Please Your Palate With a Full Pallete on Your Plate
If you've been feeling virtuous because you've been eating your green vegetables, you need to broaden your spectrum. One way to achieve better nutrition without crunching a lot of numbers is to munch on vegetables and fruits in a variety of colors. Fruits and vegetables actually come in five color categories: green, red, white, blue/purple and yellow/orange. Each color category is distinguished by a tendency to be higher in certain naturally occurring chemicals that are beneficial to health. These

Thrifty Thursday: Check for Senior Discount on Groceries
I've had November 4 on my calendar for a while, ever since my daughter told me that the first Wednesday of each month is Senior Citizen Day at Kroger, and I can get a 10% discount on my whole bill, not including tobacco, alcohol or gift cards. Yesterday I spent an hour or so going through my e-coupons and paper coupons and matching them to the store ads before heading to the store. At Kroger, the service desk employee quickly upgraded my Kroger card to a Kroger senior citizen card. There was only one catch: the upgrade would take 24 hours to become ef

Wordless Wednesday November 4
Moonwalks and inflatable slides are great fun for the grandkids. We usually rent one for Thanksgiving, but they are also good for family reunions, combined birthday parties and a host of other celebrations. Photo © Susan Adcox

More Scrutiny of End-of-Life Issues
Recently I wrote about the need for families to discuss end-of-life issues, mentioning that most people say they want to die at home, but around half die in a hospital. A new study shows that patients in the United States are five times more likely to have spent some of their last days in an intensive care unit (ICU) than patients in England. When patients were over 85, U.S. patients were more than

Halloween Candy Has a Mysterious Pull
I've always lived in neighborhoods blessed with hordes of trick-or-treaters, those neighborhoods where houses are close together and there's a dearth of scary dogs. I've never minded giving out tons of candy. It has always seemed like a proper payoff for getting to see the kiddies' costumes. In my neighborhoods, the main thing to be feared on Halloween was running out of candy. I can remember that when I was a kid, my mom sometimes raided the fridge for small apples when she ran out of candy--anything to keep from having to turn out the porch light, which seemed like a failure of sorts. Hubby and I bought our Halloween candy early this year, which seemed like a good idea at the ti