Are you Lutheran? Do you recycle? Are you a Lutheran who recycles?

We''ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming soon. But first I wanted to call your attention to a couple of newish blogs. They're specialty blogs, but good ones. The first one is called The Trashbasher, and it's written by my good friend Lo, made famous through this blog and through her wonderful dogs, Abby Jo, Bailey and Sara.

(And Abby Jo is doing very very well, brain tumor notwithstanding.)

Lo is an inveterate recycler (you should see her desk at work--she accepts recyclables from all of us in the room, and then cheerfully hauls them to the various recycling places) and she started the blog a couple of weeks ago to let people know of the many, many options for recycling beyond what the city will pick up curbside.

Bottle caps! Styrofoam! Plastic sacks! Christmas lights! Her blog focuses on sites in and around the Twin Cities, but check it out anyway. It's inspiring. Thanks to Lo, my household doesn't just compost, we also recycle plastic bags, yogurt cups, bottle caps... We have actually switched to a smaller (and cheaper) garbage can.

The other blog is called Pretty Good Lutherans, written and maintained and constantly updated by my long, long, long-term friend Susan, who has been a religion reporter at a bunch of major newspapers (Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis). Her site is a labor of love (and of self-employment---if you like it, there's a DONATE button you can click); she works on it ferociously. It's a news site devoted to news about Lutherans, and while that sounds quintessentially quaint and Keillor-esque, the truth is that there's been a ton of news lately and Susan has been on top of it like nobody else.

Churches breaking away from the ELCA, Minnesota Lutheran missionaries dying in Haiti, Minnesota Lutheran missionaries helping out in Haiti... take a look. It's impressive, the regular updates, the strong reporting, the clear writing. She also has a quirky sense of humor, and you might want to check out her "Martin the Bobblehead" site, where a bobblehead of Martin Luther keeps showing up in peculiar and unexpected places.

I'll get back to the adventures of Riley and Boscoe soon. Riley pulled a muscle and actually walked (as opposed to leaped/flew/levitated) up the stairs today, and Boscoe's elbow is bugging him, but outside of that they're just lying around snoring. All's quiet here. The cardinal photo? Our park. A welcome splash of color in deep midwinter.