Alphabet Salad

(Note: This post was written by Laurel Regan and originally published in a separate blog called “Why Windsor…”, which was later merged with Alphabet Salad.)

Being so new to Windsor, I am always happy to hear recommendations from others who have lived in the city much longer than I have, so I was really pleased that one of my readers took the time to add a comment to one of my recent posts with a list of several local food suppliers he had sourced.

Though I haven’t yet had the chance to try any of these suppliers myself, I thought I’d do some research so that I (and you!) would know a little bit more about them and where they’re located, both geographically and on the web.

• Wild Acre Cattle Co. is located in Woodslee, Ontario (about 30km from Windsor). Their web site, while fairly basic, does provide a handy price list so you know exactly what’s available and how much you can expect to pay. According to their site their beef is naturally fed with no hormones and no steroids.
• Ewe Dell Family Farms, also located in Woodslee, doesn’t have a detailed web site available at the moment, but their current site does provide contact information and confirms that they specialize in local farm fresh lamb.
• Sara’s Natural pork is available in Sarnia, London, and Petrolia, Ontario (all located a little farther from Windsor – 115 to 180km away, depending on which location you choose). Their site says that their pork is all natural, grain fed, naturally processed, with no chemicals, growth promoters, or animal by-products. From their web site: “What does naturally humane raised pork mean to you? All of our animals are given a nutritious diet, and are raised with shelter, resting areas, sufficient space, and the ability to engage in natural behaviors.” Available products are listed on their price list.
• Colchester Ridge Estate Winery is in Harrow, Ontario (about 30km from Windsor). The winery is family owned and operated, and offers an assortment of award-winning wines that are served at a wide variety of local restaurants.
• The Loop Fisheries do not appear to have a web site, so I can’t tell you much about them, but my Google-fu indicates that they’re located in Wheatley, Ontario (around 60km from Windsor). (Incidentally, whenever I find that a good company doesn’t have a web site, it a) makes me do an internal cartoon double-take, because why wouldn’t you have a web site?!, and b) makes me want to phone them up and offer to develop one for them, gratis. Seriously. Yeah, that’ll earn me a living.)
• Wagner Orchards and Estate Winery is located in Lakeshore, Ontario (also around 30km from Windsor). From their web site: “At Wagner Orchards and Estate Winery, we grow our products and raise our animals in an environmentally-friendly atmosphere. Without the use of hormones, chemicals or antibiotics and a continually reduced use of pesticides, our food is grown in the healthiest way possible.” They, too, have a very helpful product and price list, and if you live in Essex County, they will even deliver to your home (for free, if your order is over $200).

This is a fabulous start to my “buy local” campaign – and I can see that we have some exploring to do! Thanks again, Ian, for sharing these valuable resources… I look forward to discovering them for myself in the near future.

Tonight I’ll be taking the third of four classes that are part of the Profitable Blogging for Beginners class taught by Tanya from Blogelina.

Taking these classes has really sparked something in me that’s stirring up a cauldron of mixed emotions. This whole process excites me in that I feel as though I’m being given a wealth of tools and resources – everything I could possibly need to become far better at something I’m already doing and loving. At the same time, though, I’m frustrated… because it seems as though what I really, truly want to do is just out of reach, and I’m not sure how to break past that barrier.

I’m not afraid of hard work. I’m not afraid of learning new things, of growing, even of being humbled by stumbling if it means I’ll move forward towards betterment. I don’t need or want to be rich. I only want to be able to pay my bills, stay out of debt, and have a little bit left over to share with others and enjoy my life. And I want to have the time to enjoy that life.

I know that given the right idea, a solid foundation, I could build on it and make it my own. I know I could do it. But it’s that “right idea” that continues to elude me, scuttling around the corner out of my view every time I think it might be close enough to grasp.

Maybe I need to stop trying so hard to figure it all out and just keep growing in what I’m already doing. Maybe if I ease up on the pressure, my mind will relax into a solution instead of tying itself up in knots trying to make everything right.

Guess I’ll give that a shot. What have I got to lose?

(Note: This post was written by Laurel Regan and originally published in a separate blog called “Why Windsor…”, which was later merged with Alphabet Salad.)

My weekly Windsor Square column has now been posted and is available for your perusal:

The Cost of Windsor Living

I invite you to take a look and let me know what you think!

Way back in my LiveJournal days… I mean back when everyone seemed to be using LiveJournal and it was hard to keep up with all the posts… I remember how thrilled I was when I opened my Inbox and saw a string of comments from my LJ friends in response to a journal entry I’d written. There was just something so wonderful about that connection I’d made with a bunch of seemingly random strangers – we had found each other, and were now getting to know each other through our written words. Fabulous!

I experienced that again, albeit to a lesser degree, when I moved over to my public Blogger blogs, and am slowly starting to see it on my newly self-hosted WordPress blogs. I still love the connection with people who’ve stumbled across my posts, and I still adore that little thrill when someone sends me a comment.

BUT (you knew there had to be a but, right?)…

The spambots are starting to suck the joy out of the process! These days when I see a string of comments from WordPress sitting in my Inbox, the vast majority of them are more than likely to be from spammers trying to sell goods or services to me and my readers, or show us their X-rated pictures and videos, rather than real-life people who actually care about or want to comment on what I’ve written. It’s frustrating and depressing and angry-making, and I’m beyond tired of it.

The silver lining, I suppose, is that when I do get a “real” comment, the fact that it’s NOT from a spambot makes it all the more wonderful, so there is that!

OK, rant over. But if any of my readers can recommend a WordPress plugin that will help to minimize this annoying issue without making it irritating for actual, real commenters to interact on my blog, I’m all ears.

Until then, I’ll keep my cursor poised over the Spam button, and hope that some day the real commenters will outweigh the !@#$%^&* spambots.

Le sigh.

This afternoon I finished reading Night by Elie Wiesel in preparation for this week’s book club meeting.

I’ve read other books about the Holocaust, but this is the first time I’ve read Night.

Wow.

All I can think, now, is, who am I to deserve to be happy? Why am I able to feel contentment in my own home with the sweet smell of caramel cookies wafting through the air? What did I do to deserve such a good life, free to be lived in accordance with my own choices?

This world, this life, is very unfair.

I did something tonight that shows just how much my life has changed since moving to Windsor. Brace yourself, as it’s rather shocking.

I made cookies.

“That’s it?!” you say incredulously? Well, my friend, to me this batch of cookies is a perfect representation of everything I love about my life these days, namely:

1. I am not tired, tired, tired after the one-hour-each-way-commute-plus-full-workday lifestyle that I left behind, so tired that all I can bring myself to do when I get home in the evening is slump in front of the TV for a few hours, so tired that all I want to accomplish on weekends is to catch up on sleep.
2. I have more time to myself. In addition to the reclaimed travel time (my commute these days involves, depending on where I am at that moment, walking up or down a flight of stairs to my home office), my reduced cost of living allowed me to reduce my work week to the equivalent of four days. With more time to myself, I have more options as to how I spend my time.
3. I have a larger kitchen! There’s not a ton more prep space in my new kitchen, but there’s quite a bit more in the way of cupboard storage, so I was finally able to buy a proper stand mixer and toss my dying old hand mixer that was almost worse than useless. There’s a lot more incentive to bake when one has the proper space and equipment, you know?
4. I am proud of myself for following a dream, taking a calculated risk, taking the steps to live my life instead of simply putting in time.
5. I am, plain and simple, happier. Money isn’t as tight, time isn’t as fully claimed, I adore my house and love being here. For me, happiness tends to bubble over into things like writing more, taking better care of myself, maybe even baking.

I never thought making a batch of cookies could evoke so much gratitude, but there it is.

I’ll bet they taste great.

Today’s NaBloPoMo entry is posted on one of my other blogs:

Windsor Square Column: Home Sweet Home

I invite you to drop by and visit me there!

(Note: This post was written by Laurel Regan and originally published in a separate blog called “Why Windsor…”, which was later merged with Alphabet Salad.)

Oops… my column on the Windsor Square was actually up on Tuesday, and I neglected to post the link here! Apologies for the delay in letting you know, but here it is if you’d like to check it out:

Home Sweet Home

As always, I’d love your input on what I have to say, either here or in the Comments section of my column. Don’t be shy!

Well, we finally “de-Christmased” the house this evening. (What, it’s only January 12th – that’s not bad, for me!) I’m finding the front hallway looks incredibly bare now, without our beautifully-decorated tree standing in the place of honour, and it’s a little sad. I’m not a fan of the end of the holiday season.

I ordered a couple of books today – Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design and CSS Pocket Reference. I’m looking forward to seeing how they help me to develop my blog designs.

We have an energy audit booked for our house tomorrow, and we’re both geekily excited about it! Our house gets pretty cold sometimes, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to get some work done on the house that will help to cut our energy costs. If we can get it done before the end of March, we should be able to get a rebate under the current government program, which is the goal!

Still plugging away on learning the Thesis theme and applying it on one of my other blogs. I’m starting to get a better idea of where I want to go with the layout… now I just have to learn how to make it happen. The books I ordered should help!

Speaking of which, off to do some more designing.

Well, I wasn’t entirely defeated by my foray into learning to use the Thesis Theme last night. I did get it installed on all five of my sites, after all, which is no small feat considering that I’ve only recently started working with WordPress.org and self-hosting, and this theme requires more than the typical installation.

But… when I activated the theme on one of my blogs, I hit a wall. Not a wall of understanding – I found the help sites and began to dig around to find what I needed (plus, my background in web design, though long out of date, always comes to my aid in such circumstances). No, the wall I banged smack dab into had nothing to do with figuring out how to use the theme – it was all about me going completely blank as to what I wanted to do with my layout.

It may not sound like a big deal, but it’s very frustrating to me… and it touches on an insecurity I struggle with regularly: wondering if I have anything creative or original to offer. Sure, I can develop the technical skills, and when presented with an idea I can run with and develop it… but when I have to come up with something original – a plot, a design – I’m paralyzed, a deer in the headlights.

I’m not sure where I’m going to go from here. Maybe I’ll wait until I’m in a better frame of mind and tackle it then. I do know, though, that I’m not giving up just yet! Sorry, Thesis, but you haven’t beaten me.

Onward.

I can’t do a proper post today – I’ve just bought the “Thesis” theme for my blogs and now have a great deal of learning to do!

Apologies to anyone who visits my sites during the transition period, which will hopefully not be too rough.

Now, on to designing!

Today’s NaBloPoMo entry is posted on one of my other blogs:

Buy Local: Green Bean Café

I invite you to drop by and visit me there!

(Note: This post was written by Laurel Regan and originally published in a separate blog called “Why Windsor…”, which was later merged with Alphabet Salad.)

Big box stores, national chains, non-Canadian-owned corporations doing business in Canada… you can’t get away from them these days. They have their place, of course – I myself have been known to take advantage of their bargain prices and wide selection – but what saddens and concerns me is their profound effect on smaller, locally-owned “Mom and Pop”-type stores, which seem to be harder and harder to find every day.

Since I’m pretty much brand-new to Windsor, and therefore my shopping and entertainment habits are not yet ingrained, I’d really like to make an effort to get in the habit of buying local where possible and practical. As I come across local finds or favourites, I thought I’d share them here in the hopes that perhaps my fellow Windsorites will be inspired to patronize our local businesses along with me (while we still can).

To kick off my buy local campaign, this past weekend my husband and I visited The Green Bean Café for the first time. We’re hoping to attend The Windsor Book Club, which meets at the Green Bean, so thought we’d check out the location beforehand.

According to their web site, the Green Bean Café is an independent coffee house specializing in fair trade, organic and premium coffee products. Oddly enough, the café is located in the basement of a church (2320 Wyandotte Street West, right next to the University of Windsor). We weren’t quite sure how they’d pull that off… in my experience, church basements don’t exactly have a coffeehouse ambience!… but we discovered that once you’re in the Green Bean it definitely doesn’t give off a church basement vibe. It’s quite large, but still feels cosy and comfortable, and we found it to have a very relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. There were several groups of students, and while my husband and I are middle-aged non-student-types, we didn’t feel at all out of place.

I had a tea and took advantage of the free wi-fi, while my husband read his book and enjoyed a grilled cheese panini. The service and prices were great, and according to my husband the panini was yummy, so we will definitely be back to sample more of the Green Bean experience.

I encourage you to give it a try yourself!

Warning: Dull home organizational post ahead, written to satisfy my NaBloPoMo commitment and likely of interest to no one but myself. Consider yourself warned!

We’ve lived in our new house for just over two months now, and are ever so slowly getting the place organized, one area at a time. Tired of the clutter that was rapidly building up in the small add-on off the kitchen at the back of the house, I decided to designate today “Project Mudroom” with the goal of getting that corner of our home in order.

Go ahead and laugh if you will (that is, if the warning at the start didn’t drive you away and you’re still reading), but I love having a mudroom! OK, so maybe love is too strong a word to use in the same sentence as mudroom… but having that room makes me happy on some basic level. We didn’t have one in our last place, which meant that the front entrance got pretty messy at times. I’m finding that it’s great to be able to come into the house through the back door, take off your dirty or wet footwear, and put on a pair of clean slippers to take you through to the rest of the house. It’s also so much nicer to have everything you need at your fingertips when you leave the house – coats, scarves, gloves – instead of having to traipse throughout the house in a hunt for the necessary outdoor wear.

One of the ways I motivate myself to get on with a household project is to buy something that helps me organize the area. In this case, it was one of these Super Garment Racks. Shortly after we moved in we purchased one for our dressing room (old house, small closets) and loved it, so when I saw it was on sale for 50% off I knew it was a sign that it was time to get on with Project Mudroom.

So now, though it’s by no means fancy, we now have a functioning mudroom! I feel such a great sense of accomplishment.

Now, if I could only find it in me to take down the Christmas tree…

I‘m having one of those “discouraged about my writing” times – you know, where you wonder if all the effort you’re putting in is ever going to be enough… whether anyone really cares to hear what you have to say and, perhaps the better question, whether you actually have anything of value to say… whether your work will ever measure up and be as good as so-and-so’s… whether you shouldn’t just keep a private journal and leave it at that.

I don’t feel this way all that often – most of the time blogging is something I love, something that just feels right to me – but it does hit me now and then, and I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling this way.

My goal for getting past this particular downtime is going to be to do unto others – to visit and comment on some other blogs, to find and support some other writers, to get out of my own little puddle of self-pity and think of someone else. Even if it doesn’t work in terms of getting me out of this mood, at least I can hope that I bring a smile to someone else’s face!

NaBloPoMo Writing Prompt for January 5, 2012:
Do you wish the start of the year was in a different season? Which one?

Ever since I can remember, September has always felt like the start of my new year… much more so than January ever does.

Perhaps, for whatever reason, my mind has forever linked September with the beginning of the school year, which for me was always about newness… new outfits, clean notebooks, fresh school supplies. September was always the start of something, with old friends returning from vacation and new friends just waiting to be met. Thanksgiving with its turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie was just around the corner, which meant that – oh, joy! – Christmas itself would soon be in sight. September, with its freshness and anticipation, truly is the beginning of a brand new year full of possibilities and excitement.

The first of January – New Year’s Day, and also my birthday – has always seemed to me to be more like an ending than a beginning. The festivities and food of the Christmas season were through, the last of the presents were opened for another whole year, and the tree had to be taken down and put away. Worst of all, after days of delicious sleep-ins, the alarm clock had to be set again so as not to be late for school or work the next day. January means an ending to fun and goodness and a return to the daily routine.

So for me, while I’ll continue to watch the ball drop and make happy noises with the rest of the world at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, in my heart, September will always be my own personal New Year.