faboo mama

h/t to tony over at seesmic, this is brilliant. Apologies on the autoplay, I hate it, but need find out how to turn it off.

That’s right, I won the Easy Green Living book by Renée Loux that was being given away on Seesmic. Want to watch the whole thing? Below is the video of the when Ms. Loux took our questions on what we viewed as important in living “green”:

Yes, that’s not Renée, but if you click on it, you’ll see here (yes, I’m laughing at a pretty frantic email I received).

About a week and some days later, the winner was announced:

I laughed. I cried. I want to thank the Academy…

Then today…the book arrived:

I’m kinda busy with work, but I’ve had a chance to flip through the book and it’s pretty interesting. There are a lot of items in the book that I already own/buy not because of any greenness on my part, but because of price, locality and prettiness/smells. The book is more a shopping guide than a lifestyle guide, IMO, but even flipping through it, it was struck by how many items in the book are things you don’t really need in life. Or the lack of actual greenness of them, i.e. paper towels/napkins. It’s much more green to use cloth towels, and thankfully, the author does point that out. Which brings me to the second cool thing about the book.

Everything is pretty accessible to anyone who can read and shows that you don’t have to drop big $$$ to be green which is stunning to me considering Loux hosts a show on Fine Living. The best part is that Loux does explain why certain things are better than others. Unlike other “green” books, there doesn’t seem to be those not-so-unsubtle judgment calls on your purchases. Take the section on cookware. It’s extremely detailed explaining why Teflon or non-stick cookware isn’t in your best interest vs. stainless steel or cast iron cookware.

Check out the book at your local library or you can find at Powell’s.

Over at Seesmic, Craig Manganello is offering guitar lessons. This project arose from a conversation where people expressed interest in learning their guitars. So Craig, a singer and songwriter from Long Island, has offered to tutor. There are 5 lessons all together, culminating in the guitarist playing Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.

Though I’m posting the lessons here, you can also follow Craig’s lessons at seesmic under the user name ‘guitarlessons’:

Lesson 1: Tuning Your Guitar

Lesson 2: The G Chord

Lesson 3: The D Chord

Lesson 4: The C Chord

Lesson 5: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

Yay! Thank you Craig. Everybody give Craig a big round of applause.

So, I’m testing this seesmic thing. We got it over at LA Metblogs, so people can leave a comment in video. You can twitter it, but I don’t twitter, so…

I’m sad.

For the past 4 days, I’ve been unable to watch YouTube videos no matter where they are online. I can press play, then the video stops playing at 0:02, while it continues to load. Once the red bar is full, the black screen pops up. I can’t even begin to guess what the problem is. At first I was blaming it on the new Firefox update, but I didn’t update until late Friday evening and it had stopped before then.

If anyone has any suggestions, let me know. I’ve tried everything so far.

UPDATE: As of 11:54pm last night, I’ve now been able to watch YouTube videos without going to IE. It may have had something to do with the FF update after all. The other updates were downloaded, but on my computer I just did the insta-update thing. Last night, I downloaded it and installed it that way. After that, no more YouTube problems.

Not fair. And totally uncool. My right inner ear has been itching for sometime and I’ve definitely been having yellow sneezes*, but after almost a week of this and nothing, I thought that I had avoided Ilia’s cold. Well, last night, after dropping Ilia off for her ballet class I realized that I was really getting seriously sick.

I went to bed at 9:30pm thinking I should rest a bit. I was out in 2 minutes. Baby boy woke up screaming his damn fool head off (let me just say, I’m really sick and tired of him not sleeping through the night and these nightly tantrums are really, really, really old) and was up for almost an hour just generally being grumpy. Usually Adrian takes care of the kids in the middle of the night since he’s already up, but last night (this morning!) was my lucky night to wake up. So, I got to spend an hour chasing a baby around the house to change his diaper, cleaning up milk he spilled on the floor and watching him be destructive…until I dumped his ass back in bed.

I did wind up getting back to sleep, but it’s 2pm and I’m still in my jammies. All I want to do is crawl back into bed, but every time I lay down, I start thinking of all the things I have to do. So here I am, not doing those things. Instead I blog.

*yellow sneezes are like regular sneezes it just that if they were real, they’d be yellow.

The song is called The People and I lerve eet!

Great video for a great song.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww]

Stumbled across this video of Vice President Al Gore and Mos Def talking about stuff…Of course it’s from a year ago, so I’m sure everyone else has stumbled across it:
Artist on Aritst: Al Gore and Mos Def