It's been a while since our last posting but Kathy's been heading up a backyard playhouse project that's keeping everyone busy. Currently, a floor, walls, and un-shingled roof are in place. You can see photos of our progress in the photos section.

For a third year in a row, the girls entered Google's Doodle 4 Google contest. While they didn't become finalists this year, they each drew a creative Google logo. Gillie's logo involves a book themse whereas Carly's logo has a theme of being able to fly overhead and see the tops of things.

Our Vegetarian Restaurants in Milwaukee page continues to get nearly 400 visits a month. We've added a ratings system for each restaurant via PollDaddy.com.

No "Yanoff Family Green Tip" this time but instead check out this great infographic called a "visual guide to how small cutbacks lead to great savings".

• We've been visited by quite a bit of wildlife lately. First, our hawks are back as you can see in this recent photo of one sitting on the telephone wire. Then, while watering the garden last week, Scott accidentally watered a female mallard who had built a nest in a corner of the garden. She had about 10 eggs beneath her and we were really excited about the prospect of marching ducklings in May to the nearby river as our next-door neighbors did for her last year. Unfortunately, less than a week into her nesting she was outnumbered by a pair of nighttime bandits and forced to abandon the nest. Those raccoons ate her eggs and she never returned. Lastly, one such visitor was caught digging in our garden the other night and decided to stop for a drink before climbing the fence to freedom.
• Kathy bought some stiles and plugged one into the sugar maple in our front yard to see if the sap could be collected. She crafted a make-shift milk jug to the stile and after a couple of fill-ups, the resulting sap yielded several ounces of sweet maple syrup. Starting earlier next year should make for a bigger yield.
• The girls participated in the school science fair. As a fifth-grader, Gillie had to partner with someone and perform the experiments outside of the classroom. I'm not even going to try to describe what's going on in this photo of Gillie from the Science Fair, so just decide for yourself.
• We've posted a video of Gillie playing "Playing Soldiers" from a recent piano recital.

Around here, we've become big fans of Google Reader. It's an online feed aggregator, which is a fancy way of saying that it lets you read your RSS feed online, which is a fancy way of saying that if you read a lot of blogs online, you can read the newest entries for each all in one shot with this reader. My cousin, David, turned us onto it and it's been an enjoyable way of keeping up with blogs.

If you are not familiar with RSS, it stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a way of broadcasting a website's or blog's articles and updates. We use it here on Yanoff.org (you can subscribe via the RSS link at the top of each page). Users can then subscribe to the updates that a web site designates. Most modern web browsers offer a way to read RSS feeds, and newer versions of MS Outlook offer this as well. In addition, there are separate programs that can be run on your PC to merely pull down subscriptions. By subscribing to your favorite blogs and website updates, you are essentially creating your own newspaper with just the information you care about.

The part I like about the Google Reader is that because it is web-based, I can read my subscriptions from any computer no matter where I am. The Google Reader allows me to see only new items because it keeps track of what I have read. Subscription management is a cinch as even if you cannot find the "RSS" link or icon on a blog you like, you can choose to "Add Subscription" on the Google Reader and just paste in the web address of the blog and the Google Reader figures out how to get the blog postings. If you are a former reader of Usenet newsgroups, you know that Google assumed ownership of them and with the Google Reader you can also see your Usenet newsgroup subscriptions combined with your other RSS feeds.

We've been subscribing to the blogs you see in the "Blogging" sidebar on the left-hand side of our home page. We really enjoy reading photo blogs, comic strip blogs, updates from bands and sports teams we follow, and much more. Scott even broadcasts his frequent reviews for Amazon.com via RSS.

The Google Reader can even help you find new blogs similar to the ones you read if you visit the "explore" section. One last feature that we enjoy is the ability to star items for future reference, email them to a non-subscriber, or mark an article as worth sharing. If you have friends who use Google Reader, you can add them to the "people you follow" section, as my cousin and I have. Then, instead of emailing out every article or photo I find that I enjoy, I can just hit the "share" button on the article and know that it will be broadcast to those who follow me. I encourage you to view or subscribe to my shared items and let me know if you also share items so that I can follow you as well.