According to the Nutrition Research Center, this is what happens to your body within 1 hour of drinking a can of soda:

10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system, which is 100 percent of your recommended daily intake. You’d normally vomit from such an intake, but the phosphoric acid cuts the flavor.

20 minutes: Your blood sugar skyrockets. Your liver attempts to maximize insulin production in order to turn high levels of sugar into fat.

40 minutes: As your body finishes absorbing the caffeine, your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, and your liver pumps more sugar into the bloodstream. Adenosine receptors in your brain are blocked preventing you from feeling how tired you may actually be.

45 minutes: Your body increases dopamine production, causing you to feel pleasure and adding to the addictiveness of the beverage. This physical neuro response works the same way as it would if we were consuming heroin.

60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, which boosts your metabolism a bit further. High doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners compound this effect, increasing the urinary excretion of calcium. The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (You have to GO!) Your body will eliminate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was otherwise heading to your bones. And you will also flush out the sodium, electrolytes and water. Your body has eliminated the water that was in the soda. And in the process it was infused with nutrients and minerals your body would have otherwise used to hydrate your system or build body cells, bones, teeth.

60 minutes: The sugar crash begins. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You start feeling like crap. Time to grab another?

This article is a reprint of this one by a doctor who has witnessed babies being given bottles containing Coke. Aack! Take care of your little ones, people! They don’t need this kind of stimulation and nutrition-sucking chemical reaction.

And honestly…do YOU?

As Brett travels through space in Alpha Redemption, he endures sessions of immersion in a gooey pool, in which he sleeps during the faster-than-light portions of the trip. In between, he spends time reading, working out, eating, and getting to know the ship’s computer, whom he names Jay. Jay has been programmed to desire knowledge. As the trip wears on, Jay becomes curious about many things, including God, whom Brett has no use for since his family tragedy.

Besides the development of this unlikely friendship over the journey, strange things happen to Brett. With each successive awake period, Brett gets a little younger in real time. And with each successive sleep period, Brett relives the portion of his life that corresponds with his younger self. This has the strange effect of time stretching in both directions at the same time from the novel’s start point. This gets a bit tricky, but Baines manages to keep it together and interesting even when the reader is hurtling backwards in time.

Alpha Redemption is a science fiction novel releasing today from Splashdown Books. The author, P. A. Baines,writes science fiction that is both contemplative and profound. Educated in Africa, he works as an analyst/programmer and is studying towards a degree in Creative Writing through Buckinghamshire New University in England. He currently lives in a small corner of the Netherlands with his wife and two children and various wildlife.

Deforestation leads to desertification, in many places around the world. Burgeoning human populations raise carbon dioxide levels to new highs, until declining vegetative populations can no longer keep up with converting it back into life-giving oxygen. Lands that supported trees that processed the carbon dioxide that is now choking and overheating this planet lie barren, topsoil eroding, blowing away in increasing drought. Removing vegetative cover changes the temperature of the soil, which changes the temperature of the air above that place. Rains come less. The land withers.

In some locations, deforestation is primarily due to urbanization or agriculture. In many others, however, significant deforestation—or the last over-harvest of a devastated land—comes from the never-ending need for firewood or charcoal for about half the world’s population.

Three billion humans—divide by five and call it six hundred million families—cook with wood, charcoal, coal, crop residue, and dung, the last two being particularly tragic as they are needed to rebuild what soil hasn’t already washed away after deforestation. I abhor it when new high-tech but simple and more efficient stoves tout as a virtue that they can burn plant and animal “waste.” There is no such thing as plant and animal “waste” in a depleted agricultural area. Burning crop residue and manure, no matter how cleanly, is a desperation move. There are better ways to cook than with valuable commodities for sustainable agriculture.

A cook-fire may not seem like much, but we are talking 600,000,000 families cooking over primitive fires every day, and someone cooking for a family may have more than one fire—or a bigger fire or a fire burning longer—to make more than one dish. That many fires add up to a lot of smoke, and wood smoke is much more toxic than many people realize. These smoky fires are often in poorly ventilated huts, but what smoke isn’t absorbed by the walls and the lungs of the women and small children who spend so much time in the huts eventually filters out, riding the air currents, soaring in the thermals.

Some of it rises so high it crosses oceans. Clouds of particulates—much of it black carbon (soot) from cooking smoke—circle the globe, cutting us off from the sun, Earth’s only source of outside power. Invisible but equally deadly, the carbon dioxide mounts.

At a rough estimate, a solar cooker in a mostly sunny country that is used whenever reasonable can reduce need for solid fuel by one ton per year, reducing cooking output of carbon dioxide by 1.8 tons annually, while significantly reducing black carbon and other noxious chemical emissions and particulates. Get three solar cookers into the hands of families with the training to maximize their use and you have a savings equal to the lower end figures for what a family car pumps out. Program costs that have successfully accomplished this have ranged from around $50.00 (US) to $100.00 per family, (often for either two simple cookers or for a box oven that cooks more than one dish at a time) and include the training and follow-up that leads to successful adoption. This is significant carbon reduction at bargain prices. Multiplied by six hundred million families, solar cookers could reduce annual carbon emissions by at least 1,080,000,000 (one billion, eighty million) tons each year, in a way of life that can become sustainable once it takes root.

Imagine the clouds of smoke, back when all of these solar cookers at the Iridimi Refugee Camp in Chad—some fourteen thousand in all—were smoky fires.

Solar cookers and integrated combinations of solar, more efficient bio-fuel stoves, and retained heat cooking not only clear the air and slow the tide of deforestation, they promote reforestation. Many villagers and farmers plant trees with savings from having a solar cooker, for shade or food production. Reforestation projects enjoy increased success when people are not tempted to steal growing trees for fuel. Adoption of solar cooking saves time, often used to increase the size of gardens or fields, which can trap carbon dioxide and keep it occupied with the healthy soil-to-plant-to-compost cycle. When you add to the initial savings the additional carbon dioxide reduction from new trees and bigger gardens or fields, the picture grows even brighter.

It is very likely that part of the haze in this photo of the Great Rift Valley taken near Eldoret Kenya is smoke from cooking fires. Solar cookers can give us all cleaner air to breathe, in addition to helping preserve what trees remain.

Dr. Arline J. Lederman (AJ), SCI's New York representative to the United Nations says, I find it a very worthwhile challenge to advocate for a better world on behalf of solar cooking and its potential for positive impact on the earth’s balance. I think the time is right for success.

We are choking our planet with smoke and fumes. It is time for the simple, direct technology of solar cooking to take a higher place on the list of clean solutions. Solar cooking programs and solar integrated cooking systems can make a big difference in the environment we share. Greater support and acceptance for these programs will give us all cleaner air to breathe, promote reforestation of some of the most devastated places on the planet, and help to mitigate unfavorable climate change. Support solar cooking for a healthier planet.

Want to help? Scroll down to the bottom of Part 2 in this series to learn what you can do.

Learn more about Global Dimming and Soot:

http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Global_dimming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

Professor Ramanathan is an authority on brown clouds and the Asian Brown Cloud in particular. Don’t miss the two stunning photos on the entry page of his extensive website. That awful haze thirty miles from Everest has to be largely cooking and heating smoke. How much heavy industry is there 30 miles from Everest?

Sharon Cousins lives, loves, works, writes, reads, gardens, enjoys playing music and singing, and cooks with sunshine, high on a ridge ten miles north of Moscow, Idaho. Sharon’s fascination with solar cooking began late in ’06, while doing research for a novel series she is working on. You can read more about her solar cooking activities on her Solar Cooking Wiki page. You can learn more about Sharon’s writing and approach to writing on her unique writers’ website, Write ‘em Cowgirls! and in her free writers’ e-newsletter, the Write ‘em Cowgirls Express. Sharon is currently a member of the executive board of Solar Cookers International and also serves as a regional representative for the International Women’s Writing Guild.

With a lot of help from my crit partner, Margaret, I believe I discovered the core story I was trying to write in the first place. Hopefully now it is in a condition where other readers can make sense of it. Next is a read-through and tweak phase, then off it goes to my next two critiquers, Nicole and Maripat.

While it’s away, I get to turn my attention to all the other stuff I need to get done before conference, for which I leave in 19 days:

Revise my Sentence, Blurb, and Synopsis
Revise the novel’s One-Sheet
Recreate the series’ One-Sheet
Revise Chapters 1-3
Print out copies of some of the above in case I get requests for them
Print out more business cards
Tweak my website
Practice my pitch
Pack!!!

And on the home front?
A Graduation BBQ for our son and daughter-in-law, who completed their studies this year at University of Victoria.
Time to start canning peaches, tomatoes and possibly other garden produce.
And a visit from SweetPea and her parents.

Never a dull moment!

This year there are nineteen nominations for the Clive Staples Award, listed below (all published in 2009). I’ve added the link to my review of the ones I’ve read, a total of five.

*A Star Curiously Singing
Kerry Nietz
Marcher Lord Press

*Blaggard’s Moon
George Bryan Polivka
Harvest House

*Bones of Makaidos
Bryan Davis
AMG Publishing

*By Darkness Hid
Jill Williamson
Marcher Lord Press

*Curse of the Spider King
Wayne Batson and Christopher Hopper
Thomas Nelson Publishing

*Enclave, The
Karen Hancock
Bethany House

*Eternity Falls
Kirk Outerbridge
Marcher Lord Press

*Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter
RJ Anderson
HarperCollins

*Firstborn, The
Conlan Brown
Realms

*Hunter Brown and the Consuming Fire
Christopher and Allen Miller
Warner Press

*Last Cordate, The
Alison Pickrell
OakTara

*Lost Mission
Athol Dickson
Howard Books

*Lunatic
Ted Dekker and Kaci Hill
Thomas Nelson

*Muse, The
Fred Warren
Splashdown Books

*North! Or Be Eaten
Andrew Peterson
WaterBrook Press

*Offworld
Robin Parrish
Bethany House

*Starfire
Stuart Vaughn Stockton
Marcher Lord Press

*Vanishing Sculptor
Donita K Paul
WaterBrook Press

*Word Reclaimed, The
Steve Rzasa
Marcher Lord Press

Have you read two or more of the above titles? You’re eligible to vote HERE! I’ve voted!

Let me illustrate. A few months ago my husband and I were in the grocery store buying apples. As I picked through the apples, I mumbled something about wanting smaller apples than most of the ones on display. I just prefer not to eat huge apples.

Jim said, “You’re part of the problem, you know.”

And it’s true. It’s not the grower’s or the apple’s fault what size it is. The quality of the apple is barely related at all to its size. And yet the consumers dictate what size is suitable, and what size is undesired.

Now it is cherry season, and I’m having a close up view of what salable cherries don’t look like. In many cases, it’s hard to tell. In some cases they are too large. In others they are too small. Some of them are lopsided in shape. Some have a slight mark from a rubbing branch or twig. A few have very minor scars from too much rain. In all of those cases, there is nothing wrong with the cherry from my point of view. They’ll keep just fine for a few days until we get time to dehydrate, freeze, juice, or eat them.

Cherries picked without stems also aren’t salable, as they won’t keep as well. And some of the cherries do have soft spots. Those are the ones that will start to go moldy first, and infect the whole box if we’re not watchful.

You would be shocked and amazed to see how many tons of culls are sorted from cherry orchards, and there is currently no market for them locally. They just simply aren’t the right size or they aren’t perfect enough to withstand a week in a cooler being shipped to Germany or other distant destinations.

This issue affects every type of fruit (and probably vegetable) grown in one way or another. A lot of it has to do with how picky we are as consumers. We look at produce in the store and go for uniform, perfectly shaped, polished fruit that has an even color. Give it a thought next time you’re in the produce section.

Are you part of the problem? How can you be part of the solution instead?

Emma Rae Travis is an award-winning baker waiting for her big break in life. It comes when Jackson Drake and his three older sisters purchase an old hotel in Roscoe, near Atlanta, with plans to turn it into a full service wedding destination. Emma, a diabetic who has never tasted one full slice of any of her cakes–even her famous creme brulee wedding cake–is just the draw they need at The Tanglewood.

But she and Jackson have gotten off on the wrong foot, and it is Jackson’s sisters who are determined to keep Emma on staff, no matter what. They’ll do anything, even invite Emma’s parents for the grand opening. Problem? Her parents have been divorced for years, and fireworks are sure to be present if both of them are in the same room.

Other chefs have discovered Emma’s talents, too, and do their best to lure–or threaten– her away. Still, she’s pretty committed to seeing The Tanglewood onto the map. Or is she?

One of the fun things about this novel are the ‘asides,’ in which Bricker offers various wedding tips and recipes. The version I’ve seen was digital, although I’ll be receiving a print copy soon. I’m looking forward to seeing these special additions in a clearer format!

Sandra D. Bricker has been billed the Laugh-Out-Loud Inspirational Romance Author. In her former life, she was a successful Hollywood screenwriter, and a personal assistant and publicist to some of daytime television’s hottest stars. She’s involved in fundraising for the Lost Angels Animal Rescue and currently resides in Florida.

Meanwhile, it seemed to me that the easiest/cheapest way to try out solar cooking was to use the windshield shade method. I paid about $12.00 for a foil accordian folded shade at Canadian Tire, and a couple dollars more for a few inches of stick-on velcro to hold the edges together to form a cone. I also bought two 2-packs of oven bags.

Then I made sure I had an adequate pot: black. I have a cast iron dutch oven, so that is perfect. I was a bit stumped with what recipe, exactly, to try first. Sharon told me to think of it as a crockpot. So I chose a stew to make the first time. I just prepared it as usual: browning the meat, adding vegetables, broth, and seasonings.

Instead of leaving it to simmer, I put it outside in the solar cooker in one of the oven bags.: We’d set it on a small trashcan on a picnic table in one of the few parts of our yard we thought would get sun all day long. About every hour we’d don our sunglasses, grab some oven mitts, and go outside to turn the cooker to keep up with the sun’s position. The whole thing tipped over once, right to the ground, probably due to a breeze. Yay for the oven bag, which contained all the stew. We scooped it back into the pot and put it in a clean oven bag and right back on the cooker!

We added a couple of bricks to the trash can so it wouldn’t topple so easily again. You can see that the pot has a clear lid, which is from a different set I own but happens to fit my cast iron pot as well. Either clear or black works fine, but I wanted to be able to peek in without undoing the oven bag, so I chose the clear lid. The stew was fabulous. Tender, delicious. And the house was cool!

Not only that, but it was completely cooked by about 2:00, so I decided to add dessert to the menu. I couldn’t find any clear directions online for how to do a cake-like object, so I wung it. My husband figured the square inches of my frying pan to be 78″, close to that of a 9×9 pan, so I looked for a recipe that ‘size.’ I settled on chocolate brownies. I should have put them in an oven bag, but I didn’t. We had chocolate fudge–with homemade banana ice cream–so it wasn’t all bad!

This is the pre-cooked version of an asian-style chicken recipe I made the next day. It also turned out really really well. I found this recipe in my crockpot recipe book. Sadly this meal required cooked rice and sauteed kale, which I did in the house, so it wasn’t a total solar-cooked meal. The cooking itself is really straightforward. Basically, you just have to be home to keep an eye on it.

Here’s the finished meal. Awesome! Both these meals were a couple of weeks ago. Sadly the weather hasn’t been perfect on weekends since then, and it’s pretty hard to solar cook when I’m at the store all day. Sharon makes cakes and breads regularly and successfully, and I’m looking forward to the chance to do more experimenting. I’m not sure if I can do these more ‘advanced’ recipes with the windshield shade or if I should upgrade, but for now, I’m having fun exploring possibilities.

Have you ever solar-cooked? Share some recipes and experiences with us, if you have!

At any rate, I’ve heard of author Julie Lessman over at the Seekerville Blog and so was interested to read her novel A Passion Most Pure. It is the story of two sisters in Boston around the time the first world war broke out. Faith is the older sister who works at the same newspaper office as her dad, and whose love for God is a deep part of her. To the point that even though she loves ‘bad boy’ Collin, she refuses him because he doesn’t share her foundation.

Faith’s sister Charity has no such problem and loves to flirt with danger as well as ‘one-up’ her sister. She snags Collin’s attention and reels him in, much to Faith’s pain. Things come to a head shortly after Collin and Charity get engaged, and Collin goes off to war. At which point things really begin to get interesting.

This is not your typical CBA novel OR your typical romance. For one thing, the romantic outcome was not a foregone conclusion. For another, it’s an edgier book. What I didn’t like about the story was how Faith, though portrayed as a strong believer, kept falling for the same kind of guy. I just wanted to shake her. I also wanted to shake her sister (who totally deserves a good swat, trust me.) What I DID enjoy about the story in particular was the relationship between Faith’s parents. They’ve got a good thing going, and the author isn’t afraid to let the reader know!

Julie Lessman is an award-winning author whose tagline of “Passion With a Purpose” underscores her white-hot passion for both God and romance. Winner of the 2009 ACFW Debut Author of the Year and 2009 Holt Medallion Awards of Merit for Best First Book and Long Inspirational, Julie is also the recipient of 13 Romance Writers of America awards. She resides in Missouri with her husband and their golden retriever and is the author of The Daughters of Boston series, which includes A Passion Most Pure, A Passion Redeemed, and A Passion Denied.