Here’s how our evenings go: I leave work somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00. I weave through neighborhoods and past traffic on my Xtracycle (rain or shine), and pick up my two older daughters at their after-school program.

I ride home carefully with both girls on the back of the Xtracycle.  We check the mail and park the Xtracycle in the garage.  By this time, it’s probably almost 5:30.  If I’m feeling energetic, I start getting dinner ready; if not, I take a few minutes first.  My husband picks up our youngest at daycare, and arrives home soon after we do.

And yet most of the time, we eat tasty, healthy dinners with fresh fruits and vegetables.

I don’t know if I could do it on my own. I mean, I could, but The Six-o-Clock Scramble is what really keeps me going.

The Scramble is an online meal planning service. For about $5 per month (depending on the length of your subscription), you get five pre-planned dinner menus each week, along with a complete shopping list.

Do I always like the menus provided? Do they always work for me? No! And that’s why The Scramble is really cool.  It’s super-easy to swap out a meal you don’t like for one that you do, and create a custom menu plan. The website will create a custom grocery list based on the recipes you choose (although you do have to choose from the ones on the site; you can’t put in your own).

Sometimes I even skip the whole weekly menu and create my own custom plan. For instance, one week I looked at the calendar and knew that I wouldn’t have time to mess with anything unfamiliar or time-consuming. So I went to my saved recipes (yes, you can save your favorites) and chose five easy, familiar dinners that everyone likes.

You can also search the recipes on the site for specific dishes. You can search for certain ingredients, or for low-fat, low-sodium, meatless, etc.

All of the recipes on the site are designed to be healthy. Goldfarb usually keeps the salt content down (and of course you can leave out salt in most things if you need to). She also includes significant helpings of fruits and vegetables. Most of the main dishes contain 1-2 servings of fruits or vegetables, and she also includes side items, which are usually fruits or vegetables.  I often reach the grocery store checkout line with more produce than anything else, which pleases me.

What are the meals like? Tonight we had maple-soy glazed salmon with rice and stir-fried sesame-soy broccoli. Another family favorite is Italian Sausage Linguini with Grated Carrots, served with a green salad.  Most take 30 minutes or less to prepare.

Could I find good recipes and make my own grocery lists? Sure, but it would take a lot longer, or I’d forget to make a list and end up buying the wrong things.  The price is worth it to me.

Aviva Goldfarb is the founder of  The Six-o-Clock Scramble and the author of a cookbook by the same name. Come back Monday for an interview with Goldfarb, including information about her newest cookbook, to be released 4/13/2010.

Visit The Six-o-Clock Scramble website for more information or to subscribe.  Want to try it? Use the promo code GLKAT4852 for $3 off a 6 or 12-month subscription. I don’t get any compensation for recommending The Scramble, nor do I get anything if you sign up. I just love it, so I’m telling you about it!

Yes, this is the 2009 Xtracycle Radish in its unadorned state. Why did I do that? Because it’s raining, and the Radish got very wet. When an Xtracycle gets wet, moisture can get into the holes where the racks sit and create rust.

The people at Clever Cycles had told me to be sure to dry off these areas, which I’ve always done, but when I took my bike in for a tune-up, it turned out that the racks had actually rusted in place. Oops. So today I unstrapped and removed the racks to clean them off and let them dry. This requires no tools. You just pull off the SnapDeck, undo the straps at the bottom of the FreeLoader bags, and pull the racks off.

I haven’t been doing this every time it rains, but figured it’s a good idea once in a while.

By the way, Xtracycle recently unveiled the redesigned 2010 Radish, and some new accessories! They’re also selling the remaining 2009 models for only $880. You should check it out!

I created this entire post on my Motorola CLIQ. Pretty cool, huh? Also, I’m on a horse. No, I’m not. Sorry!

So when my nearly worthless Tracfone was stolen recently, I was ready to buy a new phone anyway.  I chose a Motorola CLIQ because

• It runs on the open-source Android platform.
• It’s available through T-Mobile, so I can share a family account with my husband.
• It has a full, pull-out QWERTY keyboard.
• It has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.
• It has a 5 megapixel camera and video recording capability.
• It has better performance ratings and more memory than the G1 and MyTouch phones (Android phones also available from T-Mobile).

You may now be asking yourself why I didn’t jump straight to the Nexus One, the newest (and possibly best) of the Android phones. It’s because of cost. The Nexus One would be a little more upfront, and a little more per month, mostly because you can’t add a Nexus One to an existing family plan (it wouldn’t be an upgrade for us).  That little bit does make a difference for me.

So far I’m very happy with the CLIQ. I did have to learn how to use it, but it basically ships ready to go. The phone was already activated when it arrived, with the same phone number I had before. The SIM card was installed, but it had been inserted backward (I don’t know whether that’s done on purpose or not). So once I figured out that that was the reason it thought there was no SIM card, I was underway.

The CLIQ comes installed with MOTOBLUR, which is a service that can combine your email and social networking feeds into one, pushing notifications to your phone. You have to open a MOTOBLUR account upon starting up the phone, unless you have one already.

I haven’t really been using the MOTOBLUR system, though. I’m used to doing my Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter separately, so I’ve been using the respective apps for those services. I think the phone is still using MOTOBLUR to notify me when I have a new email, though (I turned off notifications for Twitter and Facebook). You can also use MOTOBLUR to post a message to several services at the same time.

The phone itself has a touchscreen interface with three buttons below: menu, home, and back. The keyboard slides out with the phone in the horizontal position. It’s small but easy to use, and feels quite sturdy.

The home screen is pre-loaded with several widgets, which you can easily rearrange or remove, and is actually five screens wide; you can access the other sections by swiping horizontally. At the bottom of the screen are tabs for phone, apps, and contacts.  A number of apps are pre-loaded, and others (free and paid) are available throught the Android Market (look for Market in the Apps tab or one screen to the right on the home screen).

I’ve downloaded some apps, but I’m definitely still exploring and learning, so I can’t really recommend anything so far except my Twitter client — Twidroid. It works great, and I’ll probably upgrade to the premium version, which includes multiple account support, soon.  Another app I use often is WordPress; I can use this app to access all of my WordPress blogs, approve or delete comments, and even write a new post if I want to.

One thing you don’t have on an Android phone is iTunes syncing. There are apps for this, but I haven’t bothered with them. I just plugged my phone into the USB port on my MacBook, which recognized the SD card on the phone as an external drive, and copied the music files over. There is a music player app pre-installed on the phone, and it doesn’t mind at all that the music was purchased through iTunes.  There’s also an Amazon mp3 app provided for purchasing music directly from the phone.

Speaking of Amazon, there’s an Amazon app for browsing and purchasing, but there is NO KINDLE APP for Android, like there is for the iPhone. I’m still figuring out the ebook situation. I did download Aldiko, which allows me to download and read public domain books. I’m not sure how to go about buying and reading books otherwise, or whether it’s even possible. Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader actually runs on the Android operating system, so it would be nice if they could also develop a Nook app for Android phones. I’d pay for it!

One thing I had trouble with was the sound settings. I initially chose a ring tone and a notification tone from the standard set, but then later I downloaded (through the Android Market) a set of Star Trek sounds/ringtones. I successfully changed the main ringtone to (cue Worf voice) “Captain. Incoming message,” but couldn’t get the notification tone to change to “Console Beep 2.” It turns out that you have to change the notification tone in the MOTOBLUR settings through the Messaging app, as well as in the phone’s main settings.

I’m still enjoying exploring the phone and the apps. I haven’t got it all down. Two helpful tricks I’ve learned are to always try pressing the menu button to see what comes up, and if I’m stumped, to try pressing and holding on one of the items on the screen — this will often pop up a menu, too.

If you want or need a phone that performs multiple functions — photography, video recording, email, messaging, music, blogging, social networking — you’ll be very pleased with Android. I would caution anyone who’s not really comfortable with technology, but that caution probably applies to most smart phones.

UPDATE/NOTE 3/6/10: I just saw a TV commercial for CarToys that said they currently have this phone on sale for $23. WTH? I paid $149.99 through T-Mobile! But anyway, if you’re interested in this phone, try CarToys! No, I have no affiliation with them and get no compensation for this. Just letting you know.

Here are a couple of photos I took today with the Motorola CLIQ’s 5-megapixel camera. Click on the picture for a larger and clearer image.

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Then, this past week I saw a suggestion from the local Master Gardeners’ twitter account:

Cover crop that feeds nitrogen to your soil? Plant fava beans now for spring eats, plant tomatoes when they’re done. Bam! Bam!

That sounded good. I Googled “how to grow fava beans” and found Harvest to Table, which told me that fava beans are a perfect cool-weather crop.  The site also told me how to plant and grow the beans, how many to plant per person in the family, and that they can be eaten fresh or can be frozen, canned or dried. I already knew that fava beans could be used to make both hummus and falafel, which are favorites of mine.

I didn’t, however, click the link for how to prepare and cook broad beans and fava beans. It didn’t worry me. I’ve cooked beans before.  So we planted them on Saturday. But on Sunday, my sister asked me “Have you ever actually cooked fava beans before?”

“Um, no,” I answered. “What?”

“Aren’t those the ones you have to shell twice?” my mother interjected cheerfully.

“Yes,” Wendy answered, explaining that while you’re supposed to be able to just eat them unshelled when they’re young, with mature fava beans “you have to shell them and then cook them and then shell each one individually.”

Uh oh.  We didn’t say any more about fava beans.  I looked it up later on Harvest to Table, and it’s true. Mature fava beans have to be removed from the outer pod, just like shelling peas, but then you have to cook them and “skin” them before eating.

That will be time-consuming. Perhaps we can just pre-cook them all and have a skinning party!

I’m still pleased to be gardening again.  And it’s not just fava beans. We’ve got an 8 X 8 raised bed (it’s the one that had pumpkins last year), and this time I’ve divided it down the middle with a small footpath, and then into squares à la Square Foot Gardening with twine.  My youngest helped me set up the squares; she handed me nails and cut the twine with scissors.

One row of squares is all fava beans, planted four seeds to a square.  There’s also a square each of carrots, lettuce and scallions. We planted these with some old-ish seeds to see if the seeds are still good. If they are, we’ll plant more (and if they’re not, we’ll open a less old-ish packet).  And we planted peas along the wire trellis.

In addition, the daffodils are blooming! I don’t do flowers in a big way, but I do like to have something blooming, and the daffodils are super-easy (as in, I do nothing whatsoever with them except deadheading).

I know some of you probably live in the land of still-frozen ground (I’m in zone 8, by the way), but is anyone else planting or starting seeds now?

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodista/ / CC BY 2.0

On What’s the Mission, I post spiritual reflections and book reviews (I belong to a great program called Viral Bloggers in which I get free books!).  Latest reviews include Picking Dandelions by Sarah Cunningham, Thy Kingdom Connected by Dwight J. Friesen, and A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren.

Six Boxes of Books was started by my sister Wendy (who once read all of the Newbery Award winners), and has expanded to include all three Burton sisters. We mostly write about children’s and young adult books. Some posts are reviews and some cover other book-related topics, like school book orders.

ParkroseGateway.com is a local news site/blog that I started for the neighborhood in which I live. It runs on the Neighborlogs platform.  I write about local schools, community events, sports, crime, businesses, or whatever I see that is interesting. Neighbors are invited to post, too. My most recent post is a roundup of coverage on the Aaron Campbell shooting, which occurred not far from here.

You can also find me on Twitter and Facebook pretty much every day.

If you do live in Portland, you’ve probably heard more than enough about it; it’s been on all of the TV stations and in all the newspapers, and Jesse Jackson even came to town to talk about it.

You might not be familiar with the neighborhood where this occurred, though. It’s called Argay.Some of Argay (the uphill part) contains large, split-level suburban homes.  The part closer to Sandy Boulevard has many aging apartment complexes with lower-income residents.  That’s where the Sandy Terrace Apartments are.

Oregonian columnist Anna Griffin says “Sandy Terrace is less a neighborhood and more a collection of one- and two-bedroom islands. The nearest park, grocery and school are beyond an easy walk. The soundtrack comes from trucks on Sandy Boulevard, trains on the Union Pacific tracks and airplanes at Portland International Airport.”

That’s pretty typical of East Portland. Even nicer neighborhoods often lack services within walking distance, and people don’t necessarily know their neighbors.  Griffin’s headline says “Portland’s poor eastside planning didn’t kill Aaron Campbell, but it sure didn’t help.”

What do neighborhood amenities have to do with a man being shot? Griffin asks “How can community policing work in a place with no sidewalks or streetlights? How do you meet your neighbors when your door opens onto a parking lot?”

The police on-scene, as far as I can tell, didn’t know Campbell. If they’d had an opportunity to know him beforehand, maybe they and/or he would have acted differently. And maybe if the apartment complex were more community-oriented, other residents would have paid attention when things started going wrong. According to Angie Jones, Campbell’s girlfriend, Campbell went out into the parking lot of the apartment complex several hours before his death and fired his gun into the air. No one called the police or even looked outside.

These are places “which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist is not to live, according to any true definition of living,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes said. And yet, this is the kind of place where my husband and I have spent most of our married life thus far, even after having children.  We live in a “nice” house now only because we got a screaming deal in which we traded companionship for an elderly lady for rent. She’s since died, but our landlord continues to charge us an affordable rent. So we live in an older but fairly middle-class neighborhood, although there is plenty of poverty in the area, too (at least 63% of students at the local school are getting free and reduced-price lunches).

Otherwise, we’d probably still be in an aging apartment complex or duplex somewhere. Is that a bad thing? Shootings really don’t happen every day out here; most of the time it’s not dangerous. But I saw a friend (whom I do know to be a caring and compassionate person) comment the other day that “My worst fear is living in a 2 bedroom, suburban, white-trash apartment complex. We can do two bedrooms, it’s all the other rug-rats that scare me – and the influence on my kids.”

I admit, I’ve had that kind of thought, too. I’ve considered (and continue to consider for the future) homeschooling my kids, both to make sure they get a good education and because I fear peer influence. I especially don’t want to see them bullied or ostracized in middle and high school (which can happen regardless of students’ socioeconomic status).

But I also (and I’m sure my friend does, too) care about what happens to those other kids. If I opt out of the local school, or if we move out of the neighborhood to someplace more desirable, I’m not loving and helping my neighbors, and what kind of lesson is that for my children?

I don’t want to ignore the Sandy Terraces in our communities. And, as Griffin says in her column, the city shouldn’t ignore them either. Poorer areas deserve urban planning services, and the people there count just as much as those in the “better” neighborhoods.

Blogger Kiera Butler posted complete instructions for coiling an old power cord into a coaster. It’s from a book called 62 Projects to Make with a Dead Computer: (And Other Discarded Electronics). Yes, seriously. Other projects include the Scanner Compost Bin, the Walkman Soap Dish and the Power Strip Bird Feeder.

Sure, you could just turn it all in to your local electronics recycler, but where’s the fun in that?

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Disclosure: Yes, if you click on one of my Amazon links and buy something, I will get a tiny commission! Thank you for supporting this site.

If there’s one thing we like in Portland, it’s the whole sustainable and green movement. If there’s another thing we like, it’s the whole shiny technology object thing. So why hasn’t anyone around here had the gumption to marry those two oh so Portlandy things into one great “you got your techie peanut butter in my green chocolate; you got your green chocolate in my techie peanut butter” you might ask?

That would be Earthtechling. Sounds like a good match for someone who dubbed herself TechnoEarthMama, yes?

EarthTechling, the place where Earthlings come to learn about green consumer technology, is a destination for readers seeking to better their lives and the world around them through the use of green technology

Do they deliver?  For starters, Earthtechling is a WordPress site. As a proud WordPress user and coordinator of the Portland WordPress User Group, I approve wholeheartedly.

On the front page are several feature articles and section links for Buying Guides, Previews, Interviews and How-To. There’s also a section of Recent Reviews and Latest News.  Recently reviewed products include the Vers 2X (a green iPod speaker system) and The Little Green Genie (a software program that is supposed to help offset your computer’s carbon footprint). Latest news stories cover electric bikes and the Water Cube building designed for the 2012 World Expo.

Not all of the gadgets and software programs covered are actually useful to the average person. I’m not likely to buy a Tesla car, and we don’t buy each other stuff for Valentine’s Day, even if it is green stuff. However, there are some really interesting products and companies, such as Green Plug, which is developing smart power adapters. Green Plug is working on adapters that would use less energy, but that would also be universal and could be used by multiple electronic items and appliances. This would eliminate a great deal of electronic waste; I know I’ve got a drawer full of power adapters at work that work fine but don’t go with anything we’re currently using.

Earthtechling looks like a great way to keep up on green technology news, even if you’re not in the market for new gadgets.

I’ve used it a little bit. I hooked my Twitter posts, blog posts, Flickr account and a few other things to Google Buzz, so anyone who’s following me will see those items in their Buzz stream. And I’ve seen other people’s blog posts and photos in there, too. I’ve even occasionally commented on things through Buzz.

And of course, you can post directly on Buzz, too. It’s similar to posting a status update on Twitter or Facebook, but there’s no length limitation as far as I know.

I’ve posted and commented on a few of these updates, but these have mainly been updates about Buzz. I’m still posting my everyday updates on Twitter and Facebook rather than on Buzz.

There is a convenience factor to getting updates about people’s blog posts, photos, shared items on Google Reader, etc., right in my inbox. But I already get these updates elsewhere. I read blogs through Google Reader. I look at photos on Facebook and occasionally on Flickr.  Or people post their photos and links to their blog posts on Twitter.  So Buzz doesn’t provide me with anything I don’t already have.

If Buzz adds functionality for more web services, like Delicious, WordPress.com,  GoodReads, etc., I might be more interested. I already have a Friendfeed account, which aggregates these kinds of updates into one stream, but I only go there if Twitter isn’t working.   If that kind of stream were right in my inbox, though, I’d probably use it.

Buzz in the workplace could also be interesting. I’ve heard that at some point, Google will integrate Buzz into Google Apps, which my workplace already uses for email, websites, calendars, documents, etc.  Having a Buzz system available for workplace conversations could be useful; Twitter isn’t really conducive to communicating within a certain group.

For now, though, I might just ignore the Buzz.

But Sunday morning, when I wanted to ride my bike to a tweetup at the local labyrinth, the tire was flat again. Evidently, I had a slow leak. I decided not to chance riding, and figured I could patch or change the tube later.

A rear wheel is harder to manage than a front wheel, because the gears are back there and you’ve got to detach it from the chain and then get it all back in place when you’re done. But I thought I could handle it; I’d changed a rear wheel on my old three-speed before.  I opened the quick-release and pulled the wheel out; it was a little tricky, but I managed it.

Then I used tire levers to get the tire itself off so that I could get at the tube.  I’m used to that now, so it was no problem. But I couldn’t find the leak in the tube. I squeezed the tube and used the Look, Listen and Feel method from my CPR classes.  I put a little more air in and squeezed some more. No air was coming out.

I decided to just get a new tube. But the bike shop was closed for the night, so I put it off for another day.

Monday night was grand. I fixed dinner for my family and then rushed off, checking in at the bike shop, where I promptly found a tube in the size I needed. I also had coffee with a friend, picked up my new glasses, and stopped at the grocery store.  I even got the Crunked badge on Foursquare!

But when I got home and pulled the tube out of its box, I realized that I’d bought a tube with a Presta valve, and my tire pump is only compatible with a Schrader valve (the same type that’s on car tires).  So my bike was still out of commission.

Going to the bike shop on Tuesday was out of the question. Wednesday I finally made it back, and they gave me a free adapter to turn the Presta valve into a Schrader.  Once I figured out how to use the adapter, the tire inflated just fine, and I was able to put tube and tire back into place.

But getting the wheel back onto the bike? That was another story. I thought I’d be able to remember how to put it back on, but once I got there, nothing made sense.  My husband tried to help, but we just didn’t get it.

I looked at two YouTube videos on replacing the rear wheel. They totally made sense on screen. They made no sense on my bike.  But while I was looking at the videos one more time, I heard cackling laughter from my husband.

“I just moved it like this and like this and it slipped right in!”

Sure. But everything is, indeed, in the right place now, and I still don’t know how to do it myself!

I think next time I’ll just stimulate the local economy and take the whole thing to the bike shop in the first place.

Photo credits:

Presta Valve by Aezram, used via Creative Commons licensing

Schrader Valve by Mschel, used via Creative Commons licensing