Disclosure: This is a sponsored post for Green Mountain Coffee®.

Are you a coffee drinker? I wasn’t at first. In college, I watched many other students come to class with their morning coffee fixed tightly in their hands, as necessary for class as their textbooks and pens. I was primarily a soda drinker, and occasionally tea for when I wanted my caffeine hot.

It wasn’t until after I became a nurse that I understood the power of coffee. Coffee and soda both have caffeine, but coffee has a richness to it, a savory flavor and aroma, and I swear the caffeine from coffee works better than anything else to wake up a tired brain. Drinking something thin, sweet and carbonated did little to help me get through night shifts, but coffee could keep me going. (I mistakenly went back to soda when I took an overnight phone nurse job. I should have stuck with coffee.)

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Disclosure: I participated in a campaign on behalf of Mom Central Consulting for T3. I received a product sample to facilitate my review and as a thank you for participating.

Going to Chicago for BlogHer, I had a freshly dyed head of hair, with a lovely purple ombre on the lower half. It was vibrant purple when I left Columbus and I was so very happy with the color.

With each trip under the hotel’s shower, though, I started to notice streaks of lavender-blonde showing. How was it disappearing so quickly? I didn’t wash it for a few days after dying it to give the color the best shot at settling in. I was using a shampoo designed for color-treated hair, I was washing it in water as cold as I could stand – what was wrong? My best guess was the hotel water, since I could smell the chlorine in it.

Back at home after the conference, my hair looked like a big mess by mid-week – streaky and brittle on the ends. The color was even worse, my split ends were growing, and my hair was so frizzy.

The bottom 4-5″ used to be bright purple, promise. It was SO pretty. Now it’s just sad.

That was an expensive short-term ombre, that wasn’t supposed to be short-term.  I didn’t even touch my hair dryer or straightener since I had my hair dyed, so I can’t blame heat styling for the color disappearing.

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Did you know Green Giant makes chips now? Neither did I, until I was recently asked if I’d like to try their new veggie snack chips with my family. After I got home from Chicago, there was a box waiting for me with two bags of chips inside: Garden Ranch Roasted Veggie Tortilla Chips and Barbecue Multigrain Sweet Potato Chips.

Now, I’ll admit to being a little skeptical at first. Potatoes are vegetables, and that’s what nearly every chip is made from, right? So the first thing I did was take a look at the ingredients:

Easy-to-read ingredients

Whoa, there are a lot of good ingredients in these chips. And I can pronounce all of the ingredients, too. There’s no way I’d count this as a replacement for a serving of vegetables in our diet, but I’m happy to get a little extra wherever I can. Beyond the veggies, there are some great grains in there, too: buckwheat, millet, quinoa.
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