So.... it's been a little while and as you can see by the counter to the right, I am now 37 weeks and counting. The weather has finally warmed up unusually late for here (and I ended up not being as ambitious as I thought), but we're putting in the garden next weekend. I also finished quite a big internet project which was taking quite a lot of my time, and we survived the Easter long weekend by hibernating. And now... I finally feel like writing!

The past month or so I have been on my break I have been doing just lots of reading and thinking, which I tend to do in the last month of pregnancy. Then right before I have a baby, I get a burst of initiative (I can't really call it energy) that makes me motivated to do lots of things. I suppose that's the natural nesting instinct. There were also some stresses in my life that I have been coping with and my introspective self needed a break.

But, despite all of that, I still need to write. So today's post will be about a bunch of stuff I've been reading about. First of all, today I am making No-Knead Bread from the Steamy Kitchen's recipe - so easy a 4-year-old can make it supposedly. I don't have the same crock she has, I am using a Calphalon stock pot instead, and I didn't use plastic wrap (I don't keep any on hand), so let's see how it turns out.

My ever-vigilant watch on Monsasnto always seems to be able to applaud Germany, which recently banned Monsanto's GMO maize, and on the opposite side of the world, as the economy still stumbles, young people are turning into modern hippies and living in retrofitted busses that they deck out with free stuff from Craigslist.

A guy won $75,000 for making a solar cooker out of a cardboard box (an item many of my readers have made and are quite familiar with) as part of a climate change challenge for the most innovative solution to climate change. Anyone who has any interest in my blog probably had the knowledge to make this solar cooker, but I'm not sure any of us would have thought that the word innovative could mean something that everyone knows how to make. Ah well... I hope he spends it well.

The darkest thing I read was about the economic downturn and its effect on Dubai, especially its population of slave labor who can't leave the country because their passports have been taken by criminal construction companies who have now disappeared. It seems to me that Dubai has to be the epitome of what has happened socially, economically, and ecologically in the last decade. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why - which is a strange phrase to use in that instance, isn't it? Not only is a rocket scientist probably not the most ecological career to choose, it would probably take something better than one to figure this stuff out, since Dubai was designed by the world's leading architectural engineers. Maybe leaving these decisions to engineers isn't such a great idea... sorry engineers.