Since I don't have enough to do...

Announcing Green Peas blog, discussion forum, and soon-to-be online retail store for all of your cloth diapering needs.

One word of warning with cloth diapers, they are addicting, and once you start you will want to convince everyone you know to use cloth.

Clean Slate

My friend L is getting married on Thursday (YEA!!!!). Last weekend we had a "girls night" party. We ate dinner at the Mandarin (if I was saying we ate dinner at Applebees, I wouldn't say "the Applebees", but it looks funny typing Mandarin the same way...). Then we went to L's new condo. It is nice! It is so clean, and mostly empty.

Over the last several weeks I've been decluttering and throwing things away, but now I really want to get rid of stuff. I went through a drawer in the kitchen that is always overflowing with pie pans and bread pans and glass measuring cups and an odd assortment of school lunch containers. It looks better now (plus I got rid of the can opener which has never worked well-I prefer the hand type).

My BEST friend N is moving soon, so she's cleaning out her house to get ready to sell it, so I've been looking at my house in a new way... If I was trying to sell my house, what would I need to get rid of? It's kind of difficult since the kitchen is not finished yet and I don't have places to store my wheat grinder or my kitchen-aid vegetable slicer attachment, so they are in the living room on the book case. But I'm doing what I can.

Sometimes a purge feels good.

What I'd really like to do is start over in a new house (and a new car). It's fun to dream.

Not SOCIALIZED healthcare!

Over the holiday I had the chance to discuss the state of health care in our country with some family members. It frustrates me that so many people seem to take the phrase "socialized health care" and run screaming with it.

Socialized health care! What's wrong with that? I hate to point it out, but what we have now is not working. My brother-in-law, who is wonderful in many ways, didn't have any reason for his knee-jerk reaction to the idea of socialized health care other than "people in Canada hate what they have and come here for medical care". Perhaps that does happen, but I can find just as many, if not more examples of Canadians who love their health coverage.

In our discussion we talked about the cost of the babies his wife and I both have had recently. Our medical insurance has a $5000 deductible on maternity, the bills came to $4995. He and his wife are "poor college students" and qualify for medicaid. I'm not sure if he paid anything at all for his baby. Yet, even after receiving free or very low cost health care he assumes that because he is a hard worker, he could pay any medical bills that he had to.

I'd encourage health-care-conservatives to actually read about "socialized" health care plans before dismissing them. The link is to the Barack Obama for President website. Also, it might be helpful to look up the definition of Socialism. I don't think anyone is advocating a complete switch to a socialist state. But what is so wrong with a health care system that is controlled by the state so that all citizens can benefit fairly and equitably. Think "Law of Consecration".

My husband and I have had to opt out of his employer sponsored plan because it has gotten too expensive. He works for a small business, and his bosses have a real concern about the possibility of one employee having a major medical problem and the entire company being priced out of the health insurance plans altogether.

It's passed the time for a change, and if you are lucky enough to have not realized that yet, take a look at some real people sharing their medical nightmares.

Going Tankless

I've been collecting information on things I want to include in my dream home. I'm currently researching tankless water heaters.

I'm leaning toward electric over gas because of the solar panels, but I wondered if any of my readers have any experience with tankless or on demand water heaters. My brother in law said he looked into them and decided not to get one because of the yearly maintenance. I can't find anything that says they require yearly maintenance.

I like the idea of not keeping a tank of water constantly hot. I also like that if we have company staying with us, we won't run out of hot water. My concerns mostly center around what temperature the water will be heated to and how well the temperature will be regulated when the temperature of the incoming water changes throughout the year.