Raw Spirit Fest Santa Barbara 2009!!

Yippee! I love this raw family!!

My Vegan Pants are Back in NYC!

Yes it is very true, my pants are back in New York. The 'city that never sleeps' has called me back for another trip...the extended kind. I spent several blissful months in Sedona, AZ, literally playing in the kitchen at Cafe Bliss & Raw Chocolates every day, which for a good while was enough to satiate my spirit. I met lots a great folks who became great friends very quickly. I learned a boat-load of goodness about raw vegan food prep and had a blast...but soon enough spirit was calling me away again...this time to reunite with my sweetie in New York City! I spent a whirlwind four days in NYC before the Christmas holiday and knew then that I had to return to stay for awhile. Isaac, my best friend and partner, and I decided to find a sweet artist-type loft together and have a go of it, living together! I flew back to New York from Wisconsin a week after the New Year and it has been a non-stop adventure ever since. We stayed at his old place for a few weeks until we found our dream space, a lofted apartment with a great big set of windows and plenty of space for creating art, making fantastic food, entertaining friends, and dancing! We have been outfitting the place since then, which was already four weeks ago! We also recently adopted from a rescue organization the best darn puppy you could ever dream up. What a best friend! She is intelligent, playful, goofy, and is just a roly-poly little bundle of love :) She is truly a gem, and we feel really fortunate to have been lucky enough to be the ones to adopt her! We have decided to name her Juno (after the Roman goddess, not the movie ;) It just seemed to fit.
Next post will include pics of the new place and the pup!

Raw Spirit Festival 2008!

This year's Raw Spirit Fest was more fantastically splendidly amazingly gorgeously rawliciously beautiful than I could have ever expected! I felt so in the flow in the AZ Raw Family that I have decided to stay for awhile! Come visit me anytime at Cafe Raw Bliss on the main drag in Sedona!!
So much LOVE to you all!!

Veganic Farming

Check out this great article about a growing trend in organic farming called "Veganic Farming." This new trend in farming practices takes organic farming a step further by making the process totally vegan. "What!? Organic farming is not typically totally vegan??" you may ask. True!!! Organic farmers often use animal manure or slaughterhouse by-products such as bone, blood or fish meal to fertilize their soil. I was honestly really surprised when I read this article, as I suppose I always am when I am confronted with another way I have been indirectly involved in animal torture. Ugh. What else can I say but...

GO VEGANIC FARMERS!

Article and picture courtesy of The Farm Sanctuary.

Travel Water Filters

So I set out recently (on the net) to see if I could find a travel water bottle that had an internal water filtration system that was decent enough that it would filter out pathogens, metals and chemical contaminants, and that was also made out of a non-leaching plastic (glass would be best but I assumed I would not find this on the market).
Well, there are MANY different kinds of travel water bottle with filters that claim to filter out pathogens, metals and chemicals, however one stood out from the rest because it was the only bottle that I found that was made out of BPA-free (Bisphenol-A, the toxic chemical that has been proven to cause cancer) low density polyethylene plastic. This is the 911 Portable Water Bottle (dramatic name, I know). It features an IONIC Adsorbtion Micro Filtration System that is capable of 99% REDUCTION in these 4 areas of contamination:

1. Unpleasant Tastes and Odors
2. Toxic Chemicals such as: industrial VOCs, PCBs, trihalomethanes, agricultural synthetics organic compounds, detergents, pesticides, DDT, asbestos and others
3. Micro-biological Pathogens such as: E-Coli, Cryptosporidium, Giardi, toxic bacteria, cysts and spores
4. Heavy Metals such as: Aluminum, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, and mercury
5. Radiologicals such as radon 222

You can read more about it and order it here.
I should also mention that there were several travel water filters that I found that seemed to be fairly high quality, not portable water bottles, but counter top filters, which may be appropriate if you are traveling by bus or R.V. or have room enough in your suitcase to carry a larger system. However, if you are a vagabond like myself, such a large piece of equipment just would not do!
I did not spend too much time searching for the best counter top travel system, but here are a few I found after a quick search, the Water Purifier Buddy and the Crystal Quest.

Nia Now!

WOWSA! I went to a SUPER DUPER fantastic yoga/dance/t'ai chi/aikido/feldenkrais class last night! It was truly the most fun body movement class I have ever participated in. The technique is called "Nia" and it was developed 25 years ago by a couple of dance instructors who envisioned a more holistic fitness and lifestyle practice approach to exercise and body expression (compared to the then-current high impact, aerobic craze, this was in the early
80's :) So the two of them (Debbie and Carlos Rosas) invented The Nia Technique by combining 9 different forms of movement! Here is the breakdown:

From martial arts: Tae Kwon Do, Aikido, and T'ai Chi.
From dance: Jazz Dance, Modern Dance, and Duncan Dance.
From the Healing Arts: The Teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, and Yoga.

Again, I say Wowsa! Going beyond the impressiveness of the combination 9 different forms of movement into one cohesive practice, the extremely awesome part about Nia is that it is simply loads of FUN! To try and give you a better idea of what practicing Nia was like, some of the names of the moves we did in class yesterday were; 'Ringing the Bell', 'Big Bear', 'Cha Cha Cha', 'Buddha Walk', Ride the Pony', and 'Surfing'. Nia is very fairly low impact and any part of it can be modified for your body type. It is very holistic and the main focus is on being in touch with your own body's pleasure. And it just can't get much better than that, can it? :)


Check Nia out for yourself by taking a look at the founders' website NiaNow. The site is very easy to navigate and you can really get a good idea of what the practice is all about. Make sure to take a gander at their Newsletter section (which include sound bites and videos), and if you decide to give Nia a shot, there is a handy search engine to help you find a teacher in your area.
(If you happen to live in the Milwaukee area, I would highly recommend the attending Jill Campana's classes at Sacred Space Studio in Hubertus.)

Have Fun!

Vegan Passport

Behold, the Vegan Passport
(attention fellow vegan vagabonds!)

A must have for those who just can't fathom eating another animal product EVER again, even whilst traveling the globe, this handy dandy little book describes in a few short phrases what vegans can and cannot eat, in about 69 different languages! It even includes a few descriptive pics in case the words just aren't doin' the trick. Neat-o!!

(Get yours today at Vegan Society.com, thanks Vegan Society!)