Merry Christmas

 

I just want to wish you and your family and very MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

 

Today, we are going to open gifts, go to church and then go to my parent’s house.  That is our family tradition! :)

 

Then we eat a big dinner, open more gifts and just be TOGETHER!!!!  That is my favorite part!!!!

 

Now is the time to relax and enjoy this day and everything it means!

 

Happy Birthday Jesus!!!

I hope that you are enjoying your Christmas?

What are your family traditions?

Don’t forget about our December Special,

FREE LIFETIME SHAKLEE MEMBERSHIPS with a order over $70 (member price)

A Get Clean Starter Kit qualifies!

A membership gets you 15% off all Shaklee products and there are no minimums to keep your membership!

Read about my TOP 10 Shaklee products here.

~♥ Merry CHRISTmas ♥~

12/24 - I added a few more pictures of my kitchen at the bottom of the post, so please take a look if you haven't seen them before.
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Thank you all so much for your visits and sweet comments on my last post...I really appreciate it!

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Last weekend I hosted a cookie exchange at my home with some of my dearest friends...I thought I'd share a few pictures with you.

Did you notice "The Farm Chicks Christmas" book?  If you haven't gotten yours, you are missing out...what a darling book.  I found mine at Michaels.

What a wonderful time with dear friends.  We all received a nice selection of cookies...now, if I can just control how many I eat.

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Here are a few pictures of my kitchen at CHRISTmas:

Thank you all so much for your visits during this past year...I'm taking a blogging break until the beginning of 2011.

Have a blessed CHRISTmas, blogging friends.

♥ Kim

Seriously Basic Roasted Chicken and Root Vegetables Recipe

Are you still wondering what to serve on Christmas?

I just made this for my guests and yummmmmmm!!!

I got the recipe from Oprah’s website.  It was seriously so easy and delicious!

Seriously Basic Roasted Chicken and Root Vegetables Recipe

Servings: Serves 4

Ingredients

1 whole chicken (4 pounds)

1 Tbsp. and 3/4 tsp. kosher salt

3/4 tsp. crushed black pepper

3 Tbsp. olive oil

1 lemon

6 sprigs fresh rosemary

1 pound carrots , cut into 3-inch sticks

1 pound parsnips , cut into 3-inch sticks

1 pound small red potatoes , halved

Directions

Heat the oven to 400°.

On a sheet pan, toss the carrots, parsnips and potatoes with 2 tablespoons of oil, 4 sprigs rosemary, 3/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper.

 
Rinse and pat dry the chicken and season with the remaining salt and pepper, then rub with 2 tablespoons of the oil.

Pierce the lemons several times with the tip of a paring knife and stuff, along with 2 sprigs of the rosemary, into the cavity of the chicken.

Using cooking twine, tie the legs together.

 
Nestle the chicken among the vegetables and put in the oven—with the chicken's legs toward the back of the oven.

Roast, stirring the vegetables once, until the chicken is cooked through (the internal temperature reaches 165° in the thickest part of the thigh), 55 to 60 minutes.

Carve and serve with the roasted vegetables.

I roasted my chicken with red and sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, lemons and rosemary and I served this with a spring salad and fresh green beans and asparagus with hollandaise sauce.  So good!

I will be making this again and again…it’s that good!

This would be great for Christmas or any other occasion or just a nice family dinner.

What will you be serving this Christmas?

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

Don’t forget about our December Special,

FREE LIFETIME SHAKLEE MEMBERSHIPS with a order over $70 (member price)

A Get Clean Starter Kit qualifies!

A membership gets you 15% off all Shaklee products and there are no minimums to keep your membership!

Read about my TOP 10 Shaklee products here.

 

A Simple Christmas Vignette

 

I know that this post is a little late but here you go! :)

I wrapped this cute Merry Christmas sign around a candle holder.

 

I decorated with picture frames and already had and pinecones.

 

I just filled the frames with wintery pictures of the kids!  I love doing that!!! :)

 

I LOVE the nature look.  I just took a candle holder that I had and filled it with acorns that the kids picked and added a couple branches from our tree.

 

This tree is from a garage sale.

The greenery is not real but it looks real, doesn’t it?  I also bought that from a garage sale.

That’s it….simple, festive and free…except for the pictures but those were cheap and they don’t count because I need them.

 

I hope you all have a Merry and Blessed Christmas!

Don’t forget about our December Special,

FREE LIFETIME SHAKLEE MEMBERSHIPS with a order over $70 (member price)

A Get Clean Starter Kit qualifies!

A membership gets you 15% off all Shaklee products and there are no minimums to keep your membership!

Read about my TOP 10 Shaklee products here.

How to get off Permanent Marker

Yesterday, I was in the bathroom and my daughter comes in tattling on her brother.  She told me that he drew on my granite countertop with permanent marker.

So what do I do?!?!?!

Take a picture of course, hee hee…only me! lol

 

Then I sprayed Basic H and G on it and it came off in 30 seconds! 

That was easy!

The hard part is wondering how he found that marker.

Has this ever happened to you?

Have a great week!

Don’t forget about our December Special,

FREE LIFETIME SHAKLEE MEMBERSHIPS with a order over $70 (member price)

A Get Clean Starter Kit qualifies!

A membership gets you 15% off all Shaklee products and there are no minimums to keep your membership!

Read about my TOP 10 Shaklee products here.

Start your new year off TOXIC-FREE!

SOLSTICE

Winter Solstice from Mick Jones on Vimeo.

Iridescence Sea. Mark Yankus.

VLF in Finland from Jean-Pierre Aube on Vimeo.

According to its Vimeo page, this video was shot on the December solstice in Jerisjarvi, Finland:
 

Shoot on a frozen lake in the darkness of the polar nights the video is a 11 minute scan of the horizon. Recorded simultaneously the sound track is a recording of Natural Radio. I was looking for Auroral Chorus an obscure electromagnetic phenomena link with northern lights. On the video you can also hear dawn chorus generated by a big solar storm and military telecommunications from Russian submarines beacons.

LINGCOD LINGO

Lingcod. Photo by Jim Lyle at DiveBums. This site hosts a wealth of photo beauties, worth an extended visit.

A new paper in PLoS ONE reports the whereabouts of tagged lingcod in Alaskan waters over the course of 16 months. Several aspects of this research are interesting.

First up, lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus) are large bottom-dwelling fish up to five feet long and 130 pounds, who live at least 20 years. They inhabit only the kelp forests, rocky shorelines, and tidal inlets of the Northeast Pacific from Mexico to Alaska. 

Range map of lingcod. Image credit: Mmm courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The males are nest-guarders who move into shallow waters to defend territories prior to spawning. This leaves the species highly susceptible to overfishing, since the males are tied to the nest in inshore waters (read: easy to catch), and since catching a male will also result in the death of all his dependent offspring. From the paper:

Lingcod... support an important recreational and commercial fishery. Currently, lingcod is a species of critical concern to fisheries managers throughout the Pacific Coast because of the combined factors of low annual productivity and susceptibility to overfishing are a result of their high site residency and association with the nearshore zone. In Canada's Strait of Georgia, the lingcod commercial fishery has been closed since 1990 while in Washington, Oregon, and California lingcod was declared an overfished species between 1999 and 2005.

So the researchers set out to see what they could learn about subpopulations of lingcod. Do they move around, do they mix, and if so where do they go at what ages and is that true for for males and females? The who-what-where-when-why-and-how of science.

The POST array in 2010.

They tapped into POST (Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Project), an acoustic receiver array stretching from San Francisco to Alaska. It's one of 17 projects of the Census of Marine Life that's shedding light on more than a few sea mysteries:

• Green sturgeon in the Sacramento River swim regularly from California to British Columbia and sometimes as far as Alaska.

• Salmon smolts swim downstream along the Columbia River and up the continental shelf to Southeast Alaska, a 2,500 kilometer/1,500 mile journey of ~3 months—roughly 25 kilometers/15 miles a day. 

That's a lot of aquatory for a smolt. 

Coho salmon smolt. Photo by Cacophony, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

POST works with acoustic receivers anchored near the seafloor and close enough together that tagged animals swimming by are heard by at least one receiver. Thanks to the wonders of this distant listening array, revelations about lingcod life are emerging from the saltwater.

We used [POST] to monitor movements and residency of 21 acoustic-tagged lingcod for up to 16 months. Eight of sixteen lingcod (50%) initially aged at 2.5- to 3.5- years-old dispersed from their tag site. Dispersal was highly seasonal, occurring in two, five-week periods from mid-December through January and from mid-April through May. Dispersal in winter may be related to sexually immature lingcod or newly-mature male lingcod being displaced by territorial males. Spring dispersal may be indicative of the onset of migratory behavior where lingcod move out into Prince William Sound and possibly the offshore waters of the Gulf of Alaska.

From PLoS ONE.

The diagram above shows the what, where, when, how, and who of eight lingcod dispersing from their tagging areas.
 

• a) Lingcod dispersing out of Port Gravina, spring 2009. 
• b) Lingcod dispersing from their tagging site in spring 2009 and remaining in Port Gravina. 
• c) Lingcod dispersing out of Port Gravina, fall 2009. 
• d) Lingcod dispersing out of Port Gravina, winter 2009–2010. Colored lines denote individual lingcod and arrows denote direction of travel. Dashed lines indicate absences >1 d without detection. 

The tagging also revealed at least a few of the why's in lingcod life. Some left their home waters for periods up to seven days when Pacific herring migrated through—presumably in pursuit of their prey. Some fell prey to predators themselves.

Unexpectedly, our acoustic array provided accurate information on the timing and direction of a lingcod being preyed upon and removed from the study area. We were able to conclude that the predator was likely a marine mammal based on its speed, and in this case, the depth of the predator as the lingcod had a pressure sensor tag implanted.

Cold Waters from Mike Meagher on Vimeo.

Finally, a teaser of the lingcod's beautiful, plankton-infused world, translated into our native visual language.

The paper:

• Bishop MA, Reynolds BF, Powers SP, 2010 An In Situ, Individual-Based Approach to Quantify Connectivity of Marine Fish: Ontogenetic Movements and Residency of Lingcod. PLoS ONE 5(12): e14267. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0014267