We know disposable plastic water bottles are clogging our landfills, costing lots of oil, and might be putting some pretty nasty chemicals into the water we’re drinking. That’s got us switching to refillable bottles and they’re great! But, if you’re not a fan of aluminum drinking bottles, and you worry about what leaches into your water from a conventional plastic bottle, check out this new offering from Camelbak. They’ve changed the plastic formula on their very popular “Better Bottle” to a material that’s totally free of BPA and Phthalates. It’s still the familiar hard clear plastic bottle in lots of cheery colors but without the nasty stuff.

Camelbak Better Bottle: with classic cap or bite valve (available May 2008). msrp $8, www.camelbak.com

Wind and cold are not nice to our skin. No problem if you’re the Marlboro man. But I’d like to look good even if I’ve been outside having fun year round. It’s been a hard winter here in the Chicago area, probably the snowiest and coldest since I moved here 16 years ago. But I’ve tried to keep riding my bike to work as much as possible and I knew I needed some protection that wasn’t petroleum-based. I’m all for keeping bees gainfully employed, so I picked up a tin of Burt’s Bees Miracle Salve. It’s a blend of pumpkin seed oil, olive oil, wheat germ oil, bee pollen, and bee’s wax.

It’s really nice for face and hair on cold days, but I’d recommend removing it from your face once you’re inside if you tend to break out. It really came to my rescue, though, on my hands. They tend to split and crack at the finger tips in cold weather, no matter how diligently I apply hand lotions. Slathering some of this Miracle Salve on under a coat of regular lotion really healed up cracked skin and kept it healthy, despite repeated hand-freezing on my bike or shoveling the many inches of snow we’ve gotten. It’s great stuff!

Burt’s Bees Miracle Salve 2 oz. tin, $7.00 msrp. Available online at www.burtsbees.com and many health food and natural product stores. I found my tin at Target.

The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga by Sage Rountree (VeloPress; $21.95) www.velopress.com

Over-tight muscles can cause injury and pain during your sports activities and that can keep you from playing. Not good! Yoga is the perfect counterbalance to your regular sport, whatever it may be. Whether you’re a yogini or you’ve never heard of a downward facing dog, you’ll come away with something useful from “The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga.” Yoga brings strength, flexibility, and balance to your body as well as your mind. Author Sage Roundtree makes yoga an essential tool for anyone who is active in sports with her clear explanations and large photos of each pose. The sections on mediation as mental training and sports-specific yoga for your training routines are particularly helpful. There’s a short DVD included with 15-minute warmup and cooldown routines and a longer DVD with three routines is available as well.

Now is the time to think about picking up some post-holiday ornaments.  I’m really fond of the outdoor related ornaments I’ve been given in the last couple of years, particularly from Inside Outside.  All mine are cycling ornaments and all my husband’s are canoe ornaments. 

Inside Outside has a ton of cute stuff for all sorts of outdoor enthusiasts.  Check them out!

www.insideoutside.com

When Michelle Theall dreamed up Women’s Adventure Magazine, she imagined a magazine that would capture her own love of outdoor pursuits and thoughtful journalism - WA is a bit unique in the sports mag arena. I know there are lots of you dear readers who spend time journaling, blogging, podcasting, taking quill pen to parchment, or any other method of expressing yourself creatively when you’re not out exploring the world. In fact, we’ve heard from some of you with our reader’s story contests and you’ve got engaging things to say. Some of you may already have your own personal blogs.

When Mariner Software wanted to send us a sample of their brand new journaling software, WinJournal, I hesitated because we’re an outdoor magazine not a writing magazine, but I remembered all you accomplished and budding writers and gave it a try. (There’s a MacJournal for Apple users.)

WinJournal is an easy-to-use way to organize all your writing, whether typed or spoken, and publish it online, either on your own personal blog or to your website. I used it this year to keep track of everything I saw at Interbike (a big cycling trade show), and it kept all those hurried thoughts in one place. It was great to not have stuff scattered all over my computer in little notepad files that I never got around to finding and rereading later.

I struggled a little bit to set up the connection info for publishing directly to my blog because my blog address is different from my user name, but about fifteen minutes of poking around solved the connection snafu. Pretty cool! I can compose offline, and with a click of my “Publish to Blog” button, up goes my post!

WinJournal has lots of extras that let you personalize and decorate your posts as well as privacy settings for locking your journal. If you are copying and pasting something from an email message that has the carrots (>>) in front of each line, WinJournal has a Cleanup function that will remove them, as well as other clunky code bits that you don’t want to publish. If you’re not into sharing your thoughts with the entire cyberworld, WinJournal is still a great way to keep a personal or family journal, complete with your digital photos.

I was also able to record some commentary with my posts and WinJournal stored them as .wav files that it attached to each entry. My WordPress account requires a space upgrade ($$$) to enable sound files on blog entries, so I wasn’t able to test it out.

Chaos,
aka, my desk

The only thing I really struggled with was resizing the WinJournal window. My computer desktop looks just like my real-life desktop — like a bomb went off at some point. I’ve got about fourteen programs running at once and I’m used to resizing and dragging them around the desktop with carefree abandon. I could resize the WinJournal window but pulling it back out in size was difficult and it would only intermittently allow me to grab the top toolbar and drag the whole thing around the desktop. Of course, this may be an “Id1oT” error, as my boss at work likes to call them - user error, not the software’s fault.

WinJournal is pretty cool software that will definitely encourage your writing efforts.

WinJournal/MacJournal from Mariner Software: msrp $39.95