so much love and dancing!!!

Part of our first bulk order from the co-op has come in, less than a week, so quick!  We got a box of our fav flavor of Raw Revolution bars, the chocolate raspberry.  Five pounds each of organic raw walnuts and cashews.  We keep a big jar of each nut in the fridge and the rest is stored in the freezer. 



Here is something that I'm not sure if everyone does, but it's a good way to save money.  Refilling your herb and spice jars in the bulk section.  If you do the majority of your cooking/uncooking at home you will go through your favorites pretty quickly, oregano and cumin are the big ones in our house.  Also there is no need to waste any more packaging, you already have the bottle.  Here is an example of what we were out of this past week, organic poppy seeds and basil.  They both started empty;  the poppy cost $1.16 and basil 46 cents.  Easy easy, most all health food stores and coops have these in bulk, check out your local ones.



Each store will have a different method for refilling.  Most commonly you'll need to weigh a tare of your jar/container you bring in and make note of it, or if you can do it all yourself tare it to zero, fill and make note of either the weight and price or just the price and the cashier will weigh for you at check out.  For stores that you'll be going to with barcode scanners you'll want to either get your label off or what I do is just use a sharpie to mark out some part of the barcode so it won't accidentally be scanned as new.  I did have this happen and realized on the way home that I hadn't needed to tell the cashier what the PLU was, I was bagging and chatting and it had just gotten scanned.  Next trip in I took it back and got the refund and paid for just the curry powder, no problem.  Is this something you all already do??

The easiest thing we can all do to save waste...



One of my favorite things to do in towns when we travel is to check out the natural foods shops, if they have their own I like to pick up a reuseable bag and they end up being my favorites.  This hemp one is from Healthy Habitz in Frankenmuth.  Talking of a little travelling we drove to Grand Rapids on Sunday to see Michael Franti.  Maggie wanted to go as well, but we had decided not to stay the night so the bag was all hers while we were gone ;)  She never passes an opportunity to sit in/on anything!



Here's a video of Michael if you don't already know him I encourage you to check him out!!!



His shows are a great atmosphere of people having fun, being happy, and loving eachother where you meet cool folks and get to hug. oh and jumping and dancing and singing and if you're a softie like me you even get to cry a little ;)  I really did a couple of times.

Here we are in GR enjoying some sunshine and a little snowboard competition (a Rail Jam was going on)





enjoying the show =)



I use happycow.net to look for veggie places when we're out of town, looking in GR there were a handful (so cool) we decided on the Brick Road Pizza Co.  where I had a yummy fresh salad and a vegan pizza with green olives and pineapple.







It's a cute place with yummy food that's mindful of the planet and it's people.



They do not serve beer so after lunch we found to a bar close to the venue for a drink before the show.  We drank beer out of quart jars (ok this is a lot of beer for me because I hardly ever drink anymore), chatted with the bartenders, watched the gold medal hockey game, and played lots of music on the juke box. 



I just love this guy and travelling with him so much!  I'm still blissed out from the show =)