Single and looking for a hot girl's lawn to mow? Look no further than Jen. Not only is she looking for someone to mow her lawn, she's also looking for a significant other. The best part is, per today's tip, you won't even have to bag the clippings. Post a comment to apply!

-Toshio...off to write a personals ad for myself...

Beer is my favorite drink, hands down, and it was one of the reasons why parting Portland, OR, last August was such sweet sorrow. The town has more microbreweries than anywhere else in the country -Bridgeport, McMenamin's, Full Sail, Hair of the Dog, Widmer, you name it - living in Portland you really have no need to consume beer produced outside of a 25-mile radius of Mt. Tabor.

The place is also home to the only movie theaters I know of, outside of Asheville, NC, where you can order a pitcher of microbrew before you take in a second-run movie. I miss you, PDX, and promise to return soon!

-Toshio...off to drink some of my new local microbrew, SF's Anchor Steam...

... you'd be surprised at the number of women for whom THAT is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous aging;

Or take arms against a sea of wrinkles,

and by opposing, end them...

OK, OK, I'll stop (but in truth, I really wanted to do the whole bloody speech).  So, that pesky botox question... once the domain of freaks and actresses, it's become an amazingly normal and commonplace procedure these days.  I know many, many women, normal, everyday women - not rich, not actresses, not even particularly into fashion and beauty - who have gone under the needle (and not to get a tat).

And the thing is - while I'm terribly opposed to the whole thing (and COMPLETELY disturbed by the freakish freeze-faces that formerly beautiful actresses have become - I mean, come on... don't these people have stylists telling them that those glacially arched eyebrows and lips that look like they just came out of a playground fistfight are not in any way reminscent of youth and beauty?).  Anyway - while I'm opposed to the botox thing, every so often, I "get" the attraction.  I catch a glance of myself in a window reflection or piece of video, and I wonder where the hell those forehead wrinkles came from and why on earth I look so angry all the time?  And I wish for a magic bullet.

But in the the end, I'm choosing to pass on the botox.  I kind of wanna know what my real face is going to look like someday.  So my current plan involves lots of moisturizer and hat-wearing, and a lot more smiling and sleep.  (And by a sleep to say we end the collagen loss and thousand natural lines that flesh is heir to).  ;)

-Heather... off to check out the schedule for the California Shakespeare Festival...

None of us here at The Bite has ever done a true house swap (mainly because until recently, we didn't have houses where the landlord wouldn't go off his rocker over strangers in the place).  Having rented other houses while traveling, however, I can attest to the fact that a vacation - particularly an international one - is just so much better in a home.

My personal favorite?  Villa Marisa on the Amalfi Coast. It was on the western side of the Sorrento peninsula, with views of the Bay of Naples, Ischia, Capri and Vesuvius.  We watched the sunset nightly on the rooftop, sipping wines from Campania.  Sure, Pompeii was rockin'.  Sure, Positano was filled with people too beautiful to describe.  Sure, driving in Naples was like playing a video game, dodging dodgy pedestrians and mangy dogs...  but the best part of that whole trip were the times at the house, living like a local, cooking and chatting and laughing.

-Heather... off to see how much vacation I have accrued...

Check it out, and if you have any eco-lodge recommendations, sound off in the comments.

- Toshio...off to plan my next vacation...

I'm the type of person who always has to check luggage, even if I'll only be gone for the weekend and it's summer (meaning no heavy, ungainly coats to stuff into my bags).

Have any of you seen the Martha Stewart episode where Martha packs her suitcase? The woman's got talent. Somehow, she's able to fit about a month's worth of clothes and toiletries into a regular-sized piece of luggage. Amazing.

I'm headed back to Orange County for a long weekend for my sister's graduation in a couple weeks, and I'd love to be able to carry on. To all the master luggage-packers out there: got any tips for me?

-Toshio...off to see how much stuff I can fit in my backpack...

A few years back, there was a commercial (I think it's for auto insurance or something) where George Hamilton-ish guy talked about how he was a celebrity and everyone treated him
specially because of it.

The point of the commercial was that EVERYONE gets treated the same way - celebrity or not - by that company. (Sad for the company that I can't remember what it was - not the best branding...)

Well, that guy is me when I stay at hotels.

I LOVE hotels. Even when traveling on business, I still get to my room and look through all the bath products, check out the minibar, explore the in-demand movie options... Once you've done a ton of business traveling, you realize it's the same - night in, night out. But I always show up, put on the big fluffy robe and traipse around as though I own the place (or at least my little box within the place). I eat my pillow-chocolates and order the four-hundred-thousand-dollar oatmeal for breakfast.

And yes, for the past few years, I've actually hung up my towels and requested that housekeeping doesn't change out my sheets. Just because I'm fabulously famous (in my mind) and HAVE a maid (for a few minutes each morning) doesn't mean that I need to act like I do...

-Heather... off to do some birthday yoga...

I was on the swim team in high school. It was the first - and only - time I ever shaved my legs (which I did to shave precious milliseconds off my 100-meter backstroke - not as a fashion statement) and the last time I ever wore a Speedo. It recently occurred to me that back in the day, I spent more time in a Speedo than any other article of clothing except, maybe, my favorite black Converse high-tops.

Unfortunately (some might say fortunately), we haven’t come across any eco-Speedos. There’s a huge untapped market of environment-conscious Speedo-wearers out there, people, so get to it!

-Toshio...off to drop some kids off at the pool...

In the strange litany of the many ways in which I contradict myself constantly, today's tip takes the cake.  Inexplicably, I have an almost-miserly feeling about printers and printing.  When Jen and I were raising money for Ideal Bite, and we had to print out fancy copies of charts and biz plans to give to people in powerful positions, I would have printed each copy in gray draft mode, if I'd been allowed to.  I stealthily set friends' and family members' printers to default draft mode whenever I borrow their machines, and often wonder how long it takes for them to realize it.  We all have our "things, and, well, print-efficiency is one of mine.

It's odd to me that the whole printing thing can affect me like a knife in the ribs, while I can sit through an occasional steak dinner without thinking too much about the ramifications of eating grain-fed red meat.  I just moved into a new place, and all my lightbulbs aren't yet CFLs, but show me a piece of paper that has a clean back side (perfectly good for creating grocery lists or printing boarding passes) thrown into a recycle bin, and I react much as if I had found a thousand thermometers and 47 batteries in a bucket full of parabens sealed in plastic bags and tossed into a landfill.  Give me a buggy printer spitting out multiple copies of the same page, and it incites a "small children are being murdered!!!" panic in me, and I can't scramble to the print feature or the power cord fast enough.  (And it really annoys me that the printer doesn't actually STOP when you hit "cancel," taking its time shutting down, like a scalding shower cooling off after you scream and flip it to cold.)

Clearly, I need to switch out those bulbs to CFLs, and thankfully, I AM really lessening the frequency with which I eat meat.

In the meantime, just don't go tossing out any single-sided printing in front of me if you know what is good for you.

-Heather... off to enjoy a last day of meetings in LA...

I don't know. I did this cleanse where I gave it up to see if my body preferred a gluten-free diet, and while I wasn't hungry, my nails all got horribly brittle and crumbled to pieces. But that might have been because I also gave up alcohol for those 10 long days. Next time I see my naturopath he is going to test me for food allergies. I really hope I am allergic to cheese...I would be rockstar thin. 

Interested to know what you Biters think about the topic of wheat-free for health.

-Jen...off to drink a (gluten-free) beer...

Although I never polished my allowance as a kid, conventional metal polish helped me earn it-I picked up one dollar, American, every time I sat down and de-tarnished the family's silver tea set (that we never used). I don't polish silver anymore, but since my kitchen's so-called stainless steel stays anything but stainless, I usually use a very small amount of olive oil to rub out water marks, coffee spills, and sticky fingerprints.

The thing about Howard Naturals and OurHouse alternatives is that they smell good enough to eat-and after using olive oil for so long, I fear that one of them might end up on my salad...hmm...lemongrass-lime mixed greens....

-Jenifer Morgan...off to polish up my Polish...

Summer, 1996.  Writing grad school thesis while living at home with the parents.   Thesis was on the OJ Simpson verdict.  If I read the thesis now, I'd have no idea what I was even saying.

However, I DO remember one of my favorite quotes of all time... sitting in my backyard, chatting with my mom, I was probably babbling about whichever hottie celeb I was crushing on at the time (Matthew M?  David Duchovny?).  Eventually, Mom laughed, and said:

"Heather, you're never going to have a real relationship - your fantasy life is too rich and nothing could measure up."

Hilarious at the time, today, I sometimes wonder if she didn't hit that particular nail on the head.

-Heather... off to LA (NOT to stalk Leo)...

I'm reading a book called The Moral Animal at the moment.  Without going into the details, let's just say that it is making me analyze all my familial relationships - from my tendency to love my nephew insanely to my love-hate childhood relationship with my brother.

My brother and I weren't great friends as kids.  He was two and a half years older - a tall, gorgeous basketball guru with cool friends and a killer creative streak.  I, on the other hand, was studious and geeky, with fuzzy hair, a need to be right, and a big forehead.  I tended to worship his friends, and he tended to resent my insistence on riding around with him once he got his drivers license (he often made me lie down in the back seat so that I didn't ruin his cool).

But as we've gotten older, we've gotten closer.  Most often, those best moments of closeness have happened when the two of us have been on our own, chatting about our childhoods - articulating parental quirks and the ways we were sure we grew up distinctly different from other people we knew.

One of those "I can't believe everyone isn't like we are" convos actually inspired today's tip.  Drinking wine together one night, we started laughing over how embarassed we used to feel when our friends came over to find watered-down bottles of lotion and sliced tubes of toothpaste on the bathroom counter.  We were mortified at how "uncool" that was.  But as we got older, it all made so much sense - of COURSE you should use up all of a product before tossing/recycling the container.  It was something that Brent put into words that night, years ago, while we commiserated about our boy/girlfriend's wasteful tendencies:

"I mean, Heather - she throws stuff out without even squeezing it empty...      There's a lot of good toothpaste in there!"

Yep, there certainly is.

-Heather... off to call my brother...

So - having my own house is dreamy, with the exception of the fact that I'm not a terribly "handy" person.  However, everyone tells me that installing a programmable thermostat is easy, so I just ordered the Clairion one from today's tip.

I'll report back as to how easy-to-install it really is.  My last place had a timer like this one (4 settings a day, different settings for weekday and weekend), and I loved it, so I'm looking forward to getting this one in place.

-Heather... off to read up on how to change the water filter in the sink...

So, I'm getting a little tired of being corrected when I say the word "bruschetta."  Lovely, well-meaning friends are constantly informing me: "It's brew-SHETT-uh, dear..."

Um, no.  It's not, actually.  Just like pancetta is not "pan-setta" and chianti is not "she-auntie," the word "bruschetta" trips off the tongue to the beat of an Italian drum...  And that's a beat where a "CH" followed by an I or E is pronounced as a K, and a "C" followed by and "E" or an "I" sounds like an English CH...  (Think "cappuccino" - which is never "cap-poo-SEE-no").  Net-net?  It's "Brew-SKETT-uh."  I promise.

Best word for practicing this?  Cichetti...  Cichetti are essentially tapas in Venice.  If you try to order "See-SHET-tee" in Venice, I'm not sure what you'll be served.  But if you order "Chi-KETT-ee," you'll get some lovely treats.

Long-winded, and pedantic way of telling a story.  At our last company retreat here in SF, I decided to make an ill-fated dinner.  Nothing grilled right.  I forgot most ingredients.  Somehow, a few bottles of wine in, no one wanted to play the Biter Trivia that I was so excited to do (although Sara and Tosh would have won).  But the Brew-SKETT-uh went over nicely.  And the next day, the leftovers were thrown into a panzanella salad, which might be the easiest thing on the planet to make, while ranking up there with the best of foods.  So all in all - eating leftovers in wine country - I had nothing to complain about.

Until someone corrected me and very thoughtfully said "Heather.  It's Brew-SHETT-uh..."

-Heather... off to plan trips to Italy...