Mmmm, it's working!

Besides cookies? I need some inspiration! Homemade items I've received include eggnog and spice mixes.

The city I'm visiting has its giant tree up. On the one hand I could be a curmudgeon and think it's "too commercial" a la Charlie Brown but maybe the holiday feelings will calm folks down a bit...myself included I guess. Icelandic Christmas is sounding better and better.

I got this for ds, you can charge a phone with it as you cook 😁 BioLite CampStove 2+ Wood Burning, Electricity Generating & USB Charging Camp Stove https://a.co/d/fIOzoBD

Love them on pizza. Mouth is watering just thinking about it.

Just now seeing this, so impressive! Congratulations!

I generally avoid joining any thread with replies by a certain poster but I am finding myself close to tears over this website. I absolutely curated my kids books and occasionally restricted their choices. This website is not offering analysis or thoughtful critique but anonymous photos. It seems designed to let rhetoric and snap judgments instill an emotional rise, then a soothing dose of groupthink in the form of points to win anti-kindness media. Sorry, Rosie, I'll just go weep.

LOL file under Truths Received

Shopping cart behavior There are many levels of training to curb undesirable shopping cart behaviors. Once your cart has mastered basic obedience you can move on to remote command training. Don't let bad cart behavior ruin your week, call today to make an appointment for training!

Yesterday was an apple, a fig, and a handful of almonds but dinner was a mountain of roasted veggies: squash, potatoes, beets, cauliflower, and apples covered in pomegranate seeds plus a "heavy" salad of greens and cabbage and chayote. My sister has a kitchen scale so I will actually weigh today's veg and see how it compares to my volume estimates.

I do this and I call it the "park and forage" method of shopping cart management. The other lady clearly missed the memo.

That friend speaks my mind. Exhaustion, grief, transitions, finances, and limbo = no plans and no desire to think about it. I'll get there. Handel's Messiah will work its magic. But also this might be the year we do Icelandic Christmas with books, chocolate, and candles.

I'm visiting my sister so have not been posting but this thread has continued to guide my choices. She lives in CA so I'm eating lots of delicious local things: oranges from her tree, pomegranates and figs from the neighbors. Yesterday I made some borscht and three giant bowls later had all my day's goal: two kinds of beets, cabbage, onions, spinach, potatoes, celery, scallions, parsley, cilantro, dill.

I've been traveling and not on the internet which is pleasant. Loads of walking here at dd's parents weekend. Maybe 4 miles/day.

I'm traveling so having to work at getting veggies with no place to cook. The last two days have had each about 2 cups of veg combined, no fruit. Lettuce, cukes, onions, tomato. Looking forward to some Thai veggie stir fry tonight but still will only get about 3 cups today.

A heart, a sad face, and a laughing face to you combined.

Currently at parents/family weekend in Ohio. It's going well: as our family birthday gift to dh last July, dh and both dss have just left for a pilgrimage of sorts to see a Green Bay Packers game in Wisconsin, I'm here with dd for the next 48 hours of parents weekend and she's just gone horizontal with what sounds like the flu. I've not looked at email or the internet for 2 days, staying in a cabin with no power or water. Older dd is holding down the house and writing her thesis, caring for cats and chickens. From the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: anything for a weird life. Cheers!

Yesterday was easier because the crucifers are heavy - cabbage, broccoli, cukes, greens, zucchini, an apple, and applesauce.

Ghost banished, apparently.

Moon pies = literally cakes.

And just now I went back to the Chat main menu and couldn't see this thread. Ghost in the machine?

@Helpdesk I'm signed in, but after a few minutes it starts to look like I'm signed out, if I click on a thread it won't let me click on the last post, etc, but when I go to sign in again it says I am signed in. User error? Weird computer? Thanks for any help.

2 cups/servings yesterday of the same roasted veggies.

OK, I'm jumping back in this month. I went for a four hour hike yesterday, saw three bald eagles and a peregrine falcon sunning itself on a cliffside.

Lucy Poulin, former nun who took on Maine’s rural poverty is dead at 83 Lucy Poulin founded the H.O.M.E. Coop in Orland in 1970. Credit: Gabor Degre / BDN Sister Lucy Poulin, who founded homeless shelters in Orland and Ellsworth and who was known throughout Maine for her efforts to minimize rural poverty, died this month. Poulin, who passed away Oct. 14 at her home in East Orland, was 83. A native of Fairfield who became a Carmelite nun at the age of 26, Poulin went on to establish Homeworkers Organized for More Employment — more commonly known as H.O.M.E. — in Orland in 1970 as a way to combat rural poverty. Over decades until her retirement in 2016, Poulin’s vision for providing shelter, community and economic opportunity for those who lacked such things grew to include, among other things, multiple workshops, homeless shelters, affordable housing, a soup kitchen and a farm. The importance of such programs has continued to grow in Maine in recent years as Hancock County and much of the state has faced growing homelessness and housing instability due to soaring housing costs. Lucy Poulin (left), the founder and 46-year head of the H.O.M.E. craft cooperative and shelter community in Orland, pictured in 2016 with her successor at the organization, Tracey Hair. “She impacted thousands of people over her four and a half decades of service,” said Tracey Hair, who started as a client at H.O.M.E. and then took over as executive director when Poulin retired. “The hole she has left, it’s bigger than we realized.” H.O.M.E. was established 53 years ago on a 23-acre site in Orland at the intersection of School House Road and Route 1, initially as a crafts cooperative where local women could market quilts, knitwear and other handcrafted items to earn extra money. In 2016, Poulin told the Bangor Daily News that almost as soon as H.O.M.E. opened, she recognized a larger mission to serve the poor of the area with housing, food, medical care and a material sense of community. “Basically, there are three reasons people come to us,” Poulin said at the time. “They need a place to live, they want to make the world a better place or they want to take the Gospels seriously.” She said that taking the Gospels seriously includes honoring the biblical passage commonly known as the Golden Rule. “If you truly love your neighbor as yourself,” she said, “you don’t put them in a shelter at night and throw them out on the street in the morning. Everything you have, you want for them as well.” Poulin said that she paid a price for her vision and for her hands-on efforts to build a community for impoverished people. It set her at odds with the more prayerful Carmelites and led to her expulsion from the order shortly after H.O.M.E. was founded, she said. “The priest told me I had ‘an incorrect spirit of poverty,’” she recalled. “I wasn’t contemplative enough; I was out here helping people instead. It was very difficult at the time, but I got over it.” Despite being expelled by her former order, Poulin retained her faith and let it guide her in her mission of fighting poverty, Hair said. She supported advocacy work for people incarcerated in prisons and jails and, at the lakefront property that she called home, provided housing to developmentally disabled adults and animals who needed a place to live. “Lucy was quick and easy to say ‘yes’ to people when many said ‘no,’” Hair said. “She welcomes everyone at the table.” Lucy Poulin photographed in her office, January 30, 2009. Credit: John Clarke Russ / BDN Hair said that in the past year Poulin had become sick — she did not go into details — and that she received hospice care for three weeks before she passed away. A few days before she died, Poulin told her close friends and loved ones that she wanted to be buried naturally and in a way that was consistent with her vision of finding community and purpose through craftsmanship. “She said she wanted a pine coffin made from local lumber,” Hair said. “Right down to the end, the work of her hands was so important to her.”