She's not Ms. Dewey, but the new Muse bot from the Windows Live Spaces team will help you get you stay on track with your New Year blogging commitment and get your thoughts down to your blog (Space) on a regular basis, and provide you the thought of the day through Windows Live Alerts to inspire your blog postings. 

Add musebot@live.com, to your Messenger contact list.  Muse is the latest bot built on the platform Microsoft acquired from Colloquis last fall.  In addition to thoughts to post about, which are generated from the Muse thought of the day, or a quick conversation with Muse, you can post your blog posting directly out of Windows Live Messenger experience via the Muse Activity Applcation to your space thought the Muse agent.

Having recently read 'Salt a World History' I was intrigued to see how hard it was to make this stuff, which according to Kurlansky was a vital part of trade and commerce for thousands of years.  The picture below shows both the starting and finished product (2 liters of sea water and approx. 1/2 cup of finished sea salt).
Start with 1 two liter bottle of genuine salt water.  Simmer in a large pot over low heat for 3-4 hours, allowing evaporation.  Scrap crystals from the side back to the bottom of the pot.  Eventually you're left with a layer of moist crystals on the bottom of the pot.  Scrape this out, spreading it out on a tray or plate which you'll put in the oven to bake off the final water (hour @ 200F).

Viola! 2 liters of salt water should yield about 1/2 cup of your very own and very tasty sea salt (geniue Puget Sound water & resulting sea salt pictured at the left).

The history of salt really is worth a read.