zenpawn

I may be good in the kitchen when it comes to creating new recipes, but one thing I’m not is a handyman. So, it was to be a long and frustrating weekend as I attempted to replace my leaky and worn, double-basin sink. Someone with any amount of skill—unless it’s as little as I possess—could finish the job in under two hours. It took me two days.  

Everyone raves about stainless steel, but I found it to be anything but (stainless, that is). I went with a white acrylic this time. I’m hoping it’ll be easier to clean and maintain. Also, it’s lightweight, so my counters won’t complain.

I started in on Saturday after the morning dump run, grocery shopping, and lunch. Removing the old one was simple enough. Time-consuming and back-breaking, but not difficult. All the cleaners, garbage bags, etc., stored underneath got strewn about the kitchen floor to give me access to the attachments and supports. Then a little jostling from the top, and finally she was out of there. I was proud of myself and rearing to go. Off to Home Depot!

In lieu of an embarrassing picture of the old sink.

There I had my first good experience with customer support from a gentleman who was a professional plumber prior to his current position. He made everything sound so easy, even pulling out pieces from boxes to show me what to expect.

Unfortunately, once home, the only thing that went relatively smoothly was hooking up the faucet (a Moen), sprayer, and drains. Then I lowered it in place with some caulking. It seems to fit OK, though I’d prefer the hole to have been a little smaller to give the edges more of a lip to rest on.

Now all that remained was to hook up the PVC plumbing. That’s where things took a turn for the worse. Nothing fit! Threaded pieces were meeting threaded pieces, the drain catches were too big, etc., etc.. Frustrated, I washed my produce in the bathroom, had dinner, and went to bed, knowing another trip into Home Depot awaited me the next day. While my Mom and step-dad think an hour in HD is fun, I certainly don’t.

Today, I got back in time to catch the expert before his lunch break. He seemed exasperated that I hadn’t told him about the dishwasher line, and some other details. <shrug> I didn’t know what was important to mention the first time around. He demonstrated how the connectors I had did indeed fit the drain catches, and I left with different parts after having returned some others.

Back home, I got that part and started hacking away at some PVC pipes that needed trimming. I have a jigsaw around here somewhere, but heck if I could find it, so hacksaw it was. Fun, fun. Eventually, everything was in place, the water hooked up and turned on, and it was time for a test run.

D’oh! Same leak as before. Now, I knew why though. The standard size pipe going from the t-connector to the right basin was too short. And no, this wasn’t one of those I just cut.  

A final trip into Home Depot (#4) was required. A few different possible extenders in hand, and another hacksaw hack, and things are now working. I’ll dab some more caulk around the edges before I go to bed, as I can see some spots that didn’t quite fill.

The little extender that made all the difference.

By the way, New Hampshire is experiencing its first heatwave of the season, so it was a sweaty ordeal. Let me tell you, there are certainly better ways to spend your weekend; I got nothing else done and spent $230+. Yet, I’m left with a sense of accomplishment and am ready to kick back and watch the Celtics. They better win.

Pretty, heh?

Notice the digital thermometer reads 85 Fahrenheit at 4:34 PM.

Any guesses as to that contraption on the right-hand side of the windowsill?

As promised, now that my blog is on a more professional host and I’ve time to come up for air, I’m ready to make my big announcement. I’m really excited about this and put in a lot of sleepless nights and weekends, installing and fighting software, crunching the nutritional numbers, etc..

As you know, there’s a lot of buzz these days about green smoothies. Even Oprah has whipped up a blenderful or two on her show. In fact, she’s currently trying a 21-day vegan challenge! It seems all my dietary modifications started with time-bounded experiments that continued past their fourth-dimensional boxes. Let’s hope it does the same for her and her fans.

My latest personal “challenge” (the quotes because it wasn’t challenging at all) was a couple weeks on a self-designed liquid raw healing protocol. Green smoothies were front and center. While there’s nothing new under the sun, I purposely avoided reading raw food books or searching the web for ideas during this period, in order to at least attempt creating just that.

I expected to emerge with twenty-one new raw blender recipes. Instead, I was having too much fun. With the habit firmly entrenched, I just kept going. Now, a smoothie a day is back in my repertoire. Back? Indeed. Funny thing is, before I went vegan, a yogurt smoothie was my breakfast of choice.

Toss the yogurt and replace with a tossed salad and you’ve got something closer to what I enjoy today. Ultimately, I stopped compiling the recipes at just over 50. After all, I’d told everyone they were on the way. And now, they’re here! Better yet, I set about creating a community forum where members can share their own creations, modifications, and in general just get to know each other.

Check it all out at…

p.s. - My chessblog is live.

It’s been a little while since I last posted. Well, only two weeks, but that’s longer than I prefer. Anyway, there are a couple good reasons:

1. I’ve been working hard putting together the results of my raw food liquid diet. It really was a positive experience, and I wanted to do more than just an ebook. More on that in my next post.
2. I had to prepare for a long-overdue hosting change. The blog’s old home had been experiencing database issues that made for excrutiating load times, and support was impossible to obtain.

But, it’s back now and faster than ever. I moved it to InMotionHosting, where my other sites live. They’ve always had awesome support, no wait times, 24 hours a day. And my old host didn’t even have cPanel and had old versions of PHP, etc..

In case anyone else finds themselves in the unenviable position of needing to transfer their WordPress blog, I wanted to share the process I used.

1. Backup your blog’s database.
2. On your new host, create a MySQL database
3. Import the backup
4. Create an add-on domain
   (or just a directory, if you’re not moving an entire domain)
5. Copy all your files to the resulting directory
6. Modify your config.php to point to the new database
7. Cancel your old account and get them (or your registrar)
   to point your domain at the destination’s name servers

That last step is when you hold your breathe and wait up to 24 hours for the change to propagate around the internet. I decided to use the downtime to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. All in all, with some careful planning, things went pretty smoothly. I hope you can tell the difference in speed.

Ultimately, I want to be able to write more about chess too without boring my vegan friends. So, I’m going to split that topic off into its own blog. I’ll make quick mention of it here when I do, and that’ll be that.

I hope this post helps my fellow bloggers. Thanks for your patience.

As one of the main goals of Calorie Restriction is longevity, it feels right to honor here the memory of a historically significant man, who made it to 102. I don’t know what his dietary habits were, but to say he lived a rich and full life, with vigor to the end, would be an understatement.

Albert Hofmann in 1993, photo by Philip H. Bailey

To learn more:

• His books
• NY Times
• BBC News w/video

Speaking of centenarians, in case you were wondering, the current record for the longest-lived CRS member belongs to Ralph Cornell, who died last year at 104 years of age.

I’ll reveal the mystery green in the next post, but right now I’m too excited about my latest book project to write of much else. The Raw Done Light family already knows about this from an email I sent the other day, but my blog readers are just now getting the news. Click on the image below to learn more:

A little quiz to start off the week. This one’s going to be easy for my knowledgeable readers.

Name this leafy fella

Piece of low-fat vegan cake, heh?

I’m just using it for the segue. You ready for this?…

Speaking of green,
seeing as it’s tax time, let’s see how our government is using ours.

(If you’re like me, you cringe when you land on a site and it starts playing some audio or video without your consent. Therefore, in order to start this cartoon a-rollin’, you’ll have to right-click and select Play from the menu.)

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Getting a refund this year? What better way to spend it than on your health with a Vitamix. Use coupon code 06-003037 for Free Shipping. Order online or call Brenda @ 1-800-848-2649 Ext 2305

As a logophile, activist, and game enthusiast (though I prefer those involving strategy, like chess and Go, or even Texas Hold’Em), this fun on-line challenge nicely covers all the bases.

What does playing a game have to do with activism, you ask? Well, with this one, for every correct answer you give, the socially-conscious advertisers* on the site donate rice to feed the poor.

*For example:

where I got my body pillow.

If you enjoy those word game booklets you can pick up in the grocery store, or are studying for your SAT’s(!), I think you’ll like this too:

Have fun! We all win with this game.

If you’re a regular here, you know this holiday season my family decided not to exchange gifts. We’ve been gradually easing back on the commercialism with each passing year, instead making homemade goods and/or setting limits. It became less and less “strange” and more and more logical, especially as gift certificates started to creep in due to distance. This year we scrapped it entirely and it was soooo relaxing for everyone.

My sister and her husband were up from North Carolina. It was great to see them and chat the day away from morning through what I coined “linner” or “dunch” (we ate around 3 PM) and into the evening with dessert. They had a DVD of their trip to Peru that was absolutely breathtaking. The Andes are beautiful, and the remnants of the Incan society still standing today leave you in awe that these huge rocks were moved by sheer human might and the simple machines of our high school physics classes.

Unfortunately, our theme of quality time was interrupted when a snowstorm forced a cancellation of dinner plans with my Aunt and Uncle. Thankfully, my sister and brother-in-law were already with them, so they got to hang out, and I’ll catch up with them soon, perhaps for another of those “big ass salads,” as I like to call them, atop the mountain.

This video, entitled The Story Of Stuff, felt an appropriate way to conclude my happy little story.

For more resources after watching, you can check out their website.