In an oh-so-scientific survey, a "national emerging health care discount service" we'll decline to name (take that, PR flacks!) discovered that the most caffeinated city in the country out of 20 is ... Chicago! We don't make the top 5 there, but Seattle/Tacoma is number one in coffee consumption -- apparently we've mastered Starbucks lingo enough to order decaf on a regular basis. "58 percent of residents surveyed [said] this elixir of alertness would be......

We're not one of those people who hate "chemicals." Mmm, Diet Dr Pepper. But a few months ago we started to avoid buying milk that contained bovine growth hormone. Are we convinced it's bad for us? No, but we're convinced it's not explicitly good for us, either, since it exists to make life easier for dairy farmers. It's easy enough to avoid, and having a real live growing kid in the house makes us more......

We long ago accepted that when we left Wisconsin -- even the Milwaukee area -- the word "bubbler" would drop from our vocabulary. Little Miss Seattlest won't use it, and will at best find it a quaint relic of her father's birthstate. What we didn't realize before settling in Seattle, though, is that it's "pop" territory. We grew up saying "soda," or maybe "soda pop." But "pop"? When we were young, we found it......