Lee inspired me to go to Target and I got Master and Commander (Loved that movie) and a double disc of The Little Princess and The Secret Garden (I have wanted to see both of these and never have) for $7.50. Thanks, Lee! I am leaving for a week in Minneapolis tomorrow, along with my brand new portable DVD player, and they will be added to the stack of movie treats.

I am supposed to be working all day. BUT we made french toast and went to the greenmarket were we bought asparagus, spinach, potatoes, wine, shallots and apples.

Glad I was inspirational, Robin.

My next task of the day is going to suck-- Ozzie has already been sedated, and now I have to finagle him into his crate, and take him to the vet.

Have I mentioned Ozzie really doesn't like the vet?

PS, when I win a bunch of money, I'm definitely starting a vegan cupcake store.

I'm going to be baking some vegan lemon cupcakes tonight. Probably won't be as pretty as the professional ones, since my only method of frosting application is butter knife. (Also, they're not quite vegan, since I couldn't find any margarine without whey, so the frosting is slightly milk-derived.)

Margarine isn't usually vegan? That's bananas! I mean, I get that it wasn't developed to be a vegan product, but still. Food science is weird.

After a couple of days of taking claritin, I didn't take it today, and feel better. Could it be the drugs that were making my head foggy? Could it be that it was actually a cold, and the million hours of sleep I got last night cured it? Could it be the rain the other night dampening down allergens? I'll never know. This is why I don't really like taking medicine.

Yeah, theo, I was wondering if anybody had those tankless water heaters and could talk about them. I would like to go that direction for the house, but if I can do radiant floor heating, I'll probably need a tank. Plus, I want to tie in a solar water heating system, and those have to have a storage tank. I'd just like to only have that one, and not a second one.

OK, have not had one, but know a bit about them. Some people do get by with just tankless heater, but normally they have passive solar heat provide almost all their heat. So the tankless heater provides hot water, and just runs to occasional extra cycle to provide backup heating to the house when the solar heat just won't do the job. In a normal house, even a normal solar house, where during heating season you need extra heat nearly every day , the extra cycles will shorten you tankless water heater too much; so if you want both tankless hot water, and radiant heating, you probably do need two tankless hot water heaters.

I just uploaded seven million pictures (approx) to provocateuse. Especially Venus. My eyes are tired.

Margarine isn't usually vegan? That's bananas! I mean, I get that it wasn't developed to be a vegan product, but still. Food science is weird.

I'm going to be using Smart Balance, since it seemed the healthiest of the options. For more normal margarines, the grocery store had Fleishman's and one other national brand, both with whey. (I was surprised that the Fleishman's was dairy -- they're a kosher brand, and most of the kosher brands make non-dairy margarine.)

I just checked my freezer. I've got 3/4 of a pound of non-dairy margarine there (a kosher brand, Mother's), but it's been there for at least a few years, so I'm thinking it's probably not something I want to put on the cupcakes. Plus, it's got partially hydrogenated oils, which I'm trying to avoid.

Thanks, Typo.

How do you break down your classifications of normal house, normal solar house & almost-entirely passive solar house? We're hoping to do a good deal of passive solar. We're aligned just off of true solar south (couldn't quite, because of narrow setbacks), lots of south side windows w/ overhangs, including a sunroom w/ s & e windows, and small high west-facing windows for ventilation. Stained concrete slab for thermal mass.

Then we hope to use the woodstove for secondary heat. So the radiant floors (if we end up going that way) will be tertiary. I read that the they actually don't pair up well with passive solar, because of the heating cycle...that passive solar heats the slab during the day, then cools off, radiant tubing heats the slab at night, but then it's still hot in the morning when the solar hits the slab again, so some is wasted. I think I could manage this with a timed zoned thermostat, and I would just have to deal with the wait time for the radiant to heat in the event that the day is cloudy. We don't have many cloudy days, and we generally know when we're going to get them. Do you have an opinion on that kind of efficacy? Is efficacy a word?

Whoo. Didn't mean to go into that much detail.

But anyway, I probably will need to do two tankless heaters anyway, because the future expansion bathroom is far away enough to need it. But if I can get away with one for the initial build, it would be nice. eta: And if I can use them at all sufficiently instead of a tank heater, I'll be happy with that.