When I bought a bike, of course I bought a helmet along with it. A helmet is a very vital part of bicycle safety, and I never leave the house without it--even though every time I leave the house, I am very, very tempted to leave it behind. I grumble when I strap it on and fiddle with the straps and try to make it comfortable and not feel ridiculous, and that's an irritation. But while I'm doing that, I also try really hard to avoid making eye contact with myself in the mirror, because I look ridiculous. Even when I'm standing still, I look like I'm going very, very fast. In a very nerdy way.

I have always had a penchant for the Depression arts (I was knitting way before it went all hipster) and Anne inspired me to try my hand at some old-fashioned canning. I've always been a little freaked out by the principle. It's kind of godly, the whole process of canning. You're stopping time itself! In a little jar! But this season's strawberries are so exceptional that I decided to just dive in, head first, into the grandmotherly craft.

I researched and found two recipes that I wanted to try: the strawberry marsala rosemary jam from this article and my own favorite way to eat strawberries--with balsamic vinegar and black pepper--translated into jam by Gourmet magazine. But then I figured I should probably do something a little less fancy for the first batch, like regular, generic, PB&J-component strawberry. Esteban and I woke up extra early on Saturday morning and defied darkened skies to score 16 pounds of perfect ruby red strawberries. Clearly, I do nothing in a small way. I went off to our local farmer's wife store to buy canning stuff. I spent $70 on water bath canner, rack, jar lifting dohicky, jar tightening thingy, 12 of Ball's new Elite wide pint jars with platinum lids (aka Hipster Crack), and something called "pectin." Then, I went to the grocery store, because I grossly underestimated how much sugar I would need, and also, I had to get a lot of lemons and some rosemary. After all of that, I was more than a Benjamin in and still didn't have any jam. Damn.

When I came out to Utah last holiday season to start looking around for apartments, my friend J. told me about the apartment he had had, before he bought his big old house. He lived in a loft above an antiques shop, right smack in the center of the lovely little historic district of town, with its restaurants and coffee shops and little boutiques and salons all the way up and down. The apartment was huge, with high ceilings and a honey wood floor and ceiling-to-floor windows and exposed brick. "I loved that apartment," he sighed. He was really sorry to leave it.

As he told the story, a great lust was conceived, right there in my heart. When he mentioned how much he was paying per month, I gasped and choked and died and returned to life full of a fiery determination where my soul used to be, that I would have an apartment just exactly like that, because that was less than half of what I was paying in San Francisco! I, too, would have a cheap and beautiful loft and it would have the brick and the wood and it would be right smack in the historic district and that was what I would have because that is what I need, you guys, and I will die without it. Die. Without it! Do you hear me? They ignored me.

Bluh, it's another Monday morning, but also a holiday week (for those of us in the U.S.). Half of your coworkers are probably on vacation, making the office seem like a ghost town. You'll have fewer distractions this week, so you should be able to get caught up in no time and then sit around twiddling your thumbs (or surfing the Internet)...or you can take a moment to assess your workspace!

Most of us don't get the luxury of selecting our physical workspace. We get stuck in nubby grey cubicles next to annoying coworkers whose cellphones go off constantly and you are stuck listening to their oh-so-clever ringtones. You might be a thousand yards away from the bathroom, stuck next to the copy machine and completely without even a tiny glimpse of the outdoors, but there are ways to make your office space suck not quite so much, which in the long run, will help you alleviate some of that dreadful "Oh noes, I have to go back to work tomorrow" feeling on Sunday night.

• Picture your bliss. You can't take inspiration from Peter Gibbons and remove your cubicle walls, but you can make your visual space more meaningful. Display a symbol of the you that exists outside of those four walls. For instance, clipped to the side of my desk, I have the pocket fold up map from The Bathhouse Spa, with notations on it for the plunge pools, the eucalyptus steam rooms and the rain wall. When I'm having a bad moment, it immediately reminds me of times when I've been absolutely 100 percent relaxed. And naked. But it's so tiny and out of the way that I'll bet my coworkers don't even notice it.
  
  
• Test the air. Ever heard of "sick building syndrome"? Yeah, I'm pretty sure my office has it. There's even something called Monday Morning Syndrome, which is when the office has been closed up all weekend, making the air super awful when folks come in, just thinking they have a case of the Mondays. What can you do about it, other than wearing a surgical mask to work and earning the nickname "Michael Jackson"? Ask the building manager when the air ducts were last cleaned and report any leaks in ceilings, floors or around windows--all are major contributors to the dreaded mold that exacerbates allergies and asthma and can make you sick as a dog. Also, where is the photocopier? Ideally, this should be in a separate room with external ventillation so that you're not breathing in all of those electrostatically-charged toner particles. If not, make some noise to someone who can do something about it (probably not your boss or her boss, but rather the office manager or maintenance guy). If your hands are tied, you can also invest in a small ionizer to plug in at your desk. The rest of your office may be choking on fumes, but you'll maintain a small bubble of fresh air.
  
  
• Take a walk. As busy as you are, you are guaranteed two 15-minute breaks every day. Push yourself away from the desk and take a little walk. If the weather is grand, take a quick walk around the building, or when it's gross outside, make good use of the cubicle labyrinth and meander through the aisles. Not only will it give you a brief mental break, but you'll sneak in a little fitness too.
  
  
• Cut the glare. Do your office lights make you feel like you're being interrogated with their intense glare? Request some glare-reducing sleeves or full-spectrum light bulbs from the office supply catalog and not only will you feel better at work, you won't squint as much, thereby reducing wrinkles! Bonus! While you're at it, get a glare-reducing screen protector for your monitor too.
  
  
• Avoid the "free" food. The office can really kill your diet, from the free food for the taking on file cabinets to the chips and cookies during meetings. Nothing's free, and if you load up on sugar and empty calories, you're not only going to hit a huge sugar slump around 2 p.m., but you're also filling up on empty junk food and denying yourself an opportunity to eat foods with vitamins and important nutrients. And we won't even speak of the excess sodium, fat and calories in that stuff. Start a healthy food revolution: offer to buy the snacks at the next meeting and bring in a bunch of cut fruit and veggies, dip and salted nuts. Circulate a petition requesting that the vending machine supplier devote 40 percent of the space in the machines to healthier fare. And help yourself resist the temptation of the receptionist's jelly bean jar by stowing a bunch of yummy sweet and salty snacks that won't make you regret coming to work.

image via Bon Appétit

Bon Appétit has put together a collection of their 100 Top Dishes. Bon Appétit is a magazine for serious cookers with serious kitchen chops, and the 100 dishes, each of them are intimidating to someone like me, who has, in the past, had some difficulty with boiling water.

This is why I love Project Recipe. It's a blog on which two bloggers, neither of them professional chefs but with a wide gap in the level of their respective cooking skills, both tackle each of the recipes on the list concurrently. Chris knows how to properly massacre a lobster; Bridget fears food mills and doesn't own a food processor, but can bake the hell out of a strawberry shortcake. And then, occasionally, like a benevolent parent, the BA Food Kitchen steps in with tips on using left over risotto, when to sift your flour, what a dough blade's for, and there's a delightful amount of back and forth between all three posters which makes the blog a kind of happy ongoing story. It's one of the best food blogs I've ever stumbled on, and I wish they could add a couple of zeroes onto the number of dishes they'll be cooking.

Way before the price of gas hit even $2 a gallon, I've really desperately wanted a little scooter. I think it started when I was 12, watching Roman Holiday, coveting those vintage Vespas. I wanted to tool around cobbled streets, wearing capris and ballet flats, giant round sunglasses, perhaps my hair pulled back in a scarf of some nature, and my little scooter would make zip zip noises and I would perhaps raise my hand and nonchalantly say "Ciao!" Also, there might be a basket on the back, out of which would be sticking the neck of a bottle of chianti and also, an impossibly long crusty baguette.  Basically, I wanted to be a living, breathing Shag illustration. I was totally ahead of my time.

And now, with the gas crunch, it costs something like eleventy million dollars to fill my car each week and I work right spanking next to a motorscooter dealership, so every day, I look at these adorable, feminine little retro scooters that aren't Vespas, but they are so cheap and so cute and some of them are even decorated with flowers, and I ache, just a little bit. You see, about four years ago, I made up my mind. Esteban had just purchased a motorcycle, and I was going to get myself a little scooter. I had the cash in hand, researched the bike I wanted, figured out which motorcycle safety course I was going to take and then I realized... oh yeah, I'm fat.

Whoopsie, apparently all of our (and Michael Pollan's) hating on high-fructose corn syrup is starting to ruffle some feathers, specifically those of the people who make their money selling high-fructose corn syrup. They're fighting back with a major PR campaign that is trying to convince worried moms that corn syrup is as natural as honey. Really? I know, I didn't believe it either, but here's what they had to say in their press release:

HFCS, like table sugar and honey, is natural.  It is made from corn, a natural grain product.  HFCS contains no artificial or synthetic ingredients or color additives and meets FDA's requirements for the use of the term "natural."

Kim picks up the yellow phone to chat with Michelle Goodman, author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide and the forthcoming My So-Called Freelance Life on how to escape the cubicle farm. Photos via Splash.

I know that you were waiting with bated breath to see just how Oprah's vegan "cleanse" was going. Well, she's done with it and has made the rather sanctimonious point that all ingredients for her cleanse except the olive oil were grown in her very own garden.

Oh, sorry, that was me losing control and dissolving into uncontrollable laughter at the thought of Ms Winfrey toiling in the dirt between rows of heirloom tomatoes.

Early in 2007, my BFF and I did a weekend in New York City. My plan involved a carriage ride through Central Park, preferrably while it snowed, and perhaps while the Pogues serenaded us with their "Fairytale." His plan involved stopping at every hot dog cart we saw as we wove our way through the city. Due to global warming, it was a balmy 70 degrees that weekend and the Pogues were apparently busy, but I did get my carriage ride and we dutifully stopped at just about every cart from the Village all the way up to East 72nd Street. I ate hot dogs, pretzels and had an unfortunate incident with a roasted chestnut on Fifth Avenue. And never once did I see anything more than a bruised and battered banana or a sorry-looking apple on any of the carts.

New York is gearing up to issue 500 new licenses for carts in the city, but the catch is that the carts are only allowed to sell fresh vegetables and fruits. No hot dogs. No Polish sausages. No giant sodium-avalanche pretzels with frighteningly plastic shiny cheese-stuff. I'm pretty sure that even a vegetarian chick pea falafel is illegal!