Food for thought

I'm still chipping away at The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's been a very thought-provoking and enjoyable read. I have now decided to buy 500 acres of land somewhere and start a self-sustainable farm with cows, chickens, grass, and produce. Just kidding. What it has really inspired me to do, is to research viable options for eating locally produced food. In the book, Michael Pollen spends a week on Polyface Farm in Virginia that does its best to buck the industrialized way of producing and distributing food. In doing so, it is also able to produce food of a highly superior quality that you can't find in any grocery store--be it Walmart or Whole Foods. It made me want to move to Virginia.

After deciding that moving to Virginia probably isn't too practical, I spent a little time digging around online for places around here that make that kind of food accessible. It just so happens that next week is a big celebration hoo-rah for locally produced food and businesses in Utah. After looking around on that site a bit, I found a link to a CSA (community supported agriculture) in Utah that makes food drops to several locations around the Wasatch Front to people who subscribe to their service. You pay the money up front for the year, but then all season get to have farm-fresh, pesticide-free food. It looks very interesting!

An almost perfect match with UTA

I'm taking an ASL Linguistics class at the DATC this summer. Everything about it has been very good so far, including the fact that it is a near perfect match with UTA's bus schedule. It does add on another half-hour or so to the commute, but it's time that I can spend freezing to death on the over-air conditioned bus reading a book instead of fretting over morning traffic. Today I was able to get all of my homework from class done before I got home--and it only cost me $3.50 as opposed to the $6.26 I would have spent on gas (not to mention wear and tear on the vehicle), assuming I filled up at $4 a gallon. Not bad.

One thing that was a little odd was on the ride home, was that the driver kept stopping and waiting at some of the stops to stay on schedule. I rode the bus quite a bit in Provo, and never saw that happen. The strangest part was when the driver announced "I'm going to be waiting for about 6 minutes because I'm ahead of schedule, and I'm going to go over there to see if I can use the restroom." He left the bus running, doors open, got out and sure enough, headed over to a group of businesses to make a pit stop. Weird! I've never seen that, not even on all of the buses I rode in Russia. Anyone could have walked on and driven off with the bus.

So the next time you are stuck behind a bus that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, just realize that honking may not help. You might simply try pulling over and moving the bus...although in some places they might call that hijacking.

An excuse for lunch

It doesn't take much to make an excuse for lunch around here (ask Ryan about Subway--the whole 12 inches story). It is nice though, when lunch, my sister and a fabulous restaurant all happen to coincide.

I had a class this morning at the DATC in Kaysville, and plans to meet the Silent Weekend director (I'm her assistant) at a location we are considering as a potential place to have our event. So, I just happened to be driving through Salt Lake at lunchtime, and met up with Emily (she happened to be free, and even wanted to hang out with me!) at the Red Butte Cafe. Yum! I stepped out on a limb and ordered something different that what I might ordinarily order--a vegetarian dish involving spaghetti squash and some other goodies that ended up being quite good. I always get orderer's remorse when I go out to eat...you know where you order something, and then spend the rest of the time watching plates go by thinking "Ooooh, that looks good. Dang!"

The location Pam and I scouted out looks promising. It's located near Salt Lake, making it more centrally situated than other places we have had the Silent Weekend. Because we have schools coming from all over, that makes a big difference. It's also a LOT cheaper than one of the venues we have used for many years, but isn't quite as posh. The biggest concern that I have is that we will have 100+ people, and no real good meeting place where everyone can gather--unless you count the soccer field-sized bit of lawn outside. We will have to eat our meals in two shifts, and will be keeping fingers crossed for good weather!!

Hard at work or hardly working?

Yesterday, I finally moved my boxes and boxes of classroom stuff over to my new school. I am very thankful for my wonderful in-laws, who are always willing to help us with things like that. I'm also thankful that my father in-law was able to sweet-talk one of the student custodians into helping us haul it all in. And, did I mention that I am grateful to be at a school with an elevator?!? Heavenly bliss!
This is actually the second time in two years that I've had to move my classroom. Two years ago, I moved to a different room in the same building, and everything that I owned--books, filing cabinets, TV/VCR, bookshelves--had to be carried piece by piece up a flight of stairs. This fall I will be starting at a new school entirely, so my classroom moves again. It's been in my living room for the last three weeks while I waited for the carpets to be cleaned at my new school.
I think it's interesting that no matter what school you go in to during the summer, if you go expecting help from the custodians, you can pretty much forget it. "Oh, they are really busy--we can't spare any of our student custodians..." or "I think I could maybe send you someone in about an hour, but only for 10 minutes." These kind of statements are generally made (in all seriousness) while the student custodians are horsing around in some other part of the school, "cleaning lockers" or whatever else they pretend to do.
Yesterday was no different. I was going to avoid the whole issue and not ask for help, but my ever practical, silver-tongued father in-law wanted to expedite the process, and managed to talk one of the student custodians into finding a third hand-truck for us, and still another to haul boxes. It went a lot faster, and even though one of the full-time custodians kept muttering things like: "These teachers expect us to drop everything and help them haul all of their crap around," we managed to get it all done in short order.
Now I'm officially moved in to my beautiful room with windows (sigh!), and my not-so-beautiful sky blue and brilliant sunshine yellow walls. That's another story for a different day. I think sometime soon I will be thankful for some buckets of paint, and the off-the-record permission granted from someone at the school to paint... ("Teachers aren't supposed to paint the walls. We won't be painting your room anytime soon. If you do it, no one would blame you, and I didn't hear a thing you just said about painting.")

Cats and books

It's been a while since I've posted. It doesn't mean I'm not thankful for anything, it just means that I'm a slacker. Today I am thankful for...
1. Our new cat-scaring device
2. An interesting book

1. Cat-scaring devices
Let me just preface this with saying that I have been a cat owner before, and I don't really hate cats, or the people who own them. I just hate them pooping in my lettuce patch. We have been waging war with a cat who has staked out my garden to be its litter box. Grrr! I think that cat probably has the same wicked expression on its face when it sneaks in at night that you see on those horrible renditions of Calvin peeing on the Ford/Chevrolet/other symbol of your choice. I can give you a whole list of things that don't work:
--cayenne pepper (washes away after the first rain)
--upside-down mouse traps (Maybe it scared the poop out of the stupid beast--we've found a couple that have been sprung, next to a newly soiled part of garden. It didn't scare it enough, because it came back after that.)
--skewers planted about every three inches (cat just pushes them to the side so it can more comfortably do its business)

We had some old chicken-wire-like-mesh kicking around that Ryan rigged up to cover one patch that has been hit multiple times. That worked for that one, but we can't do that to the entire garden.

Enter: The Scarecrow

(This isn't our dog or yard, by the way.) Ryan found the scarecrow online, and installed it yesterday (after a few trips to the plumbing store). It will be interesting to see if it works. It will also be interesting to see how long it will take for the kids on the other side of the fence to figure out they can trigger the motion sensor by lobbing a ball over the fence.

2. Interesting book
I think I'm thankful I'm reading this one. It's a jaw-dropper. I'll let you know if I'm still glad I've read it when I'm done. I kicked off my summer reading with a bit of brain fluff (River Secrets by Shannon Hale). I'm following that up with The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Wow. This book has really opened my eyes to what it is that we are actually eating when we are eating anything that has been processed (90% of what you find in the grocery store), and why we have some of the health and eating problems that we do today. Did you know that most everything we eat today is made out of corn? Our diet has changed more radically in the last 50 years than it has in the preceding 500. Although the industrialization of our food production has increased the amount of food we can produce, it has been very damaging to the environment, to farmers, and to our relationship with food.
That's the simplified version of it. This book has really given me something to chew over (pun intended--I've been living with Ryan too long...) All silliness aside, it has made me very grateful for my amazing mom and grandma, and their thoughtful approach to preparing food for their families. In addition, it has made me re-think my initial reaction to a few things I encountered on my mission. We were always grossed out by the thought of buying any kind of meat at the outdoor markets in Russia, and so tended to stick to a vegetarian diet (and probably with good reason). One time, my companion and I found some Tyson chicken pieces being sold. They were leg quarters that were plump, frozen and plucked (things in its favor that other offerings lacked). We bumped in to one of the members of the branch while we were out, and we told her about our find. Her total disgust and suspicion of the chicken pieces surprised me, along with her fear of the "American-made chicken full of hormones". I had never given much thought to why American chicken was so much plumper than the skinny Russian birds laid out on the butcher blocks. She was just as skeptical of American meat as we were of the local Russian-produced birds. In hindsight, we probably were eating more garbage while dining on our American chicken than she was eating a Russian chicken which, although probably exposed to pollutants and radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, was raised without all of the crap we put the poor beasts through that Americans eat.

And on that happy note, I think I'm done for the day. Happy Sunday to all! I don't know what I would do without my day of rest. =)