In the past year I've whipped out the old credit card (thank you airline miles) more than a few times for the wildlife organizations on behalf of the wolves and polar bears - especially Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity. You see, they send me these emails, or they call me (I know, I know, they know me now), and I get suckered into opening my wallet. But they do good work by providing scientists, lobbyists and lawyers to protect various species and ecological balance. And how can you say no to furball baby wolf pups and huggable (ok, not really - they're actually dangerous so don't let the Nissan Leaf commercial fool ya) polar bears losing their habitat? (I might watch too much Animal Planet and NatGeo... Bonnie is a big fan so I leave it on for her - she likes to bark at the animals.) Yes, I am a wildlife sucker.

A donor for the Center for Biological Diversity is triple-matching any donations made by Dec. 31 to protect a polar bear reserve. But you can choose your own cause, too, and let me know how you supported it! It's good karma for the new year. I'm just sayin. (Are you opening your wallet yet?)

Somebody decided to get bathed, brushed, and all dressed up, and beg to have a Christmas Eve photo shoot.

Happy holidays. XO, Em and Bon

The Sartorialist features clogs. Yes, clogs - as in those really comfy slip-on shoes with amazing arch support - as in, my favorite shoes. For those of us who live in clogs or snow boots in the winter, this is huge news, especially for those of us who live in cities where clogs are seen by many as a major faux pas - shunned instead for terribly uncomfortable heels that get caught in sidewalk grates and cracks and dirt and everything else that is nasty and that lives on city streets. But now, you see, since it's featured on The Sartorialist (he, being a major fashion god of street style), the Others will want to join us in our comfort and high fashion. Click through and see for yourself. Oh, and check out the comments. There are actually people saying they "love the shoes!" This cracks me up.

I ventured from the norm for my first round of Christmas cookies this year and made these Vegan Rasberry Thumbprint Cookies. Normally vegan cookies wouldn't be my first choice, especially given my love for butter, but I happen to work with a number of vegan and lactose-intolerant people and I thought I'd try something new. Let me just say, these are really really good - so good that I sampled too many while baking. I will definitely make them again. Plus, they're great for people watching their sugar intake, and could easily be made gluten-free given the recipe's reliance on almond meal. And with this my new-age health-food hippie side reveals itself.

Have you heard of Ashima Shiraishi? She's a an adorable eight-year-old girl in Manhattan who boulders in Central Park and can climb V10. For you non-climbers, that means she's pretty much a child superhero. And the best thing about her is that she seems to really just love climbing for the fun of it. It's really inspirational to watch her and the rest of these athletes talk about their passions. We just need to remind ourselves that when we go to the gym and haven't climbed (or done whatever sport you're into) but maybe a few times in the past few months and, well, quite frankly, we suck, it's no big deal. Just have fun.

Images from one of last week's commutes just keep lingering in my head. Oh the joys of public transportation on its bad days. So I'm drawing on the likes of California poet and Sierras-lover Gary Snyder (who I once saw a few tables away from me in a Nevada City restaurant but I was too shy to go up). He wrote a book with Tom Killion's woodcut prints, which are to die for. One of these days I'm going to buy one. I'll hang it in my cabin. Anyways, back to the haiku. Hopefully the next one will be about the natural world instead of the man-made one.

almost winter bare
blazing bus whirring through lanes
black coats underground

If I had a cabin of my own, I would most certainly get this Ping felling axe from Best Made. It's pretty rad, and I am of course a sucker for the pink and green handle, and the beautiful packaging, and the leather cover. In high school I read Anne LaBastille's "Woodswoman" and I think it's safe to say it shaped my life. It's an autobiographical story of a woman who builds her own cabin by a remote lake in the Adirondacks and lives there with her dog, even through the winter, chopping wood, hunting, writing, and meeting the other strange folks who chose to live like her whenever she makes it into town (which sometimes meant crossing a frozen lake by boat). I'm definitely not enough of a loner to go that route, but it's an inspirational story nonetheless. I'd more likely be the person who calls on all her friends to help build her cabin, like a barn raising, in exchange for hosting dinner parties for them for the next decade.

This summer I went to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin for a work trip, and my coworker and I stopped at the Lion's Den Gorge Nature Preserve after work one day. Let me just apologize, Midwesterners, because I have overlooked your homeland. It's gorgeous. Lake Michigan is a mini ocean and oh, the turquoise waters! And you have beautiful birch trees everywhere. I will never say "Thank god I don't live in the Midwest" again. Probably. I heard it gets wicked cold there in the winter. But still, it was a huge surprise to find that Wisconsin is actually pretty great - lots of beer, cheese, nature, and a private ocean.

So there we were walking on this trail that wound its way along the water, through the woods, and into a bog. Yes, a bog. Complete with bubbling, slurping and gulping noises. We're standing on this deck over the bog, equally grossed out and fascinated with the amount of green in the water, and I spot the eyes of a frog in the distance. I point it out to my coworker, who is all, "Ewww, gross." And then I notice another one, and another one, and oh my gosh, this looked like a sea of green before and suddenly we see a million tiny golden eyes staring back at us. They've been watching us, unseen, camouflaged. At that point my coworker runs down the boardwalk looking like she has to puke, running for the safety of the woods. Touché, Midwest.

I found a place that's wooded and mostly empty of people, full of fallen leaves, logs and mushrooms like these guys, and it's actually in town. No drive to the mountains needed. Bon and I go there sometimes to get a few miles in. There aren't really any views, but then I guess sometimes you don't really need those. Sometimes you just need a space that's quiet, where you can hear the sound of leaves crunching underfoot, and where your dog wants to sniff every other tree... On the plus side, when she does that it forces me to take a closer look at little areas I would have otherwise not seen, like this fungi-fringed log.