Chocolate Nutrition for the Holidays

You always knew this anyway, but just to make you all feel better in the run up to New Year's......

Start your day the RIGHT WAY!

Chocolate is a Vegetable:
Chocolate is derived from cocoa beans. Bean = vegetable.
Sugar is derived from either sugar CANE or sugar BEETS. Both are plants, which places them in the vegetable category. Thus, sweetened chocolate is also a vegetable.

To go one step further, chocolate candy bars also contain milk, which is dairy. So candy bars are a health food.


Chocolate-covered raisins, cherries, orange slices and strawberries all count as fruit, so eat as many as you want. If you've got melted chocolate all over your hands, you're eating it too slowly.


The problem: How to get 2 pounds of chocolate home from the store in a car with the heat on.
The solution: Eat it in the parking lot.

Diet tip: Eat a chocolate bar before each meal. It'll take the edge off your appetite, and you'll eat less.

If I eat equal amounts of dark chocolate and white chocolate, is that a balanced diet? Don't they actually counteract each other?

Chocolate has many preservatives. Preservatives make you look younger.

Put "eat chocolate" at the top of your list of things to do today. That way, at least you'll get one thing done.

A nice box of chocolates can provide your total daily intake of calories in one place. Now, isn't that handy?

If not for chocolate, there would be no need for control top pantyhose. An entire garment industry would be devastated. You can't let that happen, can you?

REMEMBER: "Stressed" spelled backward is "desserts"

Send this link to four women and you will lose two pounds.
Send this to all the women you know (or ever knew), and you will lose 10 pounds.
If you ignore this post, you will gain 10 pounds immediately.
That's why I had to pass this on - I didn't want to risk it.

G'bye, Leaves, Hello, Yukon Cornelius

So, here in the foothills of the Great Smoky (without an E) Mountains, we have what is called Color. Our hills and trees are ablaze everywhere you look with just about every color God can come up with. I think He does it just to show off. Whatever the reason, it is spectacular. I love living here and looking at the mountains any time of the year, but in October it is wondrous to behold. Thing is, just when the colors can't get a bit richer, it is over. Just the other day I was sloping onto I-40 East and thought, "In another couple days those golds, reds, purples, and yellows will be rusty brown." And sure enough, yesterday they were.

Then this is what happens. We get rain. We had drought nearly all summer. Welcome to Tennessee Winter... cold and drizzle. It's like living in the UK, with better scenery. The first big rain of winter comes with wind, usually hits at night, and knocks all those newly-brown leaves off the trees. Next thing you know our hills look like the buzz cuts of so many Drill Seargeants. Bare black branches reaching soldierly for the sky. The rain came last night. Today was cold and damp. But my Bradford ornamental pear trees stubbornly stuck to their coats or yellow and scarlet, cheering me a little while longer (and I am thankful). Pictures: top, from my front porch; above, from my driveway looking toward my front yard.

Today I made another pair of felted fingerless glove, mitt wrist warmers for my Heart Felt Fun shop at Etsy. I also got a felted, really cheery bag nearly done but not up. Another day maybe.

Today I also got 4 new yarns done for the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer series:

Clarice - she is brown, pink, and fuschia... lovely stripes and highlights in the highest angora-content yarn I have ever recycled... 40% angora rabbit. Luscious.

The Spotted Elephant from the Island of Misfit Toys. She is a creamy white wool blend, wrapped with a narrow cord of white and salmon pink boucle. A nice, chunky, quick knit for a scarf!

Mrs. Claus - we have Christmas with an attitude! She is the high-angora blend yarn in pink, fuschia-red, and a little bright green.

Yukon Cornelius - this is the first cotton blend yarn I have bothered with. For the most part, I think cotton yarns are a waste unless you are knitting dishrags. But this has enough acrylic to give it memory, and enough cotton to class up the acrylic. AND, I realize that not everyone loves wool, however soft. So here we have good ol' Yukon. The original sweater was a sorry pale algae color, but it did have a nice metallic glitzy thread shot through it. So I have hand dyed him deep blue like his coat, red like his beard, and left a little green. All run along with a fine thread of silver 'n' gold. I hope you will like him too!

Don't forget to enter my "Go Green for the Holidays Giveaway" a couple posts below this one!

A "GO-GREEN FOR THE HOLIDAYS" GIVEAWAY!

OK, so in the interest of Raising Green Awareness for the Holiday season, and Goodwill Toward Mankind, I have decided to run a Giveaway, Sweepstakes, Drawing, Free Raffle if you will. Here is the Deal:

Visit either of my shops,
Recycled, hand dyed, high-end fiber yarns at my7kids -or-
Recycled, felted and hand-knitted items at HeartFeltFun. Either of these links will open a new window!

Then come back here and comment on two things:

1) Your favorite item from either shop and Why

2) ONE way your family can "Go Green" for the Holidays.

Please also include your email address in a non-harvestable form, like Youremailaddy AT yourserver DOT com

For instance, for probably 20 years, I have started in about September to save boxes, anything an interesting size and not smooshed, to wrap presents in. We have given CDs wrapped in toaster pastry boxes to handknitted sweaters in corndog boxes to wallets in checbook boxes. Always fun to unwrap the box to see what you "got" and then open the box to see what you REALLY got. LoL!

Miscellaneous Stuff:

No Purchase Necessary to win. If you find something you can't live without in my shops, good for you, and good for me. But no obligation!

Etsy membership NOT required to win. (But what the heck)

Contest ends midnight EST (Greenwich +5) on 12/01/08

ONE entry per person.

There will be ONE person to win. I will use Random.org to draw.

Winner gets to select ONE item of their choice from one shop, value up to $18

Winner's name will be posted on my blog sometime on 12/02/08 (I'd like to specify a time of the morning, but I am a little unstructured in that area)

Winner must respond by midnight 12/04/08 to my personal email, with their item preference and mailing address. If the winner fails to respond, I will choose another winner.

ONE extra entry for each of the following actions: Follow me, Link to this giveaway, Subscribe, Blog about this blog, purchase. Please let me know by comment if you did any of these things.

Who the HECK is Squanto anyway?

My latest yarn series is Squanto and The First Thanksgiving. Why would I choose that? I have some GREAT ideas for yarn series for Christmas... why not go on and get those up? Some reasons:

I LOVE Autumn! For those of us who are Olfactory learners, it is a Smell-O-Rama!

I LOVE Thanksgiving. Not only is it a uniquely American holiday, but how can you go wrong with an entire holiday devoted to eating? Break out the Maternity pants and pass the yams with marshmallows, I say!

I LOVE the idea behind Thanksgiving. Most of us aren't NEARLY thankful enough. No, let me rephrase that. Most of us don't give a minute of thought to anything we have to be thankful for. In fact I would venture to bet there are a lot of us out there who think we don't really have anything to be thankful for.

It irks me that our Major Retailers skip right from Halloween (news flash, not all of us "do" hell-oween) to that Major Moneymaker, Christmas.

Every one of my kids so far has loved the book Squanto and The First Thanksgiving.

So who was Squanto anyway? He was an Pawtuxet Indian brave (hey, I know the Politically Correct term is Native American, but as a partial Native American, I don't take offense to the term I grew up with, Indian. Besides, you expect a woman with 7 kids to be politically correct? HA!) under the leadership of Samoset. Their tribe befriended our totally discombobulated Pilgrim ancestors and kept them from starving... teaching them to hunt like snipers, plant a dead fish in with their corn and bean seeds to fertilize them, showing them how to survive the drastic climate changes of our Northern Atlantic coast. (For more info, visit http://www.nativeamericans.com/Squanto.htm )

Because of these, some of my yarns are called:

Squanto - a lovely wool in self-striping reds, oranges, and tans

Venison - earthy tan and brown wpp;cashmere/acrylic

Planting Fish with Corn and Beans - pale gray wool hand dyed with yellow and green

Cornucopia - deep rich colors!

Log Cabin - deep red, tan, brown, black in 100% rustic silk

Johnnycake - looks like homemade bread! A nice thick chunky yarn.

and Pumpkin...

Well what can I say? Pumpkin is a very fine 80% wool/20% nylon yarn in pumpkin tweed with slubs of cream, tan, and blue. The entire sweater this came from weighed a mere 204 grams... not even 7 oz. At 800 yards to a 100 gram skein, this would make great lace or the softest socks. I said to Richie (my dh, who for years went by Dick, until one of our pastors' wife couldn't bring herself to say it), "Shall I hand dye this yarn?"
" No, honey... it looks great just like that. "

And I tried to listen to him. Really. In fact most of the time I do listen to him. No REALLY! But after being up several days, poor lil' Pumpkin has no one to heart it. So today my itchy fingers, that haven't had a good coat of dye in a week, got hold of Pumpkin. I overdyed some areas a nice earthy olive green, and some areas a nice dirty brown. Now Pumpkin will be Pumpkin On The Vine, and I think it is much happier.

Speaking of pumpkin, I have a funny story. We built a scarecrow with a Cashmere sweater (don't gasp, someone partially felted it so I can't unravel it) for a head, a flannel shirt, my old jeans, and my dh's ancient boots that he wore on a 22,000 mile motorcycle trip. No really. We set him (the scarecrow, not my dh) up on a haybale with some pots of begonias and some pumpkins, out under this totally ridiculous shelter that some previous owner of our house built out near the road.

I came home from my daily walk escape a day later to find the scarecrow lying on the haybale with his "head" on a pumpkin, a newspaper as a blanket and his boots off and setting next to the haybale like he took them off for a little nap. I figured the Neighborhood Vandals got to him. But no, one of my kids said to me, "Mom, the scarecrow kept falling over so I gave him a little rest." Hmmm. My kid is the Neighborhood Vandal.

Tomorrow is busy... I have handmade double-pointed knitting needles to mail, my daily walk, three of us have quilty objects to finish for a challenge, by Wednesday. School for the kids, two more yarns to unravel/dye/put up in the shop and I have some merino batts I am nearly dying to try to spin. But finally I got a chanceto take a picture to share, of the scarecrow.