I could do something patriotic here since it is the weekend of the fourth and all. Instead I’m posting five puppy pictures I took yesterday, because this little Boxer couldn’t be cuter. I’m puppy sitting all next week so more photos are guaranteed.
This week you get a bonus.
I like the way the last shot turned out even though instead of looking cute she looks like a tough full grown boxer.
Hope you all have a happy 4th. Try not to lose any finger to fireworks.
Ok, technicly this should probably call this post Thursday There #1 but hey if I’m going to pretend this blog isn’t falling apart at the divs you need to keep pretending right along with me.
So anyone know where this was taken. I’m guessing we’ll see a quick response but what do I know.
I realized this week that it’s been quite a while since I posted a statue here. I always find statues interesting, their history is usually worth perusing.
After a week absence not three weeks in I’m bringing back Friday five. I had a hard time deciding what to put here this week. But decided after yesterday’s NBA draft it would be okay to put a basketball related post up. So here we go, the five most baffeling Minnesota Timberwolves moves.
All that being said, I’m exciting or the Wolves. Something new is coming and even if it’s another poor season, the thought of change makes me happy. I’m also ecstatic that we actually have a point guard on the roster. In todays league a point guard can make or break your team. I’m looking forward to the rest of the off season and the start of a new era.
Well after a brief hiatus, Where is back. This one comes to you from a far away land. Okay, not that far away it is in the 7 country metro and should be recognizable to at least a portion of you.
Happy guessing and get outside and enjoy this weather when you are done. It might be a bit humid, but compared to the last few days this is magical.
In an attempt to keep my blog from growing mold and slowly disappearing I thought I should put something up here. The last week has been fun, but I just didn’t have the ambition to write about anything. I thought I would put a quick listing of what I’ve been up to.
First, I went to my first night of Tech Karaoke last week. I had been planning on going to this on several previous occasions, but instead of making it I kept either forgetting or having something come up. I had a really good time, met some new people and even sang “Fat Bottomed Girls”. I’ll definitely be making it to more of these. I rode my bike to The Otter that night and it was kind of scary riding home. Lightening was flashing over the city, but once I realized it was nowhere near me all I could think of is how much I wished I would have had my camera and tripod with.
I also tried out a couple food places recommended to me. The first place I tried was the Cheeky Monkey Deli in St. Paul. Art was the first person who told me about it, and I’ll be honest, I’m listening to Art from now on. Not only is the place very unique, but the food was unreal. I had the roast beef sandwich and for what you pay you get some damn tasty food. I definitely recommend you check it out. The second place I tried was Dave’s popcorn. I had a craving for a chocolate shake earlier in the week and this was recommended by Angie as a great place to get a shake. I stopped by Friday and was not disappointed. It might not have been the best shake I’ve ever had but it was in the top ten.
Finally Saturday was incredible. I started out the day biking to the Stone Arch Festive. I wandered around, ate a few unhealthy things and really enjoyed the art on display. I’ve decided I should really work on my photography, maybe even take some classes, because I would love to compete with some of the artists on display there. I also took in a show by the The Alrights, who are slowly becoming a favorite of mine.
The Crowd at Rock the Garden
Saturday evening was the kicker though. I had purchased Rock the Garden tickets the day they went on sale and couldn’t have been more excited to go. We ended up missing Solid Gold, which I was okay with as I had seen them live previously. But we got there in time to see the other three bands. Yeahsayer was a disappointment for me. Though I enjoy their music, their live show was kind of boring. They just didn’t really have any sort of presence in my opinion and their music isn’t overpowering in itself. Calexico on the other hand blew me away. Of the four bands that were playing they were actually the one I was least looking forward to seeing, but they proved me wrong. Between the trumpets, the upbeat tempo,and the perfect music for a sizzling hot day I couldn’t have had more fun. I’m definitely a bigger fan of Calexico due to seeing them live.
The capper to the evening was of course The Decemberists. I had been looking forward to seeing them for quite some time. I can understand how some people aren’t fans of them, but I can’t help but enjoy them. I wasn’t sure about the fact they were playing The Hazards of Love from beginning to end, but it really worked. I think I’ll enjoy listening to the album more now. The end of their shows was awesome to, they played a couple songs from earlier CDs and then capped the evening off with a cover of Crazy on You. It was really a perfect ending to the night and I thought they actually did a better job that Heart did.
That’s my last week in a nutshell, hope you had a great one and hopefully I’ll be back to keeping your days full of insanely boring things soon. This heat is draining any ambition I have and I”ve been super busy at work. I’m going to try very hard to get a Where? up tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll hear from you then.
I am alive, in case anyone who doesn’t follow me on Twitter or hasn’t run into me offline was wondering. I’m having a blogging mid-life crisis apparently and nothing I write or do seems interesting to me. I’ll get over it soon I’m sure but thought I would assuage any worries.
I got home yesterday and immediately decided I had no interest in grocery shopping even though my cupboards were getting pretty bare again. I had plenty of lunch and breakfast items available but my dinner options seemed a bit limited. At first I was thinking oatmeal, but thoughts of breakfast turned me to eggs and suddenly I decided egg salad was going to be my dinner, well more specificly an egg salad sandwich.
Normally I wouldn’t write about something as simple as egg salad, but this batch was very good and I needed to save the recipe* for future use.
Add ingredients to bowl and mix. I’m making guesses as close a possible as I didn’t measure last night. So I’ve shared my egg salad recipe, now it’s your turn, anything you do differently when making egg salad?
*Recipe is of course used loosely here since I didn’t measure anything.
Today’s theme is Flickr searches. Flickr is my favorite website when I’m looking for something to do when my reader is empty and I don’t feel like putting a lot of effort into things. Here are five searches that never disappoint.
Have a great Friday everyone, hope your weekend is splendid.
Those who know me are aware I enjoy cooking and baking. Whether it’s making strawberry jam in an attempt to save the berries from spoiling, making ravioli, or putting together a pizza, I usually cook something three or four nights a week. Over the last year and a half, I’ve started to pay a lot more attention to my food choices. It started out as just looking at the nutrition info on boxes, but it’s slowly evolved into a life style change that I’m happy I made. Along with my lifestyle change, I’ve started to think more and more about how our food system works. I hope to share some of my viewpoints in this post.
Trying to eat healthy started almost two years ago. I finally decided I wanted to lose some of the freshman fifteen I gained in college and started changing my diet. After years of eating processed dinners and very few fruits and vegetables, I almost completely changed my diet in the course of a three-month period. I went from eating an English muffin for breakfast, to eating whole grain cereals, fresh fruit, or eggs on a daily basis. I stopped buying cheap white bread and focused on getting bread with plenty of whole grain and fiber.
By the end of last summer, I had lost almost twenty pounds. Weight loss wasn’t the only benefit I saw. I stopped having to take Tums or Xantac whenever I ate anything remotely spicy or drank too much. I had more energy, was sleeping better, and this started before I lost a single pound. The noticeable health improvement was shocking to me. This led me to make further changes in my lifestyle.
The more I cooked the more frequently I found myself reading food blogs. I started reading about sustainable agriculture, organic produce, local food, and other terms that are becoming more and more prevalent in our culture. This Christmas my brother bought me The Omnivores Dilemma. I really enjoyed it and after finishing it, I started looking even closer at my food choices. Unlike most cries to change the food system, Pollan didn’t just take up a cause and say “save the animals”, “buy locally”, or “support the little guy,” instead he researched his topics and presented the evidence and his viewpoint but in the end he left it up to the reader to draw their own conclusion.
Along with things I’ve read, my food philosophy is colored in many ways by how and where I grew up. I grew up on a family farm. We raised chickens, pigs, and cows. We grew durum and some feed grain. I’ve experienced butchering cattle, pigs, and chickens. I’ve picked eggs, bottle-fed calves and piglets, baled hay, and branded calves. We had a small farm but it was just a cog in the wheel of big agriculture. We shipped the cows and pigs to a feedlot and the durum ended up in some other state. The chickens on the other hand were a local product. We butchered them ourselves and kept the meat, we picked the eggs daily and my mom spent many afternoons delivering eggs around town.
I’ve seen how hard it is for a small farmer to make it. The one thing I’ve come to realize is that small farms that focus on growing a variety of produce can survive. However, these can only survive if there is demand, and in most areas where agriculture is the main economic driver, there are not enough people to buy the products from the farmers. There isn’t enough farmable land in Minnesota to feed the people in the Metro, and we live in a very large state, New York couldn’t come close to feeding it’s entire population. This isn’t to say we can’t all buy some things locally. Our food problems won’t be solves just by purchasing our food from a local producer, this isn’t the magic bullet. .
That being said, I don’t have a solution to the food crisis, and we do have a crisis, it’s evident in the obesity “epidemic” we’ve declared in our country, in the increase in food related diseases, and the panic that a single bad batch of ground beef causes. Food production and distribution uses more fossil fuel than home heating does. We need a solution that puts the environment and our national health first. When our economy isn’t floundering most of our country feels health care is our greatest problem. Why can’t we focus on cleaning up our food system? The health benefits of moving away from a system based on corn and fast food would make the problems solved by a single payer system seem minuscule.
Buy locally: As I said before I do not think this is something that can solve all of our problems. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt. Even if it is just one or two items, decide to buy something only from local farmers. Personally, I consider items grown in state or in a bordering state as locally produced. For starters, I suggest buying your meat, eggs, and milk locally. I think the difference in quality is noticeable and makes spending the extra money worth it.
Buy whole foods: I don’t mean shop at Whole Foods, in fact I don’t shop at Whole Foods at all, I don’t think they are doing the world any favors, I’ll buy organic produce from Target or Cub if I want to buy organically from a huge grocer. At least I know my dollars are going back to an MN corporation. By whole foods, I mean not processed beyond a certain point. That point is kind of up to you. Buy whole chickens and cut them up yourself, buy whole heads of lettuce instead of bagged and washed, buy carrots that haven’t been peeled, and yogurt that hasn’t been flavored. Try making your own yogurt, tortillas, or bread. Force yourself to do more with your food, it’s rewarding and it’s usually cheaper.
Go Vegetarian: I don’t think you should go completely vegetarian but I do think most people have too much meat in their diet. Try going a few weeks without eating meat. Doniree gave up meat for Lent and her experience was fun to follow. Some people choose one day a week on which they don’t eat meat. I don’t think there is anything wrong with eating meat but learning to prepare other forms of protein and supplementing your diet with them is a positive step.
Eat Whole Grains: This one is tough for me; things like tortillas and pasta just don’t taste right unless they are made from white flour. Still, I stopped buying cheap white bread a while ago, I usually buy Brownberry 12 grain bread, and if I want another type of bread I buy it from the Wedge where they use simple ingredients, usually just flour, yeast, salt, sugar, and water. Increasing your fiber intake is one of the best things you can do for your health.
Stop buying processed foods: This is one of the more difficult things to do. It means no more Mac N’ Cheese, no more frozen dinners, and no more Chef Boyardee. You can still buy prepared foods using this mentality. I don’t know how I define processed foods, the FDA probably has a definition, but the FDA’s definitions usually suck. I think it pretty much comes down to being able to look at the ingredient list and pronounce or know what every ingredient is.
Grow your own food: Even if you live in an apartment, you can at least grow some of your own food. I currently have a bunch of different herbs growing and can’t wait to start using them. You can grow tomatoes, potatoes, and many other things indoors using the amazing knowledge of the Internet.
try to follow most of what I suggested, but I also give in occasionally and completely disregard the things I mention here. Part of it is that when I have a bad day the last thing I want to do it put any effort into cooking, but part of it is a comfort food thing. My mom used to make me Mac N Cheese and frozen pizza so it makes me feel better when I eat them. I hope that if and when I have children that instead of reaching for white bread and Kraft American cheese they turn to whole grain bread and locally produced cheese and make themselves a, if not healthy, at least healthier grilled cheese.
This post isn’t meant to preach to you about how bad big agriculture or how you should never shop at Cub or any other big grocer. I’m just hoping you do some research and make your own decisions. We focus too much energy in the country worrying about calories, fat, carbohydrates, and other numbers. We need to train ourselves to worry less about those things and more about what our food is and where it came from.
There will be no Wednesday Where? today. I’ve been home most evenings and couldn’t find anything in my photo archives that seemed like a good candidate. Sorry about that. Instead I give you nine new blogs to peruse. They have been added to my Minnesota Reading List page. Please add any comments over there.
![Image of 21st Century Breakdown (Amazon MP3 Exclusive) [Explicit]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61t%2BIXqZhrL._SL75_.jpg "21st Century Breakdown (Amazon MP3 Exclusive) [Explicit]")
