Book Giveaway Winner!

Lady Dulcinea,

You just won Field Guide To Happiness, by Barbara Ann Kipfer! Congratulations!

Please email me your address at: lenandjennifer @ gmail. com and I will get it out to you pronto!

Stay tuned everyone for November's giveaway. I should have it posted tomorrow.

Yay, Dulcinea!

And The Winner Is....

Laughing Lioness, you won a copy of The 100 Mile Diet, by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon!

Drop me an email at lenandjennifer@gmail.com with your address and I'll drop it into the mail!

Stay tuned, people - there'll be a new contest up later today!

September Book Giveaway - The 100 Mile Diet

It's that time again! I've got another book to give away. This month it's The 100 Mile Diet, by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon.

The 100 Mile Diet is the chronicle of Alisa and J.B.'s adventure living for a year on food grown within a 100 mile radius of their home in Vancouver, BC. It is one of the books I read last year that inspired me to look for a quest of my own. I don't live totally off of locally-grown foods, but after reading their book and seeing the extraordinary lengths they went to eat locally, I started looking around at what I could find locally to eat.

Now checking the signs in my grocery store to see where my produce originates comes naturally, and I pick the ones grown closest to me, even if that means buying a variety I don't usually buy. We're growing more food ourselves and we're looking for local sources for meat and eggs. (And thinking of getting our own chickens when we move.)

And we're not the only ones. I give Alisa and J.B. kudos for sparking off a continent-wide consciousness-raising about how far our food has to travel to reach us and how we all have more options closer to home. The 100 Mile Diet is a terrific book. If you don't win it here, it's worth a trip to the bookstore.

All you have to do to get in the running for this contest is comment below and leave your name! The contest will close September 30th at Midnight Pacific Time. I will draw a winner randomly and announce it here the next day. Good luck, everyone!

And the Winner Is....

Teressa! The twelfth respondant to this contest has won herself, The Not So Big Life, by Susan Susanka!

Yay, Teressa! Drop me an email at lenandjennifer @ gmail. com with your address in it and I'll mail it right off to you.

Come back soon everyone - I'll be announcing my new contest for September!

And the Winner Is......

Jenne in AZ - you just won Harvest: A Year In The Life of an Organic Farm, by Nicola Smith.

Drop me an email at lenandjennifer@gmail.com and I will get your address so I can send it off.

To everyone else who participated - please email me as well. I'd like to send a little something to thank you for taking part in my first Halving It All contest and for giving me some great ideas!

Thanks so much, guys, and Yay, Jenne!

Book Giveaway Contest!

I love giving away books. It's a hobby of mine, in fact, and if the postage rates weren't so darn expensive I'd do it daily.

But I have a little cash in hand so here goes:

Today I'm giving away Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm, by Nicola Smith. The title pretty much explains it all. It's a chronicle of one couple's life on their small Vermont organic farm. This isn't an idyllic back-to-the-earth book that glosses over the hard parts; this is a true-to-life, tell-it-as-it-is book, warts and all.

I read it at the perfect time - after reading a string of books about authors' escapades in gardening, going without electricity, eating locally, etc., which had made me long for my own adventure. Harvest brought me back to reality and helped me refine my vision of this Halving it All experiment until it became more reasonable - more realistic. Do-able.

I also walked away from this book with more respect for the farmers selling produce at my local market. It made me feel even better about paying those higher prices they charge. While I knew in my head that farmers deserve to be paid better for their work, now I felt it in my heart.

So, back to the contest: entering is simple. Post a comment below and include in it one thing you'd like me to write about in the future. Is there a part of your life you'd like to see halved? Want me to research it? Is there something you think I'll gloss over? Something you think I won't get to? Or something completely off topic all together? (It's all right - I can natter on about just about anything.) I hope you all are remembering that things will really get in gear when I get back home in mid-August.

The contest will close on Sunday at 12:00 Eastern Time. I will put all your names in a hat and pick the winner at random. Then I'll post here and ask for you to email me your address. Good luck, everyone!