>>We're with you on many of those. Others, not so much. I like salted butter--I view it as one of the wonderful ways of bringing salt to my body. <s>
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>But do you really need that much salt? I know we have a tradition of salty foods, given that there wasn't any other viable way of preserving food for most of the last millennia, but then we've learned a few things. Being a medical husband, I've learned that our organism can get rid of as much as 30 times of its daily dose of salt, and that the heart can go on and on pumping a liquid which is a tad too thick. But there's a price, in blood pressure, wear and tear of the pump and filters (i.e. heart, kidneys) and then there's the taste. Salt just covers too much of it. Once I started getting rid of the salt, I started discovering taste - pretty much just like I'm rediscovering smell these days, after giving up on smoking.
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>Salt in regular food (bread, for instance) is all the salt one actually needs. There's no real need for the salt shaker on the table, only a custom. We've seen it at work when we had guests from home this summer - their eating habits are not from the same planet as ours :).
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It took me about 6 months to break my husband of automatically salting food before tasting it. I think what finally got him to stop was pointing out how insulting it was to the cook.

>>Certainly no SUVs around here and our 13-year-old minivan finally gave up the ghost over the summer, so we're all driving mid-size cars now. I miss that van, though.
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>Judging by our needs at the moment, I'd just get a Smart, or something completely plug-in-electric.

I need to find something that gets about 40mpg and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I drive about 25 miles one way to work and that's one gallon in my car.