Starting June, that will no longer be a problem. Greg and I are proud to say that we are now share holders of a Green Fence Farm CSA. Inspired by In Defense of Food and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, it was only an added bonus to know were supporting personal friends of ours as well. (Click here to learn more about CSAs.)

What I am excited about is the fresh-from-the-earth vegetables every month and new creative ingredients to experiment with and add to my cooking arsenal. In the meantime, we will be eating good, unprocessed food, increasing our veggie intake and supporting local farmers we know. Sounds like a plan with no drawbacks.

When our first dozen of “Welcome to the farm” eggs came, they were the freshest, most brightly colored eggs I had every seen. In addition, we are learning more about the food we eat. Did you know that fresh eggs can last up to one month without any refrigeration? With refrigeration…well, let’s just say, you don’t want to know how long it’s been since those eggs that they are selling you in the grocery store were actually laid.

It’s an exciting endeavor, but I am a little nervous. As we get what is in season every two weeks, there are a lot of things coming to us that I don’t normally eat and am unsure of how to prepare them. So anyone with suggestions on what to do with beets, turnips, cabbage and swiss chard, please write in!

Site Design and Layout

• The site design has been overhauled to a cleaner modern look that is easier to read (compared to the previous versions that were white on brown and green on darker green)
• The large image at the top that was always too big to display is gone, replaced by a series of smaller images of major trips and events in our lives.

Within the Blog

• Categories are used much more prominently and extensively. You can now easily search for a previous blog post not just by date but by relevant category as well.
• There is now a Full Archives of every blog post we ever wrote listed both alphabetically and chronologically.
• Within each post, now is displayed the previous and next post by name, so you can easily move through the blog in chronological order.

New Functionality

• The Photos section has been completely renovated to pull in the full spectrum of pictures on our Flickr feed. You can now view the sets and individual photos right on our site without leaving to go to Flickr.
• Our latest Photos are included right on the home page
• Our latest Twitter tweets are included right on the home page.
• Comments now include gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars). So if you have a gravatar and comment on our site, your picture will display, if you do not, your picture will be a cupcake instead.
• I am experimenting with the Facebook Connect technology, where if you are logged into Facebook, you are automatically logged into our blog, for ease of commenting. It’s still a bit buggy, so thank you for your patience.
• There is now a direct contact form on the site where you can reach either Selena, Greg or both with your comments.
• Also listed on our Contact page is direct links for where else to find us online including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.
• The Search was moved to the bottom of the page, but now works an extra 40% better. At least I think so, but I have been known to make up statistics at least 78% of the time.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

I should win.

Not because I am better at this, far from it, she’s been a lot more disciplined with her working out and eating right.  No, it’s because the game is skewed in my favor. 

What Selena didn’t think about when she set down the initial rules of this challenge is that she weighs only 2/3 my weight, therefore her losing a pound is more significant than me losing a pound. But the rules do not take this into account, it’s just straight up pound for pound.

So I think we are going to change the rules, make it fair, and determine weight lost as a proportion of total weight and measure in percentages instead of pounds.  We’ll start that at the next weigh-in Tuesday morning.

Until then, I’m going to sign off now and be a good winner by bringing her a cupcake as she continues cleaning up and organizing all her crafting supplies.

I am thrilled about Selena’s punishment which is to consolidate all her thousands of digital photos, spread across 2 cameras, 3 computers and god knows where else, into one central repository that can be easily viewed using Picasa or iPhoto.

As this round of the challenge comes to an end, I will call it a success. Measurably we both succeeded, albeit not meeting the intended goals, but losing weight all the same. Moreover, though, it got us both thinking twice before eating that cookie, or blowing off going to the gym, knowing we would be accountable for those actions on the scale come Tuesday. I fully expect we will start up a second round of the Biggest Loser when we get back from our travels. Selena deserves a rematch.

This is what I was bringing with (I needed an outfit for golfing, for the pool, for the evening festivities and for the meetings the following day.)

The folding system requires that outfits are ziplocked together.  This makes it easier to just grab what you need when you need it.

Then just about everything is sushi rolled together.

And it is so compact that all of that can even fit spaciously into this tiny backpack.

It takes a little getting used to, using all the ziplock bags, and what not, but in the end this is a really efficient way to travel and will come in really handy when we (hopefully) go to Europe later this year.