This post has been written over the past six months…

The Gift of Organic Food

After much asking around (Thanks to Sue, Sara and Amit who all offered their opinions), if this gift idea was WAY to far out to be considered a REAL gift, I decided that yes, indeed giving Joanna a weekly subscription to a Share Organics local organic food bin was going to be a part of her birthday (Dec 28th) present. And today (this was way back in January) the first bin of goods arrived.

We started out with a weekly delivery, which while it seemed completely reasonably at first (at $35/week it was a bit expensive for veggies, but I figured that if it meant that we could eat more organic veggies it would be worth it.  But truth be told, we just couldn’t keep up.  Too many veggies.  On top of too many veggies. This was likely because we went with the local only box, meaning that the produce had to be from geographically close locations. The types of veggies that we’re used to weren’t regulars in our boxes. So we quickly figured out that one every two weeks was more reasonable for us.

Flash forward six months.

We kept up getting our bins into April. We had sunchokes galore, leeks a plenty, bags of blueberries, an interesting number of sprouted bean/seed mixes and some delicious greens. Then we decided that we were ready to move on. There’s a few reasons:

1. Growing season was starting and I was keen to plant a garden and enjoy both the activity of a garden and the fruit of my labour
2. $35 for a box like the one above seemed a bit pricey, (I know, I know you don’t do this sort of thing for economy) but even though it was delivered and even through the food was very good (and interesting) it still seemed a bit pricey
3. We’re still regularly going to the grocery store so the delivery aspect of the service isn’t really making life easier. Buying organic veggies while you’re at the grocery store isn’t any harder than regular veggies.

Would I recommend getting organic deliveries?

As an experiment? Definitely. Share Organics themselves were very easy to get started with, they were on time and the food generally arrived in good shape. The experience really helped me begin to get over the idea that bottom dollar pricing is the most important aspect of food. Buying organic seems like a good idea to me, and this experience helped me get in the psychological mindset to want to continue to buy organic, by making it dead easy to have organic food around.

Previously the organic food aisle was generally just more expensive, but having gone through this experience, it seems that the additional monthly expense is really quite small. I don’t think I’ll be restarting our subscription with Share Organics (or any other providers) when my garden gets tired. Simple plan going forward, remain a frequent visitor to the organic aisle.

Getting off sugar a month in review

My month without sugar started on April 25th, a Sunday. I determined to stop eating things that were blantantly sugary for the purpose of

1. seeing if I could do it
2. seeing if what happened
3. trying to change a habit that is generally acknowledged to be destructive

What happened?

The biggest problem was that after work and after dinner, times I regularly chow down on sweet things, there were some cravings. A little like I imagine a smoker without cigarettes there were some moments of wondering what I should be doing now that I wasn’t making 5-minutely trips to the ju-jube bag. I filled the after work void with crackers (and cheese if I was feeling energetic). That worked pretty well, I have no idea if it added up to more or less calories but it avoided the sugar. For post dinner cravings I was reduced to eating fruit, which in general was fine (I like fruit) but having an apple after dinner was a bit anti-climactic. All those years of training that if I ate my dinner I would get some tasty dessert were being turned on their heads.

Physio-logical Difference?

Disclaimer: This is completely unscientific.

Interestingly, I didn’t get a cold AND there was one slowly picking people off in my office. This is notable because I usually DO get a cold if there is anything going around. When I started, I felt a little sick but it didn’t end up turning into a full blown sickness. Thinking about this I can’t help but wonder if not eating sugar was doing something to help my immune system. While I’m not sure I may keep this technique in my pocket for the next time I feel a little tickle in my throat.

Other than that I felt a little more alert. Which I could easily pass off on the placebo effect. (Is there still a placebo affect if the action you are taking is avoiding something? Hmmm..)

Lasting Changes

My time without sugar has easily shown me that yes, I have been leaning on sugar for snacks when I’m feeling lazy, living without that has led me to eat some better (and better for me) snacks. I’m hoping to keep that up. When I’m sick expect me to lay off the sugar. My experience leads me to believe that my immune system functions better when it isn’t being fed sugar.

Moving forward, I’m going to aim to keep sweets for social occasions and after dinner. If you’re considering going off sugar for a little while I would encourage you to go for it! It was a good and reasonably enlightening experience for me!

Confessions:

• I ate lots of sauces, ketchup, hoi sin, teriyaki. I didn’t even really look to see how much sugar was in there per serving, so before the non-sugar zealots point it out, let me acknowledge the weakness of my method.
• There was some jello+ that went down the hatch on May 23rd, but to make ammends I extended my experiment to the end of May 26th.
• I’m eating ice cream again, and just enjoying the heck out of it.

In a fit of healthy inspiration, I’ve sworn off sugar for a month. I simply love sugar just a little more than I’m comfortable with, so for the sake of trying to loosen my addiction to it. No white death for a month, starting April 25th, 2010. The recent January/February Nutrition Action issue was pointing out the possible downsides of eating too much sugar, namely getting fat, increasing blood pressure, etc which I’ll admit was a factor as well.

Parameters: Avoid Most of the Added Sugar

Cutting sugar out of my life entirely is going to be pretty much impossible as sugar is in everything. I’m aiming to limit myself to things that have 5g of sugar per serving. I’m not generally a label looker so I’m sure that I’ll be making a lot judgement calls on the fly at time, but hey this is just an excercise and I’m pretty sure that I can see the sugar coming in at least 70% of the food that I eat and avoid it. Of course anything with natural sugar (hello fruit) is going to be fair game for eating.

Apparently, I’m not even close to the being the first person to give this a try. But this is this first time that I’ve ever tried to cut back my sugar intake.

Sweet Results

What am I expecting? If I felt significantly different I’d be a bit surprised. Mostly, I’m hoping to break the cravings that I have for sugar each morning, noon and night. It would be nice if I built up the self control to not eat the three jujubes left on the counter from the night before at 7:30 in the morning after I just finished breakfast. I would call that progress.

I’m also interested to see what happens when I’m forced by social situations to refrain from eating dessert or some other treat.
I’ll keep you posted if I find anything else that is interesting in this experiment.

Some people consider me to be handy around the home. It’s quite a compliment. In an effort to help other be handy, I thought it would be a good idea to share my secrets for home handyman success.

• 5 tools from downstairs, all retrieved one at a time
• 1 trip to Canadian tire to get what I need
• 1 new tool (price >= $20)
• 14 parts I thought I would need
• 2 hours futzing around understanding the issue
• 2 minutes calculating whether it actually would be cheaper to call a professional.
• 1 trip to Canadian tire to get what I actually need
• 1 idea to rip it all out and “do it properly” — tried and abandoned
• 1 other job done as a procrastination tactic
• 2 parts that I really did need, usually one of which is improvised from junk I have around home (see I was keeping that for a reason!)
• 15 minutes actually fixing the problem

And yes, Joanna, the sink is now fixed.

Somehow I never realized just how far it is to get to Hawaii, so in case your equally challenged, from Vancouver to Honolulu you’re looking at a 6 hour flight (or longer if you’ve got a brutal head wind).  Vacations are something I seem to have a love/hate relationship with, I do enjoy visiting new places, I like meeting new people and experiencing new things.  That said it does feel a bit luxurious to fly off, spending a considerable resources to just get away from the everyday.  I think there is a part of me that simply feels that I don’t quite deserve it when there are so many people who aren’t able to do likewise, and it spends the earths resources at a somewhat ridiculous rate.  How do vacations (to Hawaii) fit in with sustainability and social justice?  What is there to be gained in the traveling to these far off places from those perspectives?

On the other hand, traveling does have some redeeming qualities that need to be acknowledged, it helps a person disconnect themselves from their day-to-day life and gain some perspective on what is happening.  It also provides an opportunity to meet people in a different location and culture and gain a better understanding of them and how they understand the world.  This understanding IS important it helps us to humanize people groups that we could just as easily demonize if we didn’t have any first hand experience that helped us to understand their point of view.  Traveling also educates and gives a person common experiences that they can use to build stronger relationships with those that they travel with.  This trip is Joanna and I heading off to spend some time together and to meet up with some friends from Victoria and spend some time away and together.  I hope that this will help me to build a stronger relationship with Jo’s friends and make them my friends as well.  So there’s the two sides that I see of the coin and part of my struggle with vacations.

And I am looking forward to doing some body surfing, surfing, snorkelling, hiking, spending time in the sun, reading and relaxing.  Time for some fun!!

I have held off getting a new netbook for quite some time, ever since Matt got a netbook by signing up with the Royal bank, I’ve been feeling pretty tempted to get one.  They`re like a real computer (not just a smart phone) but they don’t burden a person like a full size laptop.  So with the most recent vacation the time arrived, to get one.  After some digging around, I decided to try the eeePC 1001P from staples.  Definitely, not the cheapest netbook in the choice of available models, but it had a few features that I really liked.

eeePC-1001P

1. Splashtop.  8 seconds to being ready to surf the web or talk on skype.  I like that.  Waiting to boot up is a bit of a bummer.
2. Battery life is reportedly quite long.  They advertise 11 hours, but everyone who tests it says that you’re more likely to get 7.5-8.  still 8 hours is a ton and I like that feature.
3. New processor and expandable RAM, Atom N450 for the processor and expandable to 2 GB of RAM with a 250 GB hard disk.  Honestly, I have no idea how they do it.
4. Price, this turned out to be less important to me in the end.  I could have gotten something for $250 refurbished from futureshop, but I ended up spending my birthday money to get the eee, largely for the reasons mentioned above.

I’ve started tinkering already, and I’m working on installing Debian on the system so that I’ll be able to dual boot windows 7 and Debian.  Jo appreciates having a windows option for accessing some of the government sites that are built around IE and it’s handy to have windows around to do IE testing for work.  I’ll post my step by step update once I get the Debian install up and running, just need a little more time!

Today is Ash Wednesday, which for the liturgically savvy is completely obvious and expected, but for me, I often find that Lent creeps up on me and I end up waking up to the fact that it is happening when it is already half ways over.  Not this year.  This year I’m on it.  Lent is a time of preparation for Christians leading up to Easter.  One common way to prepare is to give up something for the forty days leading up to Easter.

by Cathérine

I tend to feel a bit cheesy about the things that I’ve given up in the past.  Giving up a food or drink seems like a common choice, but it doesn’t seem like there is a particular food that really has a hold on me (except maybe museli, but museli is healthy for crying out loud, I can’t give up something that is healthy!) .  I started thinking about what is the most valuable commodity in my life right now.  What is the thing that I never seem to have enough of.  Looking at it from that direction, I realized pretty quickly that my most valuable asset these days is time.  Never seem to have enough time. So, for Lent I’m choosing to give up a couple habits that make up 20 minutes of my morning habit.  Checking facebook and twitter.  Pretty much every morning I sink 10 minutes into each of them, and I can’t help but wonder if my mental and spiritual state of being is really any better for it, I have a hunch the time could be reclaimed and better spent.

No intent to swear off these things completely, maybe twitter seeing as I really only have a couple real friends active there, but just to eliminate checking on these time sinks as a part of my morning routine.  I’m tempted to feel like this is once again a cheesy thing to give up for Lent, but… I really do feel like right now, time is my most valuable commodity, so freeing some of it up and devoting it to a higher calling seems like a suitable move for Lent.

I don’t normally even have TV, but since we moved into the new house, we’ve got a free tv AND free cable (Thanks Shaw for leaving that on) and the timing couldn’t be better.  As far as I’m concerned Olympics make for great TV.  All the great emotions are there joy (two golds already), suspense (silver in Men’s bordercross), buffoonery (sorry men’s figure skating, I just can’t take the outfits seriously..  I have no doubt that you are awesome athletes, but the outfits. ai ya ai) and many others.

So, the channel has been pretty much locked on channel 9 (CTV in Victoria) while I’m at home, luckily I’m working otherwise this would really be a time of irony sittingm getting out of shape, doing an overly common activity,  as I watch people who are in great shape doing amazingly strenuous and astounding activities.  Good thing it only lasts for a couple weeks.  I still have plenty of work to do around the house that is currently being delayed.

Last year turned out to be a great year for building new habits. I’ve made good progress on two. And while they weren’t New Years Resolutions they were things that I decided I’d like to change.

So the fruit of last year amounts to my now being a regular flosser (not everyday, but regular) and no longer maintaining a pile of clothes beside my bed. This year I’m hoping to continue making some positive changes, with these two slightly more general ( but still very important goals).

- daily excercise for mind, body and soul
- making decisions and taking action as soon as I can

It’s time for a change. Joanna and I have been living in the Dingley Dell apartment for the last three years (ever since we first got married!). It’s been a great place, lots of light, lots of good time here and the unforgettable name, Dingley Dell (and all its associated rhyming pseudonyms). But the time has come for us to move on.

And move on we will, about 1.7 kms North West to Garthland.

View Larger Map
So you wouldn’t call this a big move exactly, at least not in distance, but it is going to be a big move for us as this is going to be the first house that we own! We’re pretty excited.

I’m very excited to have a garden AND a place to put some tools, that doesn’t look like one of the cupboards in the office desk. It’s a nice property with an arbutus out front and some Garry Oaks out back. I’m going to have to re-acquaint myself with a lawn mower, but I’m looking forward to being able to get back into doing that kind of work. Lately, the only time I get to do outside work is when I get up to Hardwicke, which is great, but I’m looking forward to having my own place to put some of my pent-up crazy ideas into action.

So without further ado, here’s a picture of what to look for if you come and visit. And if you know someone who is looking for a two bedroom suite to rent in January… let me know!