Hi everyone! hope you all are doing well and are getting out more since it is springtime, and the weather is at least sometimes kind! Just thought I'd drop by and say hello and tell you what's new for us!

Starting from about the first week in April, our entire household has stopped eating meat, chicken, and fish, which is, I guess, is basically a vegan diet. Our only variation is that we can't give up (or should I say don't want to give up) cheese and eggs! We started this quite naturally after watching the video called 'Food Matters'. It's a video available on Netflix, among other places, and is talks about how many chronic illnesses are a lot less common in countries where the people don't eat beff, pork, chicken, fish, etc, but base their diet on plant proteins. They say that the healthier diet consists of lots of whole grains, fruits, and veggies, especially dark leafy greens. I also read Alicia Silverstone's book called 'The Kind Diet'. That book is available for ereaders like the Amazon Kindle, and others, as well as in book form. Anyhow, we are not fanatics, but it's been really easy to eat this way, and we haven't had the same thing for dinner twice since we started! There are so many good meals and recipes available online and we have a few vegetarian cookbooks which we've been using. As far as being hard not eating meat, etc, it hasn't been hard at all, and we haven't gone hungry, either.

As for grains, we've been eating grains like Quinoa, Couscus, brown rice, etc, mixed with veggies and/or beans. It's kind of fun, actually! We also started a vegetable garden, and started composting, too! The craziest this we've done so far is that my d-i-l found a recipe to make our own laundry detergent, containing only water, one grated bar of soap, washing soda and borax. We made it, tried it out, and it really gets the laundry clean and bright, and smells good, too! It's really cheap to make, as we bought a box of borax and a box of washing soda, and used only about one cup of each. You add these to 2 or 3 gallons of water, mix, let it set, and then it's ready! Just think, how many gallons of laundry detergent you can make after buying these ingredients! We were joking about turning into hippies .

Well, gotta run! We're all well and healthy and doing great, and I hope all the same for all of you!