Birds are returning!

Just got back from a walk with Casey - and in the trees, you could hear the gorgeous, lilting song of the Song Sparrow! I guess they've returned from their winter sojourns - we started getting little grey Juncos at the feeder last week, so they're back too. Looks like Spring really is on its way!

If you're making pickled eggs for Easter, today's your day!

I had almost let it go too long! But I remembered this morning, that if I want to have some of Uncle Steve's pickled eggs on Easter, I had better get them made today, so they can "do their thing" and be ready to eat on the big day! :)

To get my uncle's recipe for pickled eggs, go here.

And, if you want lots more recipes for great Ukrainian Easter breads and dishes, check out the rest of my collection here. The highly symbolic dish of beets and horseradish is there too - the red of the beets symbolize the blood of Christ, and the horseradish symbolizes the bitterness of His Passion and death.

And (drumroll please) I am so excited, I hope it gets here before Easter (but even if it doesn't, I'll have it for the future!) - I got a lamb butter mold on eBay!! You mold the butter to be put in your Easter basket (we Ukrainians put all the food for Easter in a basket and have it blessed by a priest) in the shape of a lamb (Christ being called the Lamb of God). It is placed at the top of the basket to "watch over" the rest of the foods - pickled eggs, beets, and like 20 kinds of keilbasa (sausage) and ham. Oh yum! :D Anyway, I finally got hold of a butter mold, and I can't wait to use it! :)

I read somewhere that we have all these pickled and cured foods so that there isn't much preparation to do on the big day, and everyone can enjoy the feast! So I'm definitely cooking our pork roast on Holy Saturday, instead of waiting 'till Easter. Boy, this is making me hungry!! :D

BeanDreams 2007 - Beginning Plans

Time to start planning the garden for the upcoming growing season! As I did last year, I will be doing a detailed log on my BeanDreams page, and mini updates here in the blog of my gardening adventures. This is my second year of vegetable gardening - aside from personal mistakes made, we also had really lousy weather last year - BUT, things still went pretty well, I did get some produce out of it, and this year I'm looking forward to even more!

One big change I've made from last year is that all the crops I'm growing will mature in under 60 days - things with longer times, like the tomatoes, didn't get a chance to finish up outdoors last year, because the weather got too cold. I ended up starting to cover them in August, for goodness sake! (Tomatoes love the heat, and even though the weather was great, August was uncharacteristically cool at night - so I had to go out every night for weeks to cover my plants with plastic. Quite the hassle). With shorter maturity times, I'll be sure to have enough time for everything to come to fruition in the garden before the weather starts to get too nippy for more delicate, longer-season plants.

So, for more information and details on my growing garden here in Nova Scotia, check out my BeanDreams 2007 page. I'll be posting regular updates here too, all garden-related posts will be labeled BeanDreams 2007.

New Design at the Gift Shop Available Now!

Available on tons of colors, sizes & styles of fashionable tees (as well as framed tiles, teddy bears, and more!), this Japanese heraldry and Arabic inspired design is perfect for today's global villager! Bright red flower blossoms & beams of sunlight radiate from the center of my latest design. Get yours today!

Who had the worse flight?

Really, which of these two people get the award for worst flight ever?

You've got one guy who needed to pee REALLY badly after drinking too much before a 2 hour flight. The light wasn't working in the bathroom, so the flight crew told him he couldn't use the plane's facilities. Eventually his situation got bad enough that he had to urinate in an air sickness bag. No people, he wasn't kidding! He really did have to go! Can you imagine how demeaning that was?

Alternately, there was a man, who paid extra for the comforts of First Class, who awoke to discover he was sharing a row with the corpse of a woman who died in Economy. Apparently there aren't any contingencies for people who die during flight, and the only real option is to put the body in First Class, where there are less passengers. Good grief, I mean, I guess they didn't have any other options, but to wake up and see this corpse that keeps sliding out of the seat, AND getting to listen to the poor grieving daughter of the deceased crying for the next 5 hours, how awful. I understand it doesn't happen very often, but I can't see why they can't get an extra curtain (that's all that separates First Class from Economy in smaller planes anyway), and set it up at the front of First Class, to give the grieving and deceased some privacy. Yikes.

I bet these aren't even the worst though - in this great big world, I imagine there's plenty of horror stories for all sorts of mass transit...

Cleaning Mountains

Wow, I just heard about this guy, Ken Noguchi - he was the youngest person to climb the tallest mountains on all seven continents. But he's not just a mountain climber in it for the ego trip - he also wanted to enjoy the beauty and majesty of the scenery. Unfortunately, he would often find tonnes of garbage littering the slopes. He was so disappointed, he decided to do something about it - for Mt. Everest, after several expeditions, he and his team were able to remove EIGHT TONNES of garbage. 8 Tonnes!!! Shocking! But, it's really having an impact, and now he wants to do the same for his beloved Mt. Fuji, from his native Japan. He joined with a local environment club, and they have spent many, many hours cleaning up the rubbish from the mountainside. I mean, people had dumped tv sets there! Having participated in clean ups myself locally, it is often amazing at what some people will throw away in the woods, turning them from a nice bit of wilderness beauty to basically a trash dump. Pretty awful to look at.

So, hats off to Ken Noguchi, saving and protecting the beauty of one of the most famous peaks in the world! Read a little more about him here. His blog is here, but it's in Japanese (bien sûr!). Click here to get a rough translation of it.

HP sauce moving to the Netherlands?

Now, I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Canada (and of course, Britain) HP sauce is the Gold Standard for steak sauce - we ALWAYS have a bottle in the fridge! A steak just wouldn't be a steak without it! :)

It's House of Parliament sauce - got a pic of the buildings on the bottle, and says "By appointment to her Majesty the Queen" on it. It's pretty much as British as it gets - but they're not going to manufacture it in Britain anymore...seems weird, really! I feel badly for them, it was really a pride thing for them, a real British icon - it would be like Coca Cola headquarters being moved from Atlanta to someplace outside America. Not something that would be easy to swallow!

Now, there's some concern that the flavor won't be the same - THAT, I'm not worried about. I'm sure they did test runs ahead of time to ensure the quality remains the same. But it's the principle of the thing, it just won't be the same.

I'll still probably buy it though - as I said, a steak wouldn't be a steak without it!

Read the story on the CBC here. There are several stories on the BBC regarding it, including this one , and this story about one of the protesters doing a short "roof sit-in". Apparently, even the Dutch workers who would be getting new jobs out of this thought the whole thing was handled badly!

(The worst part is, it was an American company, Heinz, that bought the rights to the sauce and made the decision to move... again everyone, imagine if Coke was bought by Germany or something, then made the decision to move the headquarters abroad. Ouch!)

Man, all this talk of HP sauce is making me hungry though...

More problems with the new American $1 coin...

More problems with the new American Dollar Coin - first, it was missing the motto "In God We Trust", now there's at least one coin that's missing a "heads" and a "tails"!

So, it's been a little slow getting everything set up properly, but don't worry Americans, it'll totally be worth it! Up here, we've had the "Loonie" (our $1 coin, named after the Loon on the tails) for decades now, and we don't know what we'd do without it! :)

Signs of Spring here in Nova Scotia

You can smell the brush fires burning. Here in the countryside (and even farther out from the city), people get burning permits. The permits last a few weeks, starting in the spring, from now to about May. They gather up dead brush and such from their properties and burn it in a pile (getting rid of the dead brush now helps prevent fires in the hot & dry summer months in the forests). There's also large controlled burns of fields and large country-sized lawns - you can see the people standing guard over the fire, smouldering throughout their large field/lawn. This removes the dead grass left over from last year, clearing the way for the fresh new grass to grow, and providing a little fertilizing ash too! It really seems to work well, too, their lawns always come back so fast and green! (In the city, with much smaller lawns and no burning permits allowed, you have to rake your lawn to get rid of the dead grass - not nearly as much fun). :) Always a sure sign of spring!

The hills are alive with the sound of - melting. Today it was so mild most of the remaining snow was melting, and there were several little mini streams of run-off going down the huge hill at the end of our road. It was funny, Casey was cocking her head to the side, wondering what the sound was (she couldn't see most of the water because it was running underneath the remaining snow piled on the sides of the road). It's such a peaceful little sound, a gentle little trickling... :)

Yay (beginning of) Spring!! (It'll still be too cold to plant anything until the end of May, but it's nice to see the beginning of the end of Winter!). :D

New Poppy Design!

Poppies are a beloved and subsequently common motif in Ukrainian folk art. With their bright coloring and delicately bobbing heads, they are a favorite of many. I've created a brand new poppy design for my gift shop, so you can enjoy poppies in your own home (or take them with you on one of our many styles and colors of tees now available!) Head on over and get one today!

Quick Weather Note

Today's windchill is -29 degrees C. How much is that in Fahrenheit? -- bloody flippin' cold! :D (This online converter says it's -20.2 F). It was so cold that when the wind made my eyes water (during my walk with Casey), the tears froze on my eyelashes - that makes it really hard to see! :D

Casey didn't seem at all affected by the temperatures, though - she was very enthusiastic during our entire walk. Oh well, as long as she had fun. :)

Another fun design for borscht lovers!

If you're like me, you really just can't get enough of borscht, the famous Ukrainian/Russian/Polish/etc. beet soup. It is SOOO good! (View family recipe here).

I've made another fun novelty borscht-related design in my gift shop that fellow borscht lovers are sure to enjoy! Powered by Borscht features a very cute little cartoon beet in the "o", paying homage to the most vital of borscht ingredients! Show the world what keeps your engine running, and pick up one of these great tees, in a variety of colors and styles, today!

(Check out my previous borscht offering "Borscht - it's the soup that can't be beet (beat)!" here!)

Frosted Storm Aftermath

A massive storm system came our way a couple of days ago - we got off really easy, compared to many other places (which was a little weird and a little disappointing - we're used to a lot of snow around here, but the last couple of winters especially haven't had much snow at all)...

It started with regular snow, but ended with a lot of freezing rain - this resulted in the little stream across the street having snow land on top of it that then crystalized like frost. It was really different, I haven't seen anything quite like it before.


Here's an overview shot of the stream, with lots of ice and snow on top.

Here's a closeup of the frost/crystal patterns - hard to see like this, though.

Here, I've cranked up the contrast on the photo so you can see the frost patterns - aren't they just gorgeous? It's so strange for snow to look crystalized like this. Very cool!

New Bird, and Blue Skies

We've had a new birdie at the feeder here the last few weeks, and I was finally able to get a pic today! It's a White-throated Sparrow, distinctive with the yellow streak near its eyes (why it's not called "The Yellow Streak Sparrow" or something like that, I'm not sure...the white throat is not really the first thing you notice about this little guy).

Today was a lovely day, with bright sunshine and clear skies - got a nice pic of the Quaking Aspens in the back field. Such a pretty blue sky!

I don't know whether to be excited or scared...

Check out this pic featured on Mainichi today - the horizontal line going across the photo is a human hair. Those little squares around it are MICROCHIPS!!! Can you believe they've gotten miniaturization THAT SMALL???? It's unbelievable!

Hitachi has created these chips (small enough to be embedded in a sheet of paper) to be used as product trackers relaying information wirelessly - I assume to help with computerized inventories, etc.

Shows what I know! Just SOME of the uses I found online for these chips, also called "Smart Tags", are:

• Hitachi uses them in its production processes to keep track of printed circuit boards that are compliant with the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive. Read

• For people who have to take a lot of medication: interactive blister packs of pills. "The pack is configured to alert the user when the medication is due to be taken. Removal of a pill from the blister triggers another alarm, which is disabled when the user answers a question printed onto the pack. The time of each operation and the answers are stored, to be uploaded later via the Internet to a secure site." Never forget your pills again! Read

• "Has the vaccine been overheated in transit?"
"Has the surgeon left something in the patient?"
"Has this single use catheter (or other one-time-only use item) been used already?"
The chip will let you know!
Read

There's tons more uses out there, check out this Google search for more.

It's very cool, but it's also a little scary! The thought of everything you come in contact with being tagged and potentially tracked and monitored by someone is a little spooky too. But the benefits look to be huge, so I guess it's just a matter of benefits outweighing risks - I wonder where the line will end up being drawn? Hard to say, but it should be interesting technology to watch!

Happy Lunar New Year!

Today's the first day of the Year of the Pig! Celebrated by Asian cultures, Lunar New Year is known generally in North America as Chinese New Year.

Wikipedia has tons of info on the celebrations, including lots of things to bring you good luck in the coming year.

AND, of course, as with most celebrations, FOOD is central to the fun! Check out some of the great recipes and info at AllRecipes.com for Lunar New Year!

We're going to make some Chinese food to celebrate tonight - not sure yet what's on the menu, but I'm sure it'll be delish! :D

Have fun everyone!

Baby Pandas!

I know, I know, ANOTHER batch of cute photos...but they're just so ADORABLE!!!!! :D

The BBC has a photo journal of the newly named baby pandas at China's Wolong Nature Reserve. Enjoy the babies! :D

Exciting Pysanky News!

I just found out that a BRAND-NEW pysanky design book has been released by the Ukrainian Gift Shop in Minnesota! This is the place that published the first Pysanky design books back in the '70s, and since then have published tons more, and have continued to be huge supporters & spreaders of Ukrainian culture in North America.

So, if you're a pysanky fan, check this new book out: Ukrainian Easter Egg Design Book 5! It's a limited edition hardcover, so order soon! :D (Yevshan in Canada is selling it too!)

Lovely evening, fading to dusk

A shot of the backyard this evening, with the setting sun tinging the trees orangey-pink - looks cold though! (And it is!) :)

I LOVE cute stories like these!

I'm such a sucker for this stuff...

A Rottweiler, not much more than a baby herself, has become mommy to some baby lambs that had a difficult birth.

Quote by Ms. Foster, the dog and lambs' owner: "The first 12 to 24 hours for a lamb are absolutely crucial and if Molly hadn't been doing what she was doing, I would have had to have been there rubbing the lambs through most of the night to keep their circulation going."

It is SO frickin' adorable! Read the rest here (there's more pics too!).