Cackleberry in California!

There is simply no excuse - good, bad or indifferent - for neglecting Cackleberry for so long. So here's one more attempt to get back on track and bring you the great recipes, vegan musings, updates on the animal rights movement and all the other good stuff I used to put out at least semi-regularly.

The news is that I moved, with My Beloved and our two rescue pups, from New England to California - finally fulfilling a dream that we'd shared for several years but never been able to act upon. However, when opportunity suddenly knocked, we leapt at the chance to make the transition from plucky New Englanders to carefree Californians. We quit our jobs, put the house on the market and high-tailed it west.

The road has been long and not a little challenging and you can read all about the actual journey at our travel blog, TheTeapotTourist.blogspot.com, which we updated each day as we drove coast to coast from Westfield, Massachusetts to Concord, California. We rented an RV - a singular experience in and of itself - and, having loaded all of our 'stuff' into a POD and shipped the cars via transporter, we spent 10 days living on the road. Why did we not just fly? Yes, I can hear you asking the obvious question! Well, the truth of it was that Darwin the Beagle, our senior pup, was undergoing a second course of chemo for lymphoma and he was too sick to fly. Besides which, neither My Beloved nor I were confident that either of the pups would be looked after by the airlines as well as we would want, so driving seemed like the only option to us. We gave him his chemo on the road and each state that we passed through offered a dog-friendly campsite that was happy to welcome a slightly shaky senior to its community. :)

And having settled in and felt the California sun on his Back, Darwin is now doing well, as are the rest of us. West coast living suits us and I am finding new interests and new meaning in my life. No, things have not worked out exactly as I had hoped, and there have been a number of disappointments and frustrations, but overall the change is refreshing and inspiring. I passionately want to get back to writing Cackleberry, to playing with new recipes, sharing new photos, and spotlighting issues within the vegan world. In terms of my commitment to veganism and to the animals, nothing has changed in the slightest.

I do not expect that the kind folks who used to follow this blog will flock back in droves, but I do hope the word might get out that Cackleberry is back: bigger, better, still uncompromising, and packed with news, updates, recipes, restaurant reviews, photos, gossip, and all things vegan and animal.

I hope to see you soon. In the meantime, stay vegan, friends!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

At last, an iPad!

Today, at long last, I bought an iPad. I really hope it'll help me in so many ways, one of which is in letting me update Cackleberry a little more frequently and more easily. It's not that I don't have anything to say, but that - like everyone else - I have limited time to write. So the snatched 5 minutes here or 10 minutes there are going to come in handy as I get back to a more frequent and regular blogging habit.

One of the first things I'll be doing is a restaurant review. Tonight My Beloved - without whom, let's face it, the iPad would have continued to be a dream - and I are going to visit Karma, the new vegan restaurant I mentioned in my last post. It turns out that their niche within a niche is actually raw vegan. And as neither of us are huge fans of raw food - except the naturally raw stuff like fruits and veg and salads - this will be interesting. Nevertheless, intrepidly we go forward this evening and will report what we uncover at Karma!

Meanwhile I shall continue to learn what this neat little iPad doohicky can do....

Stay vegan, friends!

Vegan Blog Tracker - Vegblogs!

Am I the last person ever to learn about RSS and newsfeeds?

Apparently so.

And to remedy that, I have added a feed (top, right, friendly-looking orage icon!) to Cackleberry so now you never need to miss a post!

Why? I hear you ask.

Well, I would very much like to be included in the blogroll at Vegblogs.com among such vegan luminaries as the Vegan Freaks (Bob and Jenna!), Fatfree Vegan Kitchen (Susan!) and A Vegan Ice Cream Paradise (Agnes!) so I have added my feed and will wait to see what happens!

To check out Vegblogs.com yourself, click on this link or visit via my blogroll to the right, 'Blogs of Note' ->

Welcome, Welcome!

Hi Guys!

This is the placeholder entry for my new blog - Cackleberry!

It's going to be all about this new vegan journey I'm on - recipes, news, frustrations and successes.

And it'll be full of oddities too - starting with the title itself!
What the heck is a cackleberry?????

I'll let you know soon!