a 'green' St. Patrick's day

So, the new job is going quite well... but that means my green blogging - pobrecita! - is suffering.

Do as I say, not as I do - don't let your Green Life suffer because your financial, housing and professional life is in turmoil!

Be really Green this St. Patrick's Day - check out this awesome Slate article about the relatively green-ness of green beer.

Then, go even greener by buying some local suds from Yazoo Brewery.

And if you're going out, Dan McGuinness is the mainstream choice (I went last year and it was pretty fun but also super crowded), but you should also check out the Family Wash over in East Nashville, where they've got locally made beer brats and vegetarian shepherd's pie!

Last minute Christmas shopping & buying local

So, I'm not really doing the whole christmas-gifts-for-everyone-and-their-brothers thing this year, but I have had a little bit of holiday shopping to do, and I've found several awesome local products.

First of all, Nashville Toffee Company offers up a seriously yummy option. They were offering samples at Whole Foods the other day, and I was back the next day to buy a box for a gift exchange with my sorority "family." It's perfect for anything, really - a white elephant swap, family far away, coworkers, anyone (unless, like my friend Julie, you're allergic to caffeine - the chocolate bark on the kind I bought kept her from partaking).

And I MUST plug Hillsboro Chocolate Company, a shop opened by one of my DG sisters, Mandy Strickland, and her family. Get thee down there and check out their offerings! I am going to head down there during lunch today (hopefully) to see what they have and take home some goodies to the fam.

For my corporate gifts this year (which won't go out until after Christmas, I'm afraid... things are just too crazy), I'm getting bottles of Arrington Vineyards' Raspberry wine (goes perfectly with the BIPI logo!). Every wine I've tried from down there is a winner - the Gewurztraminer is my favorite, but I also like the Desert Rose. And even if you don't drink, you should head down to the winery to see the place - it's so gorgeous down there!

For Christmas, mom wants to make cookies, so I went to Whole Foods to grab some flour, and found two things that I'm excited about trying out. First, there's a spice company in Chattanooga called Alchemy Spice, and they had a sweet spice cinnamon blend that i want to try out on some snickerdoodles. Also, there is some jelly from Honeyberry Farm in Knoxville... I got the orange date nut honey jelly (for thumbprint cookies).

Okay, I realize that I just listed all food stuff!

If you're interested in something you can't eat but is still yummy, head out to East Nashville to Art & Invention Gallery. There are pieces for every budget and person on your list, from jewelery to pottery to oil paintings. My favorite piece, though, was a lazy susan that was painted to look like a big slice of lime. It's definitely worth a trip out there.

Well, this is all you'll hear from me until next week - I'm not working tomorrow morning, so no posts for you ;)

Have a green (and hopefully a little bit white) Christmas!

This year's christmas cards

For the past two years, I've made Christmas cards instead of buying them... generally I like doing it until it comes to the assembly-line stuff (cutting out 400 little squares and putting glitter on them; stamping 180 martini glasses and coloring them in...), but at that point I'm always caught by the sunk cost dilemma... although in the end I am happy that I did the project, so I guess that finishing them is always better than abandoning them...

It's a bizarre characteristic of mine that I enjoy the end result more than the project itself (mom always enjoys the process more), but this year I think I might have found a card project that I do enjoy in addition to the resultant card.

Previously, I've stolen paper from mom's ridiculous stash, but this year, after staring at the racks of paper at Michael's for a long while and not finding anything that flipped my skirt up, I decided I'm going to use all the magazines that are in my recycling bin and old paper grocery bags.

I'm doing a tea-bag folded starburst out of the magazine pages, and then using the grocery bags for the cards & envelopes themselves. The tea-bag folding should be an easy, portable and very soothing project that i can carry around with me and pull out at any time, so maybe this year's card will come with the added bonus of no assembly-line stress.

I feel like I'm going to look a little ridiculous with my hippie, I'm-recycling-for-Christmas cards, but i think that they'll turn out sort of cool anyway, and lately I'm embracing my ridiculousness, so we'll see how this year's batch turns out. I'll definitely post a pic of the finished piece, but for now, you can see my prototype. I used a corporate gifts magazine that was selling petit fours - you can see the little cake layers and the chocolate decorations.