from beautiful this...

...to this.

cabbage butt symmetry.

reader participation (please!)

hi friends.
so, if you haven't guessed, the main purposes of the blog are:
1) staying in touch
2) procrastination
3) recording things so i will remember them (or remember to pen and paper write about them) later.
4) to keep all the stuff i like in one place
5) posting pictures
6) procrastination.

so, since i like to procrastinate (and my two favorite methods are computer-ing and cookie eating) please save me lots of calories and fat by interacting with this blog and giving me things to read so i can procrastinate longer. and i really really like to hear from you. yes! yes you can make this blog interactive. there are two ways...
a: leave a comment. it's easy. just click the 'comments' link and say something witty, clever, boring or just a hello. you are welcome to!
b: (new) at the bottom of each post are 'reaction' buttons. right now they are silly labels i made up...but vote if you want...or suggest new reactions.

i realize i sound like a raving lunatic desperate for communication with friends from across the country...and, well, it's basically true. so just do it.

(can you tell i am procrastinating going back to my ag test studying?)

libra hugs under the waning moon!

there is no fast-forward button.
that makes life both incredibly exciting and full of impatience.

might as well be here, now.

(practice!)

good times

there seems to be no shortage of fun things that happen when i set foot outside the front door. yesterday, a rainy run through the arboretum with the dog. it's such a quiet and splendid place, and fierce gets to run off leash on peter's hill! at the end of the run i finally stole some fallen quinces from the two quince trees i have been eyeing. i'm pretty sure quince is my favorite fall fruit (ok, unless we are putting winter squash in the botanical 'fruit' category). i am sure i looked like the biggest goofball sneaking around under the umbrella-like trees, looking for fruit that were un-bruised, un-slugged and un-whole-y enough to stuff in the pockets of my raincoat and sneak home with. the dog rolled in the wet grass, happy as a clam. i came home with a fair amount of quince and muddy pockets. a good deal all around.

this morning i (attempted) to bike to the house where a few classmates live for a study session...but i couldn't find their place. hmmm. maybe i wasn't supposed to study there afterall! but, i did discover the sunday farmers' market, tiny & delicious. the sponsoring non-profit had a bunch of 4 oz tubs of fromage blanc...that a farmer donated...for them to give to people...i know...unbelievable. so i gave them a donation and have creamy delicious cheese. and, cabbage was only $2 a head for fairly large heads. so now i'll be making a big batch of sauerkraut, not just a small batch. (except that the coop doesn't have kosher or pickling salt...which seems weird). then i biked home, earlier than planned, and got to study.

study break number two: 12:30 blessing of the animals at the unitarian universalist church. it's a short trip and the dog hadn't had a walk...so we went on an adventure. a small group of adults and kids, and 2 dog, 2 guinea pigs, 1 caterpillar and many stuffed animals (yes it was a blessing of animals and stuffed animals) gathered on the church steps. it was adorable. each type of animal got a blessing, including all the cats (in absentia) and stuffed animals (present and at home - for those stuffed animals that almost all of the adults present fessed up to having at home). it was super sweet, but my favorite part was watching a young/new minister have to make up a blessing for a guinea pig on the spot...it went something like this..."thank you god, for the guinea pig. their ability to (pause) hold still for long periods of time, their furriness, and their (pause) rodent-ness." if only i could remember it all, it was glorious. the caterpillar blessing was equally good ("power for transformation, furry-ness..."). it was so sweet to see all these adults just willing to just show their fond-ness for animals, and a lot of sweet tenderness too. especially some of the parents there with little ones, they were equally moved (i know, it sounds silly) by the whole thing.

then we walked to the new pet store. who knew that teeny-tiny dog snacks added up so fast? hmmm. the best part was that they have bite-meez which i haven't seen for years and made me so happy!

now home and back to the books. next time i will tell the story involving lowering a cat out of a tall tree in a purse.
adios!

no, really, follow the link...

i actually visited this sock monkey art page after i blogged it...and i feel like throwing it in at the bottom of the post following post is giving it short shrift. really, you should look at all the photos in the 'monkey series'.
that's all, back to regularly scheduled programming.

chord geek out

yay for teachers who send chord progressions to try playing on the harmonium through snail mail . i was just learning a few basic chords when i left portland, and i am out of practice. after actually remembering what a chord is...i set out to figure out what notes i was actually supposed to be playing. i found this incredible do-hickey at piano world dot com. wow, i'm a visual person and it was so fun to see what keys equal which chord and get the notes for it. yes, i figure most people did this in kindergarten when they learned to play the piano/recorder/violin. i was not one of those people...so i get to learn as an adult. yay for learning. tomorrow...during daylight hours in a hopefully empty house...i will play!

and, in honor of said teacher...click here.

mission accomplished

well friends...
it's time to pull out the index cards, make flashcards and disappear for a few days. adios!

...and...
I'm pretty sure I am studying how nutritious a
dinner of m&m's and beer is.

I've found my people...now how do I become friends with them?

despite the post following this...I'm craving a hot dog, canolli, decaf coffee with cream and honey and an 'oreo' from the delicious bakery 'flour'.

food inc.
if you haven't seen this docu-film...you should. beyond the egregious footage of slaughterhouse kill floors, which ensure that I will never eat meat whose farmer I haven't met, it does a pretty good job of giving a fair image of where our food comes from, a bit of pulling back of thr veil. I believe it comes out on DVD in a few months.

on my first big city adventure...except that the city isn't really big and every say is an adventure. I'm off (after a for real, actually lovely yoga class) to see a girlyman show in somerville. that involved a bus and a train, but so far neither has been an obstacle for my amazing sense of direction (ha!). I'm just excited to see girlyman...even if it means going alone.

on my first big city adventure...except that the city isn't really big and every say is an adventure. I'm off (after a for real, actually lovely yoga class) to see a girlyman show in somerville. that involved a bus and a train, but so far neither has been an obstacle for my amazing sense of direction (ha!). I'm just excited to see girlyman...even if it means going alone.

autumn night moongazing from thr front porch, crisp as a fall apple, the first wood fires of the season, content.

i would like to learn to make shoes...

cute little leather shoes. with cute rivets. and gum soles. and bold stitching. does anyone know any good cordwainers?

maybe i'll save that project for later...for my free time later...

dog + cat = bff

chicken drama

1500 miles...

oh geez, i just love being in school and getting to ponder all the things i have always wanted to. we had a guest lecturer last week who freely touted the line that we have all heard so many times (or maybe you haven't...so start paying attention now!) that our food travels on average 1500 miles to get from farm to table. our lovely professor asked us to think about that number we hear so often...and ask where it comes from. as i am a person who tends to like facts, i decided to do some hunting. and while we can all gather from the state of our current food system that food sure does travel far...where does that number come from? looks like that specific number comes from an early 2000's Leopold Center study/report looking at food miles to Chicago. I don't have to tell you about it because Slate already has done a good job of it. fascinating! i love how the media can get a hold of anything...and the public picks it up and suddenly it becomes widely accepted fact...kind of like the fad diets we get to talk about in nutrition class. the original paper looks really interesting (and specific) mostly because it outlines exactly how they determine food miles for food. i think that the paper focuses solely on produce, which makes sense since it has a single point of origin and little processing (mostly dispersion through distrubution hubs). what i want to know is how we can think about things like food miles for products like coke or peeps. (from corn field to lab to processing plant and on and on). la la la! i am so happy.

on a side note, peeps are a frequently used reference 'junk food' in nutrition class. hmm.

wow, time to detox from itacha 92609! I think I have a goat cheese and cupcake hangover. what an amazing ceremony of joy to be a part of, and an incredibly fun weekend to boot. Katie and I made it safely back to boston. I've been studying for my statistics test and watching fierce follow Sadie the cat around the house. I'm exhausted after so much celebrating and glad to going to bed. happy almost October. I know I'm biased, but it's surely my
favorite month. adios!

thank goodness for friends...friends who get celebrated. it's like a mini portland reunion in ithaca to celebrate katie and tara...I feel blessed (and it makes me miss my old home and 'hood more than I have so far). wow.

three's company!

ithaca farmers' market

one nice thing about life...you can never really know what's going to happen. like I never really saw myself riding home on the t in boston on a sunny autumn afternoon in my green sweater with a nutrition book in my lap and listening to chris pureka with a cute black dog waiting for a walk, or wanting farm, or loving chickens or eating beans on a regular basis. but here I am. and there you are (who ever you might be!) it's all just so lovely. a real-life choose your own adventure book, but you don't always know what the options will be. I could say 'you don't know how it's all gonna turn out', but that implies that there will be some permanant thing that happens to define the rest of it (well, that one thing is the same for all of us)...which isn't true. so, one content foot after the other...we'll just see where this path leads.

beans.

there's been a lot of talk about beans lately. a classmate brought a delicious dish of beans to a potluck last week. turns out they were rancho gordo dry beans he bought in san fran before leaving to move to boston. i just read a small piece about fiber and where to get it...beans. but really, the kicker was in ag class this week: talking about agricultural industrialization and the transition in the uk from a one crop system (grain/fallow) to a two crop system (grain/legume/fallow). the addition of the legume (bean!) added nitrogen to the soil and protein to the human diet (a nice side effect). the prof's slide showed something like a lima bean...but we wondered what kind of bean it really was. he said he couldn't find that info and sent us on a search.

that all leads to me thinking back to a year ago when i was helping jason & amber harvest and thresh beans at their red truck farm (wow, so glad to see they have a blog, with a great post about the beginning of dry bean season). these are the best beans i have ever eaten. i wonder if they will ship me some on the east coast, even though it automatically makes them non-local! there is nothing like harvesting real food, by hand (ok, or with small clippers) to put much of life in perspective. clipping and pulling the dried plants and stacking them in their appropriate pile, by variety, in the metro barn. running each variety through the thresher (a modified wood chipper), clearing out stem and leaf debris as they clog the machine. pouring rubbermaid binds and 5 gallon buckets of dry beans, leaf parts and small clods of soil past the gust of a running fan to separate the seed from the rest. each tiny, beautiful seed will grow more of its kind or nourish someone's belly. i guess it's good to know when we have found the things that mean something to us.

that all leads me here now. flipping through the rancho gordo heirloom beans cookbook. wondering which beans the people of the uk used to eat and how those beans got there (most beans are new world or eastern in origin). missing the sunny september days of portland, the fun of farming with friends, harvesting quinces from the howell bybee orchard and enjoying the seasonally angled, golden yellow of the fall sun on sauvie island. but knowing that just as much stands ahead as behind.

off to research my beans!

info on basic bean varieties and their history.

hunger.

no, this is not a serious post about hunger in the world. it's about the fact that most of my classes (excluding statistics) involve talking about food. food nutrition. food policy. how we grow food. it's great, i love it. it makes me hungry. hungry all the time with all of this thinking about and talking about food. in the guest seminar today, the guest speaker made the recommendation that we stop selling so much liquid milk in the market, that instead we should convert it to cheese. cheese was basically the old fashion method of preserving fresh milk (think: no refrigerators, cows not lactating all the time, more than you can drink). of course, with modern technology we can drink and preserve fresh milk to our hearts' content. that's a side note. anyhow, the guest speaker john carroll (from unh) suggested that producers should just make more cheese. and this was in the context of smaller scale farming and farmers' markets. so, of course, i start thinking about all the different kids of delicious artisan cheeses out there...and at 12:15pm found myself rather hungry. this also happens in nutrition class when we are even talking about food digestion. in ag class when talking about meat processors. in food policy class i even got hungry when they showed us a packet of emergency peanut-based nutrition supplement for the severely undernourished (among other things, i have a peanut butter weakness). so between all this food talk and larger quantities of biking than usual...i'm ok eating lots of delicious food. off for some smoked mozzarella (saturated fat and all).

the thing about e-mail...

is that it is always there for you...and it's so easy to look back at all the stupid things you've written. no need to generalize here, things i have written! it tends to happen when i do a search for something/someone that i know is somewhere in my e-mail. a generic search brings up other hilarious, historical e-mails and topics that i forgot were part of my life. i love that we get to keep floating down the river of life and everything keeps changing. it's fun to look back and see from where we have come! there's a great indigo girls song to the same theme: watershed.

enough old e-mail oogling...i found what i was looking for (other than a good laugh) back to work. the work being duct tape, homework and trying not to take myself too seriously.

food labels...

i thought i had figured out food labels, and actually...i have a pretty good handle on them. what i never thought about though was exactly how much work, wording and regulation goes into the labels. thank you fda for setting such specific standards as:

N7. When the caloric value for a serving of a food is less than 5 calories, can the actual caloric value be declared?

Answer: The caloric value of a product containing less than 5 calories may be expressed as zero or to the nearest 5 calorie increment (i.e., zero or 5 depending on the level). Foods with less than 5 calories meet the definition of "calorie free" and any differences are dietarily insignificant.
#
N8. Should a value of 47 calories be rounded up to 50 calories or rounded down to 45 calories?

Answer: Calories must be shown as follows:

* 50 calories or less--Round to nearest 5-calorie increment:
Example: Round 47 calories to "45 calories"
* Above 50 calories--Round to nearest 10-calorie increment:
Example: Round 96 calories to "100 calories"

just can't get enough: go here.

girlyman

these are things that are exciting...
1. girlyman has a new website
2. girlyman is touring my part of the country very soon
3. how many shows do i want to watch in one week? what if they count as birthday presents to myself?
4. maybe katie hughes & co will come with me?

hmmm.....yay!!!!

farmers' market!

mmmm! first full week of classes, yay! tonight I will celebrate by making ground pork/corn and leek stuffed buttercup squash and watching episode 3 of glee. after yoga, after studying.

the paper clip idea...

i have this thing with paper clips, and this idea. i collect paper clips that i find on the streets and sidewalks and places where paper clips don't really belong. my long time plan was to collect them and label them with 1)where i found them and 2) display them somehow. basically, an art installation project. but with blogs and phones that can post pictures to the internet, i thought about making a paper clip blog. on my dog walk this morning i came up with the name...the paper clip project : documenting paper clips in the wild. appropriate as i am now back in school...sounds like a research project. la la la.

well, i just took a study break and thought i would google the paper clip project just to see what's out there. and i found this which seems kind of important and a big deal and i don't want my project to seem like it is putting down something so, well, serious and respectful.

so, either i need to not care so much, or think of another name. i was basically going to make a blog and invite people to post pictures of wild paper clips in their (native?) habitats. hmmmm...

any ideas? (this is where you leave comments on the blog! i know who you are!)

[back to studying]

the best part of the pet rock festival

fierce and stella!

normal nap posture

don't be jealous...

of my totally rockin' saturday night.
i know, i know, you are all (all three of you) wondering how i spent my first saturday night in boston. well, let me tell you...it involved the following lovely events...
-walking the dog in the rain
-buying a calculator for statistics
-reading statistics
-listening to an online edition of statistics class
-taking an online statistics quiz
-helping my housemate assemble her bed
-baking chocolate chip oatmeal cookies
-hanging pictures on the wall
-responding to an e-mail from my elementary school best friend/neighbor
& discovering that there are eight million duct tape orders piling up and trying not to have a mini 'i-don't-know-what-to-do-about-this-yet' attack.

overall, it's been a pretty great night.

tomorrow i meet up with some old friends (and their dog stella) at the pet rock festival. it sounds like it's a festival dedicated to the charming pet rock fad of the 80's (or was it 70's), but actually it's a big rock concert festival fundraiser for rescue animals. with a dog water park. in worchester.

good night!

and this is a reason why I am a plant & food geek...

puppies? kittens?

oh friends, just when you think that things are feeling pretty mucky...you find something like this...

internet at home...sort of

yay! internet at home! it's amazing how much easier, more productive and smoother life is when there is internet at home. we were supposed to have internet yesterday, but the company goofed...but our downstairs neighbors were kind enough to let us borrow their internet password for a day or two until ours starts working. yay!

and since no one uses books anymore, and most of my readings (ok, about 50%) are either websites, pdfs, or scanned books...the computer is becoming more important. it's interesting that these readings are all done online to safe time and paper, but most students end of printing them out anyway...which seems way less efficient for the 'saving time' argument...especially since the school printer and copy machine jam all the time...and the printer is packed with students all the time. oh well. nothing's perfect. i just ordered the rest of my books & software. yes, software! it's some sort of nutrition software for investigating what we eat...i think we have to food diary for a few days and then enter everything into this program...this i am very, very geekily excited about.

hmmm, la la la, what else...?! for a school of nutrition that has a program focusing on agriculture (mostly of the local/sustainable/progressive variety) i was surprised that we had the regular old spread of bagels and cream cheese (on styrofoam plates!!!!) for breakfast, and that there were fat free lays potato chips and diet sodas served with lunch...and that none of the food seemed to be local. hmm, maybe that's a good project to work on. but really, the soda thing really threw me for a loop. and everyone's lunch was pre-packaged in a paper bag...and it all just went into the overflowing trashcan when we were done. interesting.

biking in boston is an interesting challenge. i think i have figured out how to get to and from school most efficiently and have it down to about a 25 minute ride, at least home. i've decided that streets are so much more efficient than 'bikeways', especially when the bikeways involve waiting with pedestrians to cross ped x-ing (xing!) at intersections and when most of the bikepaths are pot-holed or bumpy from tree roots growing under the path. plus, riding with cars is just must faster. there are about a million community gardens between my home and school (by bike) and one day i will just stop to look at all of them on my way home! i also cross over darcyface's street each day by bike...and i get excited that we live in the same city! one day i will figure out which way to turn and i will visit her (except that she'll be at work...hmmm).

it's borderline chilly tonight! i had to close my window, it was that chillly. but soon the leaves will start changing colors and then it doesn't matter what temperature it is, because life is automatically awesome.

we have become a four person, three dog household as jessica moved in yesterday with her adorable dog rhubard. i think fierce is excited to live with another adult dog (as opposed to a puppy). so far fierce and rhubarb have been performing funny territorial antics in the house and generally grant each other wide berth...but i think they will be bff's in no time.

i have class a whopping 12 hours a week. but i think i will spend at least 24 reading and another 12 doing homework. none of which are things to complain about, i am always so happy to have a reason to curl up at home with a book (or e-book or computer).

back to the books! (and i apologize that this post isn't letting me spell-check)

off to find my way home by bike...
I made I here, I'll probably make it back.
it helped that Portland is in a grid, those of us that are directionally challenged are having a fun time making this make sense. and she's off...

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here are some things we did today: washed the dog at a u-wash dig wash in Portland (we pretty much got washed too), ate an amazing AMAZING dinner that involved quince paste and cheese and crab salad and cured duck and arugula and bacon wrapped dates, walked around the Portland of the east coast, took awkward family photos (see below), practiced yoga and took it easy. back to the hotel...hopefully to sleep through the night!

I'm her mom. no she's not. (duh, of course she is)

the candy store gets graphic

I am challenged by being a tourist. (that was some diplomacy after my original thought: I hate being a tourist).

life is good, part 2 (maine!)

life is good, part 1

officially sick:
I made it through orientation, but rushed home instead of going to happy hour because I didn't have anything left in me (and thank goodness...happy hour mingling takes a lot of energy)! although, I have to say that the people in my program are pretty cool, yay! came home to a house full of my furniture! yay for parents and yay for movers!!! I dug my mis-matched sheets out of boxes ('don't you think you need new sheets!' my mom asked. nope!) and crawled into bed. officialy I have a fever, and a that point I know it's ok to give up and craw into bed. no orientation for me tomorrow, just rest & healing. buenos noches!