New Boots: LOVE

Back in January we went for a nature stroll in a nearby park and I found that I was sorely lacking a pair of shoes boots for trudging through wet or muddy ground. It was quite wet from winter rains back then and Don had to carry me through some areas because I wore my favorite walking shoes, my Minimus New Balance shoes. They were not the right tool for that adventure.

Enter the Ahnu Montara.

I found these babies at Cabela’s in Texas during our week-long vacation in February. I have only had the chance (since the weather is warming up now) to wear them a few times but I am so in LOVE.

They have Vibram soles and are simply the most minimal boot I’ve ever seen.

I dislike the height of many hiking shoes/boots, they are almost always just too low, hitting the bone on my ankle, which is just plain uncomfortable for me. These are the perfect height and they are not bulky around the ankle like so many traditional styles of hiking shoes or boots. They are also very lightweight. Score!

Ahnu has also created a new technology called Numentum®:

“a neutral positioning system engineered to encourage your foot’s natural biomechanics. It is designed to center and guide the foot to promote an efficient, stable and balanced stride.”

If you are a fellow minimal shoe lover and you’re on the lookout for a good pair of boots that won’t load you down and that has a strong sturdy sole, check out Ahnu. True, they were not cheap at $148 plus tax. But finding something that actually got me excited to wear on my feet (when the need arises) = priceless. Don has shoe envy now (for the first time) too; they didn’t have any styles for men or I’m sure we would have walked out with two pair. As it is, he’s still recovering from his knee surgery and not likely to do any serious hiking until cooler weather in the fall so it’s on our long-term shopping list to get him a pair, eventually.

Plus my boots were made of awesome.
~ Gwen Hayes, Let Me Call You Sweetheart

**Please note, I have not been compensated in any way for my opinion; I simply like to share my experiences of new products that wow me with others.

Related articles

• Ahnu In The News (ahnu.com)
• A Guide To Finding The Right Hiking Boot – Part 1 (backpackingsamurai.com)

My First Green Juice

I made my first veggie drink with the juicer this last weekend. It was…different. Very leafy tasting. Like a liquid salad. Not bad but not stand-up-and-get-excited good either. Just very different. I had no idea what to expect so I can’t say that it didn’t meet my expectations. It was just a new experience all the way around.

I reduced this recipe to try to make a one serving portion for me to try out.

Ingredients:

• one apple
• two stalks of celery
• six kale leaves
• 2 swiss chard leaves
• a handful of parsley
• half a lemon
• a chunk of cucumber
• and a small piece of ginger

The juicer performed well. It jammed up once, just a little on the greens. I think it was the overabundance of parsley and I think I was pushing it too fast. It’s a masticating juicer so it runs slower (and quieter) than the ones that sound like aircraft taking off.

Luckily, it also has a reverse button which worked wonders for eliminating the jam.

I got about 20 ounces of juice out of it all.

It seemed like a little more than I was going for. I wasn’t sure I would drink it all but I did. (It could have kept in the fridge for up to 72 hours, at least until the next day, but I decided to go for it instead.)

I’m not sure what I think about the whole process. I’m not keen on the ratio of food to juice. It’s a lot of freaking food for not very much juice in my book. And, as one of the cautions I’ve read about juicing, it didn’t really fill me up or make me feel like I’d had lunch. I managed until dinner but it definitively isn’t as filling as our green smoothies.

I think more experimenting must be done.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. 
~ Albert Einstein

Related articles

• Juicing vegetables: What’s old is new again (bangordailynews.com)
• 3 Weird Reasons Juicing is Better than Eating Vegetables (under20workout.com)
• Juicing fruits and vegetables is a healthy, new trend (azcentral.com)
• Vegetable Juicing (juicing-for-health.com)

Wine Stopper Display

We recently visited Don’s cousin in Texas, who is a fellow fan of wine, and she had some pretty cool accessories to her kitchen related to wine. She turned me on to Wine Enthusiast which has all sorts of neat ideas. I’ve been saving corks for over a year with the hopeful plan to make a wine cork board at some point but not really knowing where I would get the frame. I just assumed I’d eventually scour the shelves at a local hobby store looking for something or that perhaps Don would build me something from scratch. But, even easier, I now have all sorts of examples from WineEnthusiast.com! Awesome. Thanks Janna for the tips!

Also, during our same trip to Texas, Don’s mom gave us a wine stopper as a gift – thanks Jean! I initially felt bad because we never use our pretty wine stoppers, the bottles just won’t fit in the fridge and we don’t have any way to display them so they just get relegated to the back of a drawer. That’s no fun! After my inspiration at Janna’s house, I decided we needed a display rack that would allow us to enjoy our wine stoppers – which we have been collecting for a few years.

Check it out!

It holds 6 stoppers and I only have 5 so I even have room to grow! I totally love this simple little solution. And all my pretty stoppers make me smile.

I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.
~ W.C. Fields

Related articles

• Wine Corks 8 Ways (chicspaces.wordpress.com)
• 18 Cute Wine Stoppers – From Strategy Game Bottle Plugs to Topsy-Turvy Toppers (TrendHunter.com) (trendhunter.com)