soon!

ah! sorry for the long absence! matt and i have been without internet for about a week, and while it's been nice (more time for planting, tending to other projects, not wasting tons of time in front of the computer screen, reading more books) i've missed blogging. i promise to bring a big update soon about how the garden and seedlings are going. my grow table is overflowing with sugar snap peas, salad mix, spinach and carrots. i am super excited about how the garden is progressing!

all about food

so i have strep throat, and i'm up at my parents house in santa rosa. hanging out with my dogs, reading my old books that haven't made it down to my house [omnivore's dilemma!], eating my mom's homemade cookies. it's awesome... except for the strep throat part.

here are some really cool things i've stumbled upon:

Cricket Bread Blog - a guy who lives in North Carolina, and is involved in lots of neat projects; growing his own food, recycling bikes, community organizing. Very inspiring!

the gross paradox of the american diet 

- as seen at bayfair in san leandro

from the ethicurian

the ethicurian is a collective blog that highlights food policy, food safety, eating, and news relating to, well, food! there are lots of cool links; enough to keep me interested and entertained for hours, which is important when i'm stuck in my childhood bedroom for days :)

stickers available from the greenhorns etsy shop

The Greenhorns are a group that is creating "a documentary film about young farmers generating an agricultural revival". Their blog is called An Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles and their actual website is here. I'm reading their guide for beginning farmers, which is available as a PDF on their website - I'm totally digging the hand drawn illustrations.

Lastly, this awesome video about school lunches. I'm a teacher - you can check out my other blog at handmadeducation.blogspot.com - and I worked in the lunch room at my school for a few months. I was TOTALLY disgusted by how much food is wasted. For example, new milk is brought in everyday. At least 20+ milk cartons are thrown out because they were brought in the day before... the milk doesn't even expire for days, but we can't use milk that's a day old... what?!? Also, if the food isn't eaten, it has to be thrown away. Thank god we compost at our school, but still, all the plastic containers that the food comes in have to be thrown away. It was very frustrating seeing my kids eat poor quality meals, only to throw away a majority of them. The Edible Schoolyard, based in Berkeley, is such an inspiring project. I wish more public schools could afford programs like that!

starting our garden

the root systems on these types of weeds are amazingly tough.

matt is working hard all day long (11am-11pm, roughly), so i decided to get out in our garden and do some much-needed weed pulling and bulb planting.

a before:


after:


i pulled about 25lbs of weeds from that area alone. yikes!! our front yard is thankfully big, but it's also covered in plastic sheeting, weeds, and lava rock. it's going to be a little while before i can plant my seedlings -which i haven't started yet due to the weird weather. i planted about 35 tulip bulbs all around the perimeter of the fence in the area where it's just soil. a month ago i got really obsessed with the idea of planting tulips and daffodils around the edge of the fence, so i went out everyday for a week and tended to the soil - turning it, aerating parts, mixing it all up. it totally paid off! the soil is just the right consistency, and is already growing a bunch of wildflowers that i planted there about a week ago. yay! i hope my tulips will grow nice and big. also, in the corner at the top right of the fence, i planted about 10 daffodil bulbs.

i found lots of random things in the yard; we live on a pretty major street, so finding the occasional piece of trash is normal. lots of scraps of plastic, drink lids, papers... all kinds of things end up in our yard. this morning, a few other things showed up, too:

a san francisco muni fastpass. in my garden... in oakland.

a hilarious caterpillar that rolled itself around because it couldn't walk.

a cute ladybug who was unlucky enough to be on a weed i pulled.

there was also some chinese newspaper and a couple of mcdonalds cups. gah!! i'm out to garden some more.

songsmith

Oh hey, it's Matt.

My first post here, and it's not about biking, crafting or sewing, and although I do rather enjoy it I wouldn't say I "love" it.

If you haven't heard about Microsoft's new "Songsmith" (which you probably have), it's a program that automatically writes accompaniments to simple musical phrases, vocal tracks, or whatever you stick into it (garbage in, garbage out of course). See the official trailer... here.

So then a bunch of people started stripping down famous songs to just their vocal tracks and feeding them into songsmith, with hilarious results. A few highlights (to my hears):
Billy Idol - White Wedding
The Beastie Boys - Intergalactic
Weezer - Buddy Holly

Well, you probably know about that too, huh? Well then check this out; some guy in Germany put together a bunch of graphs of various statistics related to the current worldwide recession, then converted them into diatonic ("within a key") MIDI melodies, then fed them into microsoft songsmith.

The result? A Soundtrack for the Recession!

working hard for the money

Things have been a little nuts in our household lately. Matt was effectively gone all week for band tour, I started my (hopefully) last semester at SFSU [I want to transfer to the university where matt works], and afterschool has been crazy. I stopped working at my second job, so money has been a big issue for me. When I was looking at worldchanging, I saw this graph:



the working class are working harder than ever to pay for 15 gallons of oil. Meanwhile, CEO’s are working a mere 33 seconds. The distribution of wealth in this country is ridiculous. Minimum wage is very high in the Bay Area, and Matt+I are lucky enough to earn much more than that per hour, but our gasoline also costs a lot more!

make your own bike lane

i found this via worldchanging

how cool would it be to have your own non-destructive bike lane? in oakland, bike lanes are few and far between, unless you count the awkward (often poorly paved and maintained) edge of the road between the lane line and the sidewalk. matt is great at riding his bike in traffic, but i still get a little anxious because of my knee injury a few years ago - the thought of getting stuck or in a position where i'm not able to move is frightening. having a light like this to help drivers not only see where i am, but also to alert them to how much room i need seems like a good step towards safe biking practices. it's a bummer these aren't in production yet - there are lots of negative comments on the initial site, with caveats for every situation (snowy streets, groups of riders, drunk drivers), but if these weren't made solely on the basis that there are certain situations that they couldn't be used in, would we ever have innovative products?

the food map

while still in its baby stages, this is an amazing idea that really lets a visual learner understand where our food comes from. i'm toying with the idea of showing it to some of my students (kinder and third grade) when talking about local food.

i found the food map via worldchanging. i bought the worldchanging book not having heard of the website (from which is spawned). i highly highly recommend this book - the ideas in it have spawned a lot of changes in our household. matt and i like read parts to each other while the other is doing something mundane like cleaning or driving.