Wishbone 3-in-1 Bike

The Wishbone 3-in-1 Bike my in-laws purchased last Friday at No Sugar Added for my 19-month-old arrived in the mail this Friday afternoon.

It took me just under 35 minutes to get it from pieces in the box to a tricycle and that included reading the instructions. If you are considering buying one but are concerned about the assembly, please know that if you've put together a bookcase from IKEA, you can put together this bike. The only thing required that isn't in the box is a Phillips-head screwdriver.

Please also remember to buy a helmet. We forgot and had to postpone her maiden voyage until we could swing by the bike shop and buy one.

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Product Review: Ecosmart LED Lightbulbs

I have been struggling with the appropriate light bulbs for the recessed lights in our kitchen since we moved in over two years ago. The previous owners had traditional flood lights installed which heated up the kitchen like McNuggets under a heat lamp. So I switched to CFLs, as I am want to do. But there were two problems. First, the kitchen lights are on a dimmer switch and CFLs, at least all those with which I am familiar, are not dimmable (they just switch from on to off and when the dimmer switch isn't totally on, they buzz at the resonant frequency of my frontal lobe). Second, with six CFLs, the kitchen was as bright as the surface of the sun. So I had put off replacing light bulbs in there until we were literally down to one functioning light bulb. I ventured to Home Depot this week to see if I could find a solution to my lighting conundrum. And I think I did . . . LED light bulbs.

The brand is Ecosmart, which I'm 98% sure is Home Depot's brand. They're made in the U.S.A., which is just lovely. I bought three different bulbs, each with a different watt equivalency: 40, 60, and 75. They look pretty different too. The 40 watt equivalent LED bulb, pictured above, looks the most like a standard light bulb. Actually, it looks more like those bulbs that are supposed to go in bathroom vanity lights. The other two look like medium and large halogen bulbs. But all three fit in my standard sized recessed fixtures.

I thought that the 40 watt equivalent might be too dim for the kitchen. I was wrong. When the dimmer is set to maximum the kitchen is as bright as the surface of the sun, which is totally cool when you're trying to do delicate cooking procedures or cleaning . . . which this totally makes you realize you need to do a lot more frequently and vigorously. I'm guessing they would also be excellent at staving off Seasonal Affective Disorder. But unlike the flood lights, the room temperature does not seem to be affected by the blazing light. More importantly, you can actually use the dimmer switch to make the light significantly less intense, which is nice for when you're just working on your morning bowl of cereal. I am very happy with their dimmability thusfar.

According to the box, these give off light at about 3000K (correlated color temperature), so they right between warm light and bright white light. They certainly don't seem as blue as fluorescents, and I don't think they're as blue as CFLs. They're not as yellow as conventional bulbs, but I kinda like the slightly more daylight accurate nature of non-conventional bulbs anyway. That way your food that looks great in the kitchen still looks great at the backyard barbecue.

Another reason I'm interested in moving toward LEDs from CFLs is I'm kinda wigged out by the mercury in CFLs. LEDs don't contain mercury. So I'm definitely thinking I might change the light bulbs most in danger of being broken, like those in floor lamps, to LEDs from CFLs.

One ginormous caveat: these LED light bulbs are expensive to purchase. The 40 watt equivalent LED bulbs cost $29.97 each. The 60 watt equivalent LED bulbs cost $39.97. The 75 watt equivalent LED bulbs cost $44.97. That said, they claim 50,000 hour lifespans. Based on the manufacturer's calculations the 60 watt equivalent bulb uses $75.00 of electricity over its lifespan while a 60W halogen bulb uses $360 over the sam period resulting in a savings of $285.00 per bulb. I believe that calculation is solely based on kilowatt hour usage, so it doesn't include the cost of replacing the comparable light bulb multiple times. For example, over the 50,000 hour lifespan of this LED light, you would have to replace a CFL at least 3 times. So I think if we ever move out of this house, we're taking these light bulbs with us.

Another caveat: these LED light bulbs interfere with radio communications. We don't get great radio reception here to begin with, but now, when the LED lights are on in the kitchen, the radios throughout the house get even more static. They do not seem to interfere with our baby monitor, cordless phones, or wi-fi.

A little more technical data for you:
The 40 watt equivalent LED bulbs output 450 lumens and use 8 watts of energy. So their lumens per watt is 56, which is apparently some wonderful measure of luminous efficiency at least as good as a CFL. The luminous efficiency of the 75 watt equivalent LED bulb is 47, so if you don't actually need to perform brain surgery, you should probably stick with the 40 watt equivalent LED bulb. The color accuracy for all the LED bulbs I looked at on the Color Rendering Index is 85, which seems to be good as that's out of 100.

Long story short: other than the hefty upfront cost and the static on my radio, I love my new LED light bulbs.

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Unifying Theory of the Slip into Truthiness

I know a post about something other than food and babies almost seems off topic for this blog these days, but I was listening to my local NPR station the other day and heard an interview with the authors of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. If you only have a few minutes, the interview is excellent. I haven't read the book, but plan to as soon as it comes to my local library or is released for the Kindle.

Meanwhile, I've downloaded the following books to my Kindle for our impending trip.

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, also found via an interview with Pat Morrison on KPCC.

Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs by Ellen Galinsky, with whom I thought I heard an interview on NPR, but actually I read about her over at this post on the Motherlode blog at the New York Times. Ahh, this post does have something to do with babies afterall. Satisfyingly topical, yes no?

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, with whom I'm sure I heard a radio interview that I just cannot find because I was taken by her accent and her humility in the face of a successful book by a white woman about black women. And the sample was VERY compelling. Of course, the black woman who is the main character of the opening of the book is a nanny, so this is also on topic.

Also on topic, but not on my Kindle, are the following "real" books that I recently purchased and am working my way through:

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. I started this in Bloomington, Indiana, but there are not enough renewals available at the public library to get through this 896 page brick of awesomeness. I believe I checked it out after Alton Brown's book sung its praises.

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman.

The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg.

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Product Review: bumGenius One-Size All-in-One Diaper

Last time, if you recall, we learned a few new cloth diaper vocabulary words. Our new diaper vocabulary word for today is "all-in-one." As in, "The bumGenius organic one-size all-in-one pictured below would be very convenient for a guest diaperer."
As the name implies, all-in-ones are cloth diapers with only one part. There are no inserts or liners. It's all one piece.
One common complaint about all-in-ones is that they take forever to dry. Other diapers address this concern by separating the absorbent part of the diaper, the soaker pad (like the GroBaby or the gDiaper) or insert (like the FuzziBunz), from the less absorbent parts of the diaper, the exterior shell (like the GroBaby) or the exterior shell and a liner (like the gDiaper or the FuzziBunz). bumGenius addressed the drying issue while still maintaining its all-in-one integrity by permanently affixing multiple layers of separate soaker pads, as you can see in the above picture showing a side view of the bumGenius. That said, it still takes longer to dry that the component parts of the diapers previously mentioned because due to the exterior fabric, you can't dry it on the high heat that you can dry soaker pads, inserts, or prefolds.

Why didn't I show you a picture of the interior of the bumGenius? Simple, because it's already stained. So another common complaint about all-in-ones that bumGenius does not address (and I'm not sure any all-in-one could), is that they don't stand up to the intense washing necessary to combat baby poo stains and residue. The washing intensity is limited by the exterior material.

The only cloth diaper I've seen that is even more like a disposable diaper is MonkeyDoodlez. MonkeyDoodlez has a few lines of fitted, true all-in-ones (they also have a line of pocket diapers). There are no flaps attached at the ends, like the bumGenius. The closures are velcro. The whole thing goes in the wash. Of course it has the downside of being difficult to dry and not standing up to the harsh washing some folks deem necessary for cloth diapers. bumGenius has addressed the former problem, at least to the extent any all-in-one could, but not the latter. While the fitted MonkeyDoodlez have the advantage of no snaps to adjust the size to confuse guest diaperers. This particular bumGenius diaper uses a couple of rows of snap-downs to allow a general size adjustment, so it should stay in the diapering rotation longer than a fitted diaper. But it lacks the adjustable leg openings that make the FuzziBunz one-size pocket diaper uniquely awesome. [FYI: bumGenius makes a fitted diaper with velcro closures . . . so the only difference between that diaper and MonkeyDoodlez is the improved drying through attached flaps)]

End verdict: great for guest diaperers, but the drying and staining issues make this one not for me, choosing among cloth diapers. Might be just the thing for someone choosing between disposables and cloth, though.

My other diaper reviews:

• Product Review: gDiapers versus GroBaby
  
• Product Review: FuzziBunz One-Size Pocket Diaper

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Product Review: FuzziBunz One-Size Pocket Diaper

In my ongoing effort to give a fair and balanced account of the state of cloth diapers today, I went to my local granola crunchy baby store and bought pretty much one of every type of diaper they had, including a FuzziBunz one-size pocket diaper.


Did you catch all the diaper lingo I dropped? What does it mean?

A pocket diaper has two parts: the stuffing and the envelope. Instead of a snap-in soaker pad, like the GroBaby or a smoosh in soaker pad like the gDiaper, in a pocket diaper you slide the soaker pad into an opening between the exterior shell and an interior liner. You can see the fuzzy white liner in the pictures below. So unlike the GroBaby and the gDiaper every time this diaper is used the whole diaper, both the stuffing and the envelope, have to be laundered. Kinda a bummer once you get used to the potential for reuse of both the GroBaby and the gDiaper (or prefolds with covers, a.k.a. what we were diapered with as kids, . . . another adventure I've recently embarked upon).

Another bummer of the pocket diaper is that the interior lining gets seriously soiled, but because it's attached to the exterior of the diaper, you can't brutally wash and dry it like you can the soaker pads in the GroBaby, the reusable soaker pads in the gDiaper, or good ol' prefolds. Mind you, thusfar the snow white lining of the FuzziBunz I'm using has shrugged off stains like baby poo is just no big thang, so maybe my concerns about the cleanability of pocket diapers in general is inapplicable to FuzziBunz. Only time can tell.

The upside of the pocket diaper is that it's very straightforward for guest diaperers, like baby sitters or grandparents. The only way it could be more straightforward is if it had velcro closures instead of snaps. But other than that, you could pre-stuff one of these and leave it on the changing table for the babysitter and you'd be good to go. The only reusable diaper that is more straightforward for a guest diaperer that I've seen is an all-in-one . . . but that's a story, and diaper vocabulary word, for another day.

Onto our next diaper vocabulary word: one-size. A one-size diaper has some sort of mechanism for adjusting its size to allegedly fit all sizes of all babies. Now, that's a pretty tall order because babies come in all shapes and sizes and you don't want an ill fitting diaper. Most one-size diapers have a row or two of snaps on the front (possibly referred to as "snap-downs"), like the GroBaby one-size and the BumGenius one-size. FuzziBuns doesn't have that, though it does have a ton of snaps to make the tummy opening "adjustable." But the FuzziBunz has a cool little feature that I think every one-size diaper should steal if it's not patented: adjustable elastic for the leg openings.

It's REALLY low-tech, just elastic with button holes in it strung through a casing along the leg gussets attached on both ends to buttons. But it's those leg holes where leaks are most common, so this is quite an elegant solution to a ubiquitous problem.

You can see in the picture above that the extra elastic and the buttons kinda tuck into the interior lining of the diaper, so the don't bother your little one's bum.

This is the leg gusset on the tightest "setting," which was actually too snug on my 10-pounder. That means this one-size really could work on even smaller babies, whose legs would not sufficiently fill other one-sized diapers to prevent leaks. Pretty snazzy. I wonder if the lack of "snap-downs" will result in the FuzziBunz not being so one-size on the large end of the spectrum. We'll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, the FuzziBunz one-size pocket diaper is the best fitting diaper we've got, even if we do have to wash all its parts after each use.

So the jury is still out on whether this one-size really will fit through toddler-hood as well as it fits newborns and whether the interior lining will hold up to either the staining power of baby poo or the washing necessary to remove it. I'm not ready to commit the amount of money required to make FuzziBunz my exclusive diaper, which would be considerable considering you have to wash them for each diaper change. But, if I had a heavier rotation of guest diaperers, I'd definitely consider at least buying a few more. If I had a friend who was really choosing between disposables and cloth, I'd definitely recommend this over either the gDiaper or the GroBaby, as it's just much more like a disposable.

My other diaper reviews:

• Product Review: gDiapers versus GroBaby
  
• Product Review: bumGenius One-Size All-in-One Diaper

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Product Review: gDiapers versus GroBaby

Recently we at Chez Kelman have had the opportunity to test drive a few different diapering options. We used disposables (specifically Huggies . . . but for no good reason) for the first month, just until we could get our heads back on straight. Now we're branching into the wonderful world of alternative diapering options. So far we've tried the GroBaby diapering system and gDiapers.

Our co-bloggers Bob and Rebecca gave us a starter set of the GroBaby diapering system. Theoretically that should last four diaper changes before laundering. In reality, we made it through three changes before feces had contaminated both shells and thus required laundering. Perhaps with more practice - like maybe we could get the fit tighter or the arrangement of the soaker pad more evenly distributed - we could maximize the efficiency of the GroBaby diaper system. That being said, they are easy to put on and take off. It is easy to remove a soiled soaker pad and put in a new soaker pad. And there were no leaks, which we had a few of in the last couple days of newborn sized diapers. These new cloth diaper "systems" are SO much easier than the old fashioned diapers with pins.

Our friends Sarah, Chris, and Will brought a small sized set of gDiapers over since Will had outgrown them before they had the chance to test them out on him.

I didn't find gDiapers any easier than the GroBaby diaper system. If anything, the three parts of the gDiaper instead of two parts of the GroBaby diaper added a layer of complexity without any discernible benefit.

And like the GroBaby diapers, if anything gets on the outer shell you have to run it through the wash and hang it to dry. The gDiapers just add another liner layer that also has to be run through the wash and hung dry if anything get on it. The only difference is the soaker pad in the GroBaby diapers is washable instead of disposable.

And I wouldn't try to flush the gDiaper pads. First, you have to disassemble the pad before putting it in the toilet. Gross. Second, you have to let the inner layer of the pad sit in the toilet to disintegrate a bit before attempting to flush. They even provide a stick with which to swirl it around. Gross. Third, you have to hold on to the outer layer of the pad until you flush for some reason. Gross. Fourth, I am ENTIRELY sure this would clog the toilet. Entirely. Gross.

So much easier to just throw a whole diaper in the laundry.

And as far as saving the planet goes, the GroBaby wins hands down what with no part of it being disposable. My guess is that gDiapers are aimed at dedicated disposable diaper users who want to decrease that insane level of environmental impact.
The picture above shows a size 1 Huggie (the largest size that could theoretically fit a baby who could also fit the smallest size Gdiaper) next to a Gdiaper insert. I'm not arguing that the content of the Huggie is the exact environmental equivalent of the Gdiaper insert, but by volume alone, the Gdiaper is going to take up more space in your trash can and in the landfill, or clogging up your toilet and your waste water treatment plant.

But I could totally see disposable diaper users trying gDiapers, thinking they might transition from gDiapers to cloth diapers and be SO disappointed by the grossness and effort involved that they won't ever try cloth diapers. This is a total bummer because cloth diapers are actually MUCH easier than gDiapers. Really, gDiapers combine the worst parts of disposable diapers with the worst parts of cloth diapers.

Meanwhile, I'm currently conducting an experiment wherein I put GroBaby soaker pads in a gDiaper instead of the disposable gDiaper insert. I'll update this post with the results.

Edited on 1/20/2010 to add: The GroBaby soaker pads in the gDiaper worked VERY well. No leaks. The liner layer did an excellent job of keeping the poo off the outer shell. The liner itself did get soiled, necessitating a wash, but the outer shell could be reused with another liner and another soaker pad. Certainly no worse than the GroBaby. But I'm beginning to think all-in-ones get a bad rap. I mean, if I end up washing part or all of the diaper after each use, why not wash the whole diaper? Now, I understand that as she gets older and there are fewer explosive newborn bowel movements, there will be less frequent need to wash the whole thing. But I'm wondering if it's not worth trying some non-pocket all-in-ones. I had originally dismissed that sort of cloth diaper as too expensive and not easy to clean. Time to make a run to my local granola crunchy baby store!

I'm sorry I don't have time to respond to all the enthusiastic comments, but you should totally read them if you haven't yet. Very interesting! If you're wondering why they seem to skew in favor of gDiapers that might be a function of gDiapers linking to this post from their Facebook page. Thanks for the link!

Edited on 2/5/2010 to add:
Check out my subsequent diaper reviews:

• Product Review: FuzziBunz One-Size Pocket Diaper
  
• Product Review: bumGenius One-Size All-in-One Diaper

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Product Review: Dr. Bronner's Soap

Recently I have joined a sort of hippy elite. I became a user of Dr. Bronner's Soap. I've been searching for a less toxic soap for awhile, as evidenced by my review of Method Hand Wash almost a year ago. In the interim I made a desperate choice that reignited my motivation. I bought grocery store generic, anti-bacterial soap in a large refill bottle. In fact, they were two for the price of one, so I bought two. It smells STRONGLY of bleach and will strip the moisture from your hands turning you from smooth as a baby's bottom to see ya' later alligator in no time at all. In fact, when we had an ant infestation in our bathroom, I grabbed the nearest cleaning supply I had on hand--this toxic soap--and literally squirting this stuff over an inch away from the ants killed them immediately and we have not had a single ant in the house since. I'm pretty sure it is weaponized bleach.

I had heard good things about Dr. Bronner's and noted it's very good rating at the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database. But I was concerned about the cost. At Dr. Bronner's website you can get a gallon of peppermint scented for $52.49 ($0.41/fl. oz.) plus shipping and handling. Henry's charges $9.79 for a 16 fl. oz. bottle ($0.61/fl. oz.) and $14.49 for a 32 fl. oz. bottle ($0.45/fl. oz.). Trader Joe's only carries the 32 fl. oz. bottle and only in peppermint, but they more than make up for their lack of selection with their rockstar price: $8.99. ($0.28/fl. oz.). [Trader Joe's also carries their own brand of peppermint pure castille liquid soap, only in 16 oz. bottles for $3.49 (the lowest price of all: $0.22/fl. oz.).]

So when I used up the last of the weaponized bleach hand soap, I bought a 32 fl. oz. bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic 18-in-1 Hemp Peppermint Pure Castille (liquid) Soap Made with Organic Oils at Trader Joe's. I filled our soap dispenser and have been in love ever since. Others have noted that optimally you would dilute the soap and run in through a foaming soap dispenser to avoid the solidification and concomitant clogging (read further for a link). But I thought I'd just give it a try in the smallest soap dispenser before I ran off and invested money in foaming soap dispensers. It has a low viscosity, which causes it to shoot out of the dispenser without mercy. But this also allows you to lather up your hands without water. It also rinses cleaner than any soap I or David have ever used. You get no sense that there is a residue on your hands once you've washed them. But it also doesn't strip your skin of moisture like other soap. I've used it to wash my face and it is effective even on my insane sunblock. The peppermint makes it very refreshing after a hot day outside. The only downside is that it is, as my loving husband so eloquently put it, "urine-colored." So our clear soap dispenser is slightly less attractive if you're into clear soap . . . which I think smacks of racism, but that's just me. I'm a hippy. You can tell because I use Dr. Bronner's.

A few other random thoughts on Dr. Bronner's:

As I mentioned many moons ago, Ask Metafilter's post describing Uses for Dr Bronner Soap [WARNING: RAGING hippies responded with some VERY personal uses for this product which may induce nausea and Republican sympathies in MANY readers]. It answered my question: can I use Dr. Bronner as a hand soap? Answer: Yes, diluted with water and in one of those foaming soap dispensers. Now I just have to wait for someone to ask, "Now that I use only foaming soap dispensers, what do I do with my three non-foaming soap dispensers?"

Ask Metafilter has also answered the key buying bulk Bronner's question: Will Dr. Bronner stay good for the rest of my life? Short answer: quite probably.

How many soaps can claim to have spawned a movie? Dr. Bronner's can: Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox by Sara Lamm. Gristmill has a nice review of the film.

Dr. Bronner's Peppermint get's a 9 out of 10 on Good Guide.

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Why I miss the south (#42)

Des Ark -- great band from North Carolina. Think Touch and Go band (June of 44, Shellac, etc.) meets Catpower, meets Smithsonian Folkways sound. Some songs from their amazing first album are on Myspace. You can listen to her (Aimee Argote's) more folksy self-released album on Indyweek.com. And she certainly wins the best title award for Top 40 single with the song "If By 'Gay' You Mean 'Totally Freaking Awesome', Then Yeah, I Guess It's Pretty Gay." You can listen to that on the Pitchfork page.

Top Ten DVDs I Netflixed in 2008

About a year ago when I usurped this blog, I posted a list of the Top Ten DVDs I Netflixed in 2007. Seems like a harmless enough tradition to keep up. This is a non-sequential list of the ten DVDs that earned my five stars this year.

To put this list in perspective, I Netflixed over 150 DVDs in 2008. We don't watch broadcast TV. We just watch Netflix DVDs interspersed with the series we own on DVD: The Office, Arrested Development (we bought the whole series after we Netflixed it last year - little did we know we'd move to the Orange County it makes such good fun of), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel.

Creature Comforts America: Season 1 - I am seriously tempted to buy this DVD just for the Southern mother/daughter pigs. I love them so.

No Country for Old Men - We heart the Cohen Bros. But we didn't get the chance to see this in the theater. We were fools. It is awesome. Tommy Lee Jones' character has the best line, "Once you stop hearing 'sir' and 'ma'am', it's a slippery slope." So true.

The Prestige - So much better than the other period magician movie I also Netflixed, The Illusionist. Not that The Illusionist sucked or anything. We really liked it. But we watched The Prestige twice in a row.

Ed Wood - I know, I know, I should have seen this YEARS ago. I don't know what made me not want to watch it before. It was BRILLIANT! Maybe I just love Johnny Depp in this sort of Willy Wonka-esque role.

The Sting - I know, I know, I should have seen this YEARS ago. It was awesome.

Sicko - As I've said before, this was my big life changing documentary of the year.

King Corn - If you can't be bothered to read The Omnivore's Dilemma, watch this for the Cliff Notes version of Michael Pollan's cornification argument.

The Daily Show: Indecision 2004 - I couldn't get my political humor in real time, so I had to settle for four year old hilarity.

My Kid Could Paint That - Brilliant documentary that I've been meaning to write a more thorough review of since it rocked my world. Modern art, child exploitation, and Binghamton, New York. Does it get any better?!?

Battlestar Gallactica - all three seasons that are thusfar on DVD, the miniseries, and the television movie Battlestar Galactica: Razor - I am SO humiliated to confess this guilty pleasure.

A few honorable mentions (i.e., I read this list to David and he protested the omission of the following):
Gangs of New York
Why We Fight
Our Brand is Crisis
Northfork
Charlie Wilson's War
Michael Clayton

East Coast Tour Highlights

After carving my Barack-O'-Lantern in Richmond with the fam, I continued my east coast tour. For some particularly museum-y highlights please see below for links to four reviews of five exhibits I enjoyed on my journey.

In D.C., the remaining members of A(rg)H attended Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples at the National Gallery of Art.

To get my fiber arts fix I went to the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian to see the TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit, and the Textile Museum where I saw Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas.

In a close race, my favorite museum exhibit from my east coast tour was The Panza Collection at The Hirshhorn Museum.

Last, but by no means least, I went to Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum.

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Product Review: Bliss Travel 6-Pack

I promise this is my last post remotely related to my weekend in San Diego. One of the highlights of that trip were (was?) the W Hotel's toiletries. The W provides Bliss products in its baths. More specifically, the Bliss Travel 6-Pack consists of bliss fabulous foaming face wash, bliss lemon + sage soapy sap, bliss lemon + sage body butter, bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo, bliss lemon + sage conditioning rinse, and bliss lemon + sage soap slab. Following I share my reviews of each of these six products.

FYI: All of these products are available in larger (like around 8 oz.) sizes on W Hotels' online shopping extravaganza or directly from Bliss.

The Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Cosmetics Safety Database handily contains all of these Bliss products, which isn't terribly surprising given that Bliss's website includes product ingredients. How refreshingly forthright! To put Bliss's products' scores from The Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Cosmetics Safety Database, which in the case of these six products range from 4 to 7, in perspective, please recall from the post in which I first explored Skin Deep that Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm, scored a 7, while Seikisho Mask White and Method Hand Wash Refill Sweet Water both scored 5s. Clinique's repairwear intensive night cream received the best score of all the products I've reviewed, a 2, which is an even better score than my favorite night cream of all the night creams: Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +, which scored a 3. Conversely, the worst score of a reviewed product, an 8, which falls into the high hazard category, went to La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream.

bliss fabulous foaming face wash
This is the only product in this review that is not scented with "lemon + sage," which I will discuss in more detail below. Its scent reminds me of bubblegum.

Skin Deep gives bliss fabulous foaming face wash a 5, which falls into the moderate hazard category. 60% of facial cleansers have lower concerns.

While in San Diego, I felt the bliss fabulous foaming face wash might have dried out my skin a little more than my usual Clinique Step 1 Facial Bar Soap for Oily skin. But the climate in San Diego was so different from home that I wasn't sure whether weather might be to blame. What better way to answer that question than take my Bliss Travel 6-Pack on a four-city east coast tour? Just for you, Gentle Reader. Just to provide you with a thorough review of the beauty products I squirreled away at a fancy hotel, I travel for ten days by plane, train, and perhaps even automobile. My sacrifice in the name of your product knowledge knows no bounds.

After nine days using the bliss fabulous foaming face wash in lieu of my usual Clinique Step 1 Facial Bar Soap for Oily Skin, my skin was not dried out at all. So I blame my first impression entirely on the climate of San Diego. I did have one minor blemish during the nine days, but I think it was in process prior to starting the bliss fabulous foaming face wash regime. Notably, the blemish had ebbed by the end of the nine days without any extraordinary measures, like blemish cream. Additionally, usually by the end of a long trip my face cries for exfoliation. But I felt fresh faced all the way to the end. Finally, of all the bliss travel products I used on the trip, the fabulous foaming face wash was the most efficient. I hardly used half of one travel-size bottle. So on all points, a big thumbs up for bliss fabulous foaming face wash.

bliss lemon + sage soapy sap
I LOVE the "lemon + sage" scent of the following five products. But my super-sensitive sniffer, a.k.a. the husband, HATES it. Thankfully, I didn't take him on my east coast tour, so I didn't have to hear him complain. But he did raise some concerns while we were in San Diego. Of course, the scent of the bath products was not nearly as disturbing as the scent clearly intentionally pumped into the lobby of the W Hotel, which closely resembles Nair. I get it, there's a beach theme, women use depilatory before they go to the beach, but the stench of the bathroom after de-hairing triggers memories of chemical burns, not summer lovin'.

But back to the bath products. Bliss lemon + sage soapy sap is shower gel. Whichever marketing wahoo thought "soapy sap" was a hip alternative to "shower gel" should suffer a lifetime ban from product naming.

Skin Deep gives bliss lemon + sage soapy sap a whopping 7, which falls into the high hazard category. This is the only product of the Bliss six to pose a high hazard. 94% of body wash/cleansers have lower concerns.

Over my nine-day test drive I found bliss lemon + sage soapy sap lathered nicely in three different water conditions (i.e. in the showers at the three different places I mooched a place to sleep). It did not dry out my skin and left me feeling clean without being so fragranced that anyone noticed. Also, at home I use one of those net ball scrubby things every day, so usually by the end of a long trip I feel like I need to exfoliate my entire body. But bliss lemon + sage soapy sap kept me feeling just as well exfoliated on day nine as day one. Quite impressive, though I wonder if I was basically giving myself a full-body chemical peel considering the Skin Deep high hazard rating. Finally, the soapy sap was second only to the fabulous foaming face wash in terms of efficiency. I didn't quite finish a whole sample sized bottle in nine days. So if you don't care about the things Skin Deep cares about and you don't mind encouraging bad product naming, bliss lemon + sage soapy sap might be right for you.

bliss lemon + sage body butter
Skin Deep gives bliss lemon + sage body butter a 6, which falls into the moderate hazard category. 75% of moisturizers have lower concerns.

Unlike other products labeled butters (you know who you are, Body Shop Mango Body Butter), bliss lemon + sage body butter applied smoothly and soaked into my skin, leaving it smooth and soft rather than oily. I was slightly concerned that the smell would overpower my hosts, but the scent doesn't actually have much staying power. I mean that as a compliment. It was certainly more effective than most moisturizers in maintaining my silky smoothness, but I don't think I'll be switching from my usual Lubriderm in my daily routine. That stuff works magic on my elbows. bliss lemon + sage body butter didn't undo any of that magic, but its comparative lack of spreadability caused me to go through a number of sample sized tubes on my nine-day trip. I think I get more bang for my buck from Lubriderm Daily Moisture Lotion for Normal to Dry Skin. Both of them rate 6 over at Skin Deep. So I wouldn't kick bliss lemon + sage body butter out of my travel kit, but I wouldn't go out of my way to integrate it into my daily beauty regimen.

bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo
Skin Deep gives bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo a 5, which falls into the moderate hazard category. While a 5 doesn't usually have me singing from the hilltops, compared to other shampoos, it's actually a fairly low score. 31% of shampoos have lower concerns.

My hair is really picky about shampoo, but it loved bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo. Like the bliss lemon + sage soapy sap, the bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo lathered nicely in three different water conditions. My hair is about 18 inches long at the moment (my desperate need for a haircut could be the subject of a whole different post . . . or perhaps an epic poem at this point) and crazy thick, but the bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo was undaunted. Usually when I travel I go through multiple sample sized bottles of shampoo. I just finished one bottle on this nine day trip. That says something about the awesome lather bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo generates. Also, usually after I shampoo, my hair is on the verge of dreadlocks, but not so after bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo. And this trip I forgot my brush AND my comb. Without combing or brushing my hair would normally dread up underneath at the nape. But not this time. And here's a little SAT analogy for you:

bliss lemon + sage soapy sap:my skin::bliss fabulous foaming face wash:my face::bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo:my scalp.

What does that mean? My scalp felt as clean and without buildup on day nine as it did on day one. I'm pretty content with my Kiehl's All-Sport Everyday Shampoo, but after nine days with bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo, I'm considering a switch.

bliss lemon + sage conditioning rinse
Skin Deep gives bliss lemon + sage conditioning rinse a 5, which falls into the moderate hazard category. 52% of conditioners have lower concerns.

My hair is fickle when it comes to conditioner, too. But it loved bliss lemon + sage conditioning rinse. After shampooing, I applied a relatively small amount, combed it through, and let it sit for about five minutes. It rinsed out well in three different water conditions. My hair felt soft and smooth without feeling coated. It didn't tangle or dread at the nape. As I mentioned above in reviewing bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo, I experienced no scalp buildup over nine days. Also like the bliss lemon + sage supershine shampoo, I usually use a ton of conditioner when I travel, but I used only one bottle of bliss lemon + sage conditioning rinse on this nine day adventure. I am pretty happy with Kiehl's Hair Conditioner and Grooming Aid Formula 133, but after nine days with bliss lemon + sage conditioning rinse, I'm considering a switch.

bliss lemon + sage soap slab
Skin Deep gives bliss lemon + sage soap slab a 4, which falls into the moderate hazard category. While this rating is the lowest of these six products, relative to other bar soaps, it's actually a fairly high score. 70% of bar soaps have lower concerns.

This is the only product I didn't take on my east coast tour. Partly, it's redundant to the bliss lemon + sage soapy sap. Partly, I don't have a soap box. But, most review-relevantly, in our room at the W Hotel in San Diego, a moss green trail of slime developed from the soap dish, across the counter, and into the sink. Not to mention the white soap dish came to look like a swamp. OK, once you recognize the bar of soap itself is moss green the slime trail and soap dish swamp were explained, but still off-putting. Of course both trail and swamp were easily removed with a washcloth. That turned the white hotel washcloth moss green, which was certainly convenient in terms of determining which wash cloths had been used and which were fresh. But as far as home use, much less as a guest in someone else's home, this lovely smelling, moss green bar of soap does not pass muster.

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Who Killed the Electric Car?

Who Killed the Electric Car? is a documentary film primarily focused on the short-lived success of the electric car in California and the multitude of forces that lead to its untimely demise. But even if you're not so into cars or California or the environment, the film provides an excellent illustration of how corporations control both consumers and government.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.

I'm not going to focus on the frustration of not being able to buy an electric car or a plug-in hybrid. I'm not going to focus on the bait-and-switch called the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. These are all important and aggravating concerns that the film covers sufficiently. The film's website provides an excellent list of resources on these topics.

The real revelation in the film comes from the evidence supporting the conspiracy among car manufacturers and gas companies to covertly kill a perfectly viable technology while purportedly supporting it. It's one thing for Wal-Mart to unabashedly exploit its suppliers, employees, and the environment in the name of low prices. It is entirely different when a corporation takes on a product line with all the appearances of enthusiasm while simultaneously trying to destroy that same product.

If corporations are rational, if soulless, actors, how does this sort of self-cannibalization take place? Following a rational actor model, car manufacturers alone would have nothing to lose by shifting to another fuel source for their vehicles. It is the gas companies who would lose. If your car is powered by electricity, you never have to buy gasoline or engine oil again. That sends chills up the spines of petroleum corporations, if they had spines. So the destruction of the electric car is evidence that the petroleum companies have HUGE influence over the automotive industry. And not just in the U.S. Honda and Toyota, purveyors of those popular hybrids, also cannibalized their electric car fleet.

The question then becomes how can you extract the petroleum companies from the decision making process. Can politicians and policymakers stand up to this lobby? The film implies that legislative and regulatory action requiring the automotive industry to reduce emissions to zero could work, as it did work to introduce the electric car to the California marketplace. But how do you convince an industry that got California to repeal those laws and regulations once that this time we're really not going to take it back. Why won't they just drag their feet, produce too few to meet demand, inflate the sales price, install less-than-state-of-the-art technology to lower performance and reputation, promote using the unattractive counter-message advertising, and donate to the campaigns of politicians willing to take it back? And unlike politicians or consumers, corporations never die. Corporations never leave to spend more time with their families. If politics is a waiting game, corporations will win.

Who Killed the Electric Car? illustrates that corporations control the government. The United States is a corporatocracy. The real question it poses is can the American people rest control of their country from the corporations and restore democracy.

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Joe the Quilter

Sunday I took an awesome workshop with Joe Cunningham, a.k.a. Joe the Quilter. Seriously, it's changed my entire approach to quilting.

The workshop was put on by the Flying Geese Quilters Guild. Honestly, seeing Joe on their schedule of presenters was one of the reasons I joined this particular guild. The fact every single guild member at the class was super friendly to a new kid like me was just icing on the cake.

The workshop took place at Material Possessions Quilt Shop, which is HUGE. I suspect it has as good if not better selection of quilting fabric as G Street Fabrics in Rockville, Maryland. And the classrooms were spacious, well-lit, well-equipped, and well-organized.

Now on to the class itself. Its title was "You Maverick, You", though the current partisan use of the term "maverick" might have inhibited Joe from referring to the title. If you look at the origin of the term "maverick" and Joe's philosophy of quilting, it's actually quite an appropriate title for the class. Conveniently enough, the New York Times addressed the history of the term in a recent piece.

In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

Joe's philosophy of quilting is based on his search for the origins of what is considered "traditional" quilting. Antique quilts do not conform to the forms and techniques commonly accepted as "traditional" quilting. The rules enforced by present day "quilt police" seem to have coalesced in the patterns and kits made available in the 20th century. Patterns and kits were designed with control and efficiency in mind so quilters could predict the amount of fabric they would need for a particular project and predict the appearance of the end product.

Basically, (and I might be taking this idea farther than Joe himself might be comfortable with) what is commonly accepted as "traditional" quilting is really a set of patterns and techniques created by the quilting-industrial complex. These "traditional" patterns and techniques are like branded cattle, they can be traced back to their owners, purveyors of 20th century quilt patterns and kits. A maverick approach to quilting eschews these "traditional" patterns and techniques, it does not bear the brand of the quilting-industrial complex (unless you consider Joe, who does make his living teaching, among other things, this approach, a part of said complex - though arguably his is such a loose approach that you couldn't look at someone's quilt made using it and know for certain that it was the result of his approach - so the individual quilter's end product does not bear even Joe's brand).

In a sense, this approach harks back to pre-20th century improvisatory quilting in which women created without patterns or techniques beyond those they shared with one another on an interpersonal level. As a guild member noted at his lecture Monday evening, this process is very similar to that of the Gee's Bend Quilters. It strikes me as the type of approach that would appeal to the anti-corporate craft movement that all the lip-ringed, tattooed knitters and Threadbanger fashionistas are into these days (Of course that could be the result of my delusion that my inability to knit does not prevent me from being a cool crafter - quilting can be cool . . . really).

Perhaps most importantly for me, abandoning the pre-planning injects creativity into each step of the process. Making a quilt from a commercial pattern doesn't appeal to me because as far as I can tell, it's just manual labor. Designing an entire quilt and then making it front loads the creativity, which explains why a lot of my quilts stall out between the design phase and the execution phase. Once the quilt is all planned, it's just manual labor.

So what's the approach? It's a lot like Mona Brooks' Abstract Design Warm-Up from page 68 of Drawing with Children. Basically, you start with a piece of fabric approximately the size and shape of the quilt block you desire. We used a square, but I see no reason you couldn't start with a diamond or a triangle or a hexagon - any shape that can be tessellated. Then Joe presented two simple modifications to the block which totally reminded me of the Abstract Design Warm-Up's instructions,

Turn your paper in any direction you want.
Make three straight lines anywhere you want on the paper, but start the line on the edge of the paper and run it off another edge of the paper when you are done.

But where Abstract Design Warm-Up would just have you draw lines, in an exercise like Joe's each line would be cut with a rotary cutter and strips of fabric would be added before the next cut. Each cut is a creative act. Each fabric choice for a strip is a creative act. The only thing that repeats with each block you make is the set of "rules" Joe set out for us (or that you've set out for yourself). How you execute that set of rules can vary with each block - so each block requires a set of creative decisions. Once you've squared up (or diamonded up or triangled up or tesselated shaped up - which, given the sort of odd shape you get from the improvisatory piecing stage, turns squaring up into another creative decision), the process of laying out the blocks was a heckuva lot more interesting than your usual quilt design as each block was unique. And Joe spent time with each student working through their layout. How rarely do quilt students get to that stage in the process so they can really get some practice?



Everyone in the class was amazed at how far they got on their quilts in what was basically a six-hour class. Many people finished their whole top. Clearly this technique can produce creatively satisfying results in record time.

More generally, the lessons learned from this approach - even if the abstract "modern" quilts that result may not be your cup of tea - can be applied to other quilt projects. It can be a lesson in working with a limited color palette (many students, including myself, used only three fabrics). I found it to be one of the most relaxing times I've had quilting in a class, which is particularly impressive given that it was my first class with this guild, I didn't know anyone there, and I had never been to this shop before. The class sparked ideas for ways to incorporate improvisation at every stage of the quilt making process, which should help jump start my projects that are stalled at the design stage by injecting creativity into their manufacture. The practice arranging completed blocks can certainly inform the arrangement of any quilt where the blocks aren't all identical - like those with scrappy fabric choices or a sampler of many different kinds of blocks.

Not only did the Mona Brooks'-style design prompts remind me of my first and favorite quilt instructor, Jeanne Benson, like Jean, Joe established a very positive and open classroom environment. He set every student at ease by introducing himself individually. His comfort in front of the class, and in the presentation in front of the whole guild on Monday, really allowed the focus to be on learning rather than on the performance. He provided unconditional positive constructive feedback even in the face of die-hard pattern followers who were expressing a lot of self-doubt about their own creativity. He spent time at each stage of design with each student. And he encouraged group affirmation and participation in the design process by calling our attention to each student's work on the design wall. If you're looking for a guild workshop that isn't just another pattern or technique, i.e. that appeals to all tastes and skill levels, I highly recommend Joe Cunningham's "You Maverick, You."

FYI: The three fabrics I used in my blocks are Kaffe Fasset's Pansy in blue, Luana Rubin's Honey Bees and Clover in Lemonade Yellow from her Joie De Vivre line, and FunQuilts' bilaterally symmetric light blue print 1122-215.

Updated 10/18/08 to add: Joe blogged about the class and included a picture from the guild meeting of six completed tops from the workshop. It's a great picture that shows how different each quilt turns out even though they all started with the same design prompts.

Updated 1/26/2009 to add: If you'd like to read more about my impressions of Joe the Quilter's take on creativity and see individual pictures of each block I made in class, check out this post at my other blog.

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Round and Round

What comes around goes a-Round Up. Yeah, I'm all about the heavy metal.

In this round up: NPR's speech coach, best brainy podcasts, natural makeup, anti-bacterial soap = the anti-Christ, consumer product health/ecology/social goodness review site, roasted tomato sauce recipe, blogging life in culinary school, blogging life in creative writing school, wanna-be Consumerist, universal health care or revolution - those are the options.

So you have to record a bunch of podcasts for a distance learning course, or you just want to impress friends on the phone, you too can learn the tips and tricks of NPR's speech coach. Via Not Martha.

I've come to realize that my more tedious work tasks are much less tedious when completed whilst listening to something like NPR. I contemplated looking into audio books. Then I saw Not Martha's link to the discussion of intellectually stimulating podcasts at the AskMetafilter.

Looks like I'm not the only person into less chemically evil beauty products. Grist has an article about the recession-defying boom in natural personal-care product sales. Via Re-Nest.

Per Re-Nest anti-bacterial soap ingredient triclosan is El Devilo, but it was two for one at Stater Bros., so I just bought me a gallon of it. Apparently my natural liquid hand soap buying is not recession-defying. But their Method hand wash isn't perfect. So there. OK, I'm just trying to make my hands feel less infested with resistant bacteria by putting down Re-Nest. But, dude, where's the love for Desert Essence’s product Castile Liquid Soap with Organic Tea Tree Oil?

Add GoodGuide to your informed consumer armory. This site rates personal care products and household cleaners based on their health, environmental, and social impact. Via Re-Nest.

Inspired by Chef Rebecca to roast all the tomatoes in my kitchen, I found this Roasted Tomato Sauce recipe on Serious Eats.

I think this blog, 19 Months, about going to the Culinary Institute of America will surely cure me of any tiny fantasy I might have of going to cooking school. Hell, I don't like standing in line at the grocery store, standing for the duration of your class day? Hell to the no. Via Serious Eats.

Sort of parallel, but probably not so much new journalism as new agey, my dear friend Jonathan is currently attending the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop and blogging about it and life during it. So if you ever thought you wanted your MFA in creative writing, but you want to kill that dream dead dead dead, click here. Not really. The blog's a fun read.

Totally contemplating parlaying my extreme spreadsheet of grocery prices in the Fullerton area into a Consumerist-esque weekly post. Thoughts, questions, comments, concerns?

I finally watched Michael Moore's Sicko the other night and while I'm not sure trying to get 9/11 first responders treated at Gitmo is really communicating a message to anyone who doesn't already get it, I liked the film.

More importantly Sicko clarified the issues and gave me the vocabulary to enunciate what I think this country needs: free, universal health care for life, to abolish health insurance companies, and to regulate pharmaceutical companies like public utilities. Not coincidentally, these turn out to be Mr. Moore's positions as well. In case you were getting confused by the jargon (I was), universal health care has also been called socialized medicine, single payer health care, Punishing the sick by jacking up prescription drug "co-pays" is a particularly poignant issue in my house. If you want to help, click here for a long, somewhat dated, list of opportunities to do so, including contacting your representatives and the presidential candidates (which still includes like everybody and their mother, well, and your mother if you're Chelsea Clinton).

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Update: Reusable Shopping Bag Collection

Previously, you may recall, I cataloged for you the wonders of my reusable shopping bag collection. Yesterday, a brand new, super awesome, and most importantly sort of free, reusable shopping bag entered my life.


I attended my first meeting of the Flying Geese Quilters Guild. They are even more impressive in person than they are online and they gave me this awesome bag just for joining. OK, the membership wasn't free, but I suspect the price of half a year's membership (which is what I paid) isn't much more than the cost of this bag. It's certainly a more economical "free" bag than the SXSW or IQF/Chicago totes. It even has an exterior mesh drink pocket! And it might be sized to fit all sorts of quilting goodies. But until I'm in a quilt goody toting mode, its gussets and sturdy construction will allow much canned goodery.

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Product Review: La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream

I swear the more I see of southern Californian women, the more I moisturize. It's like the attack of the Leather Zombies out here. I swear our waitress the other night could have been carved out of beef jerky. So I give you another night cream review: La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream. This one really could give the reigning champ, Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +, a run for its money. (That's foreshadowing, just so you know.)

Cellular Night Repair Cream is part of La Prairie's "The Swiss Moisture Care - Face" Collection. La Prairie's website describes its Cellular Night Repair Cream like this:

• Enhances natural skin repair for face, neck and décolleté
• Protects against accelerated skin aging
• Skin looks repaired, rejuvenated and replenished

Of course, La Prairie's website can't be bothered to contain ingredient lists. No. That would make this too easy. Running La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream through The Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Cosmetics Safety Database was a challenge, but what am I if not up for a challenge? I emailed La Prairie's customer service for the ingredients and this is what I found. (Click here for the full ingredients list as I copied and pasted it from the email from La Prairie's customer service into Skin Deep.) Skin Deep gives it a whopping 8, which falls into the high hazard category.

To put La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream's 8 in perspective, please recall from the post in which I first explored Skin Deep that a similar product, Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm, scored a 7, while Seikisho Mask White and Method Hand Wash Refill Sweet Water both scored 5s. Clinique's repairwear intensive night cream received the best score yet, a 2, which is an even better score than the reigning champion Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +, which scored a 3.

I applied La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream, after using Clinique's 3-Step Skin Care System, avoiding the immediate eye area, exactly like every other product I've tested for you, Gentle Reader. Applying La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream was very similar to my experience with Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +, even more so than my experience with Clinique's repairwear intensive night cream. I had to apply multiple dabs to cover my face and neck. Unlike Clinique's repairwear intensive night cream, La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair did not feel like a layer coating my skin. It soaked into my skin almost like Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +. La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream didn't cause my skin to do anything odd, as opposed to Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm, which made my skin wish it were on another face. La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream's smell was not quite as strong as Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm, but the fragrance wasn't nearly as mild as Clinique's repairwear intensive night cream, not to mention Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +. La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream has more of a fancy grandmother smell, whereas Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm has more of a lemon fresh toxic waste dump smell. I wonder if both of these products dumped their not so endearing fragrances how much lower their toxicity would be?

Due to their similarities, I actually did a half-face runoff between La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream and Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +. La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream actually felt a little more present than Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +. Though I thought I thoroughly covered the left side of my face with Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +, it almost felt like I hadn't put anything on at all, which is certainly a vast improvement over feeling coated, but it almost felt insufficient. Maybe it needs to be translucent black like Seikisho Mask White so you can tell when you've applied it completely. That might cause pillow staining though, this being night cream and not a mask. After an hour or two an independent cheek softness tester determined that the right cheek, which had been covered with La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream, was the softest. And I have to agree. While Kiehl's Abyssine Cream + had no negative side effects, I wonder if it had any effect at all. La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream had no negative side effects (that I could feel) and did seem to make my skin a little softer to the touch.

I think La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream might have even decreased the appearance of what few lines I have more so than Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +. Not that I have a lot of lines to compare. And I wonder if I sleep more on one side or the other and if that has any effect on lines. My Russian aesthetician in D.C. was convinced her eyebrows grew differently because she slept on one side more frequently than the other. Who am I to doubt a Russian's knowledge of female facial hair? Anywhoodle, maybe all the chemicals in La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream caused my skin to swell up enough to make my crows feet disappear.

At Neiman Marcus, my source for all these fabulous free samples (well, technically gifts with full-priced purchases - all the links in this paragraph go to their respective pages on Neiman's website), La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream costs a whopping $200 for a 1.7 oz. jar or $117.65 per ounce, which even puts Fresh Repair and Restore Face Balm ($95 for 1 oz.) to shame. Mind you, if I'm going to pay almost $100 per ounce I'd be willing to pay the extra $22.65 for a product that doesn't feel like a chemical spill took place on my face. But for the money, I think Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +, which costs $32 for 1.7 fl. oz., or $18.82 per ounce, is a much better buy.

So this leads me to a conundrum. Do I recommend the possibly effective but definitely toxic, more expensive, and smelly La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream? Or the possibly ineffective but definitely less toxic, least expensive, and unsmelly Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +? I mean, if you're just going for moisture and don't really care about the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, then Kiehl's Abyssine Cream + is clearly the winner. But if you want your wrinkles to promptly disappear, toxicity and frugality be damned, then La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream is for you. As I'm not so worried about the appearance of lines and wrinkles, so much as I am concerned about the future onset thereof, and I'm a big fan of lower toxicity, I think I'll stick with Kiehl's Abyssine Cream +. I'll save the remainder of my La Prairie's Cellular Night Repair Cream for the night before some big photo op.

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Reusable Shopping Bag Collection

Many moons ago I posed the following question.

Anyone interested in reading about my collection of reusable shopping bags . . . ?

To which I received the following answer.

Um, me!

Currently I am torn between knitting up reusable string bags (light, convenient, inexpensive, but cut into scarce knitting time) and/or buying lovely tote bags on etsy that I can use over and over.

Quandry!

Add that to California's contemplated 25 cent bag tax and here we are.

Right from the start, let me make my position clear: I am in favor of using resuable shopping bags. Plastic bags are bad for the environment on a lot of levels and paper bags aren't perfect either. Really, reusable shopping bags make a lot of sense. But I'm not so sure that rampant consumerism is the solution.

I lack the knitting skills of Gentle Reader (or the average Simian, frankly, as my knitting awe is well-documented). Nonetheless I have been fascinated by the folks who have knitted plastic grocery bags into reusable grocery bags (though digging them up on WhipUp is not nearly as easy as it should be with its site search). Along those lines, I found a tutorial on fusing grocery bags together to piece together into reusable grocery bags.

However, there are two reasons I haven't pursued transforming plastic grocery bags into reusable grocery bags. First, we have dogs. "Huh?" I hear you cry. Every plastic bag we get that doesn't have a hole in it is used to pick up dog waste. In fact, some family members have even taken to saving up their plastic bags and bringing them to us when they come visit, which is awesome. While in Bloomington, as we started to use reusable bags and shopped minimally at mainstream grocery stores, we actually regularly ran out of poo-bags.

Second, the few bags with holes in them we use to line the bathroom garbage cans, which green or no, I don't think I could live without. If someone can suggest a SANITARY alternative to lining your bathroom garbage can with some kind of bag, I'd be happy to hear it.

Of course, as plastic grocery bags go the way of the dinosaur (petroleum product goes the way of petroleum source, kinda ashes to ashes, get it?), we've started to look into alternatives like Bio Bags for our dog poo and bathroom garbage can lining needs. But those don't seem like reasonable alternatives to plastic grocery bags qua grocery bags.

I, too, contemplated buying tote bags for the purpose of carrying groceries. But the idea of buying something that isn't entirely carbon neutral, and in the long run might be more difficult to recycle to replace something that is relatively easy to recycle, seemed wrong. At the same time I was contemplating these options, I received my first free bag.

Whole Foods back in Silver Spring, Maryland, gave away these insulated bags with purchases over some gawdawful amount. As it was Whole Foods, that amount was easy to reach. This bag holds a TON of stuff. The zipper is on the fritz, but that doesn't really impact its ability to carry said TON of stuff. And if you get just the right OCD bagger, they'll actually put the cold stuff in the insulated bag. There was this one bagger at Bloomingfoods who I seriously stalked just so she would bag my groceries because she was SO OCD and packed this bag like nobody's business. I miss her so. One tip: with bags this big, suggest the bagger actually put it in the cart prior to filling it. Otherwise fitting into the cart can be a challenge. Sometimes for their spine's sake, baggers won't bag in the cart, but some spry young things will.

If you're the first person to sign up for a People's University class through Bloomington Parks and Rec, you get a free tote bag. How awesome is that? I got this one for a People's University class at Bloomington Cooking School with Chef Matt O'Neill. It was an awesome class. The meal we cooked alone was worth the money, especially if one partook of the accompanying wine. I've seriously used the skills he taught me every time I've cooked since that class. And though this is the least sturdy of my totes, it has held up fine. I think most baggers understand that this is not the canned goods tote.

I can't say that going to SXSW is the most economically or environmentally sensible way to get reusable tote bags, but it is by far the coolest. This draw string bag was stuffed with other random promotional nonsense, like a t-shirt and a DVD, and one was handed to every person who came into the Village Voice Media day show at La Zona Rosa. The line up was Health, The Cribs, The Black Keys, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, and ... And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. I'll save my review of the show for another day. But the bag is great. Truly ingenious baggers will even use the exterior pocket.

Like the SXSW tote, procuring this tote was neither economical nor green. But that's where the parallels between SXSW and The International Quilt Festival in Chicago come to an abrupt end. This gusseted tote was filled with class schedules and the official IQF/Chicago 2008 pin, not babydoll t-shirts and R-rated DVDs. The line up was Kathy Kansier's Quilts With Great Edges, Wendy Butler Berns' Unabashed Free-Motion Quilting/Specialty Threads, Sue Nickels' The Scalloped Edge, John Flynn's Confessions of a Non-Traditional Quilter, Diane Ricks' Microwave Dyeing for Cotton, and Susan Purney Mark's Stamp it Up. I'll save my review of the show for another day. But the bag is great. With that gusset it expands to hold quite a bit. And it lends me some street cred when I bring it to quilt guild meetings.

So I guess the moral to my story is: use what you have. If you go to events like this, take the free tote and ask other folks who are poo-pooing their totes (quite common at SXSW, NOT common at IQF), if you might have theirs. You don't need a ton. These four bags almost always suffice to carry my weekly groceries for two. Especially if you don't bother bagging well-contained things like milk, potatoes, and chips.

If you don't go to functions with freebies and you're goal is to reuse, start at the beginning: buy a used reusable bag. Get thee to Salvation Army or Goodwill. If your place of work hosts events with tote bag give aways, ask what they do with the leftovers. And if you do go the etsy route to support indy crafters, buy a reusable bag made from recycled materials, like monkeylandoriginals bag made from grocery bags and old sheets, or sewinspired bags made from t-shirts.

If you do choose to purchase a new reusable shopping bag, I would be remiss if I failed to refer you to Not Martha as she has obsessed over them like no blogger I know. Additionally, check out the plain canvas totes available from Dharma Trading Company. The prices are quite reasonable (some under $5) and the company is eco-conscious.

If you're super crafty, you could make your own reusable shopping bag. Molly over at the Purl Bee has an excellent tutorial on how to make what she calls an apple picking bag, but it would be perfect for a grocery tote.

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