A New Land

Hachi looks comfortable with her new home already.

Conflicted

If the graphics can supports full color picture, why is the text so
old-school?

We Were Made For Deeper Waters

Got to celebrate our good news by seeing Jeffrey Foucault and Kris
Delmhorst at the Tractor. There is no couple more talented and lovely
than these two! How lucky that they still play the little places like
the Tractor.

Progress

My hair, it is longer.

Fingertip-less

My first foray into fingers on gloves worked out better than expected,
considering that I stubbornly refused to start with a pattern and so
had to guess at the stitch counts.

Rock Stars

My fiancé rocks out in the living room, playing "bass".

Daisy Daisy Do

Daisy Daisy Do
Originally uploaded by Arboreality.

Few photos of our latest trip to Oregon, up at Flickr. It was fun getting to use the macro lens, but I think it's probably time to acknowledge that I'm going to need to start carrying around the tripod if I want to get decent macro photos!

Fact & Fiction at the Grocery Store

I recently had a conversation with a co-worker in which I wound up defending Whole Foods as a reasonable place to shop when watching your budget. I insisted it was cheaper than QFC, if you shopped for quality nutrition, and not for price alone. I said this based entirely on a single brand of cereal I know to be a full $2 cheaper at Whole Foods than at QFC, however, and couldn’t back up my argument with facts.



But today, I can, and I’d like to share those facts with you.

Here’s how it worked. We shopped the three closest grocery stores: QFC on Broadway, Madison Market, and Whole Foods on Denny. We compared exact products. We did not take into account member discounts, specials or sales; the prices shown are the base price to the best of our knowledge. All pricing was done between February 7th and February 17th of 2009.

We chose 22 products that we purchase all the time, that we have already vetted as having a good quality for value ratio. Yes, we’re food snobs. Yes, we’re aware of the whole corporate-organic political situation: all we’re trying to do is eat whole, healthy foods with ingredients we can pronounce that haven’t been proven to cause cancer in small rodents. Your mileage may vary if these aren’t your preferred products.


I’ve highlighted the cheapest price for each product. Specifically, I’ve broken out a separate line for the cheddar because we were shocked at how much it cost at Madison Market, and I wanted to highlight just how much closer Mad Market would have been to Whole Foods if not for that one ridiculous price tag.

Results: Well, we began with the premise that QFC was more expensive when you’re shopping for organics and “naturals”, but we truly didn’t expect this kind of difference: that’s nearly a full $15 difference between Whole Foods and QFC. You could get a whole second block of cheddar (at Madison Market, no less!) for that.


Thanks for reading. If you'd like to give it a try, or just play with our numbers, you can download the raw data here.

Not Worth Saving

If this is what the stimulus package is meant to save - sad little
strip malls in the middle of what once were fields- then maybe we
don't need it after all. Is this really the legacy we want to leave?

Love The One You're With

...even if it's yourself.

Things I Learned by Reading the Stimulus Plan

Things I learned by reading the Stimulus Plan:

1. If you are a first-time home buyer and you haven’t bought a house (and you can afford it), consider doing it in 2009. First time home buyers who make less than $75k/year can get up to $8,000, free, if I am reading it right.
2. If you were thinking about buying a car, you should consider doing it this year… tax free! Just buy American, k?
3. Laid off? Get your ass to college! $15.8 billion in Pell Grants for higher education.
4. The government got back almost 7 BILLION dollars, just by repealing a (possibly illegal) decision made by the Treasury late last year: the Repeal of Treasury Section 382 Notice section of the Stimulus plan removes a decision which allowed new owners of a company to claim that companies losses themselves, even if the losses occurred prior to their ownership. Did I mention it saves the government almost SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS? For those of you keeping track, doing this alone makes the Defense Environmental Cleanup ($5.4 billion) line item free. Where did Treasury Section 382 Notice come from, anyway?
5. Light Rail gets $8 billion; Highways get $27 billion. Boo, Hiss.
6. National Endowment for the Arts gets… $50 million. Bigger Boo.
7. Apparently we never paid the Filipinos who participated in WWII, and now we owe them almost $200 million. How many of them are even left alive, at this point?
8. There’s a lot of stuff in here about the environment. $4.5 billion for “green” Federal buildings; $300 million for energy effeciant vehicles for the government (I hope they are incduding the post office in that one), $3.2 billion for “energy efficiency” grants… and then they go and mess it all up with $3.4 billion for “fossil fuel research and development”.
9. Single biggest line item under “Health Care” - $7.4 billion for Scientific Research. At least the scientists will stay employed! Second biggest line item – National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Guess we’ll be getting those online health records sooner than later!
10. Single biggest line item under “Science” – $4.6 billion for broadband technology. Hot damn, it’s like we’re actually going to start participating in this century again!

Sunrise

The Earth has tilted finally so the sun us awake when we are in the
morning. Queen Anne glows bright,and I can see well enough to notice
this stencil in the wall near my vanpool meeting place.

Dashed Are My Hopes and Dreams

It snowed again.

My Cat, The Neurotic Genius

Watson did this.

What's important to note is the hanging bit of paper left on the roll (at right), and the complete absence of paper on the ground in front of the toilet. He pulled the entire roll off, then hauled it over to the litter box, where he then installed it properly.

If we could just teach him to use it* to wipe his butt, we'd really be making progress!



*(instead of the carpet... what are you, a dog!?)

What's For Dinner: Stone Soup

Tonight was clean out the kitchen night at our house. We hit the grocery store for some staples (chocolate ice cream), then I tried to come up with the best way to use up our stack of leftover odds and ends. We began with:

2-3 cups cooked brown rice
3 wizened apples
a peeled but not cooked sweet potato (we over prepped for some sweet potato fries earlier this week)
a butternut squash
a few broken carrots
a few mildewy shallots
a cup of spinach
a quarter of a red onion

It was the butternut squash that led me to think SOUP, remembering a squash-and-apple soup recipe I read a few months back. It became possibly the best butternut squash soup I've ever tried, and so, I share with you:

Brown Rice Butternut Squash Stone Soup (with Apples, Spinach, and Caraway Seeds)

Peel and chop into evenly sized pieces:
3 apples
1/2 butternut squash
1 sweet potato
2 1/2 carrots

I stacked these in a large mixing bowl as I chopped, apples on the bottom and on up (think hardest to softest)

chop finely:
1/4 red onion
1 shallot
4 cloves of garlic

In a large pan, melt 1/4 cup butter, add onion, shallot, garlic. Stir until soft. Add enough vegetable broth to cover bottom, stir until it becomes creamy. Add carrots, 1 bay leaf, and a dash of caraway seeds (it just sounded like a good idea). Cook until the carrots are warmed through, then add sweet potato. Add enough vegetable broth to cover, boil until sweet potatoes are warmed through. Add squash and enough broth to cover. Bring to boil, add some salt. Toss the apples on top, put a lid on, simmer for 10 minutes. Add the rice and spinach, stir well to mix in rice.

When you can stick a fork in everything (especially the carrots!), you're done. Remove the Blend the soup (I used a blender, but it'd probably be easier with a stick mixer), return to pan. Serve!

Enjoy the empty kitchen and the full tummy!

Betting on Bad News

Photographers awaiting the results of a bomb scare downtown. Took me
three blocks out of my way, but thank god I was on foot, traffic was a
zoo.