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| random ramblings from a random geek. |
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On Monday afternoon, since I had the day off work, I headed over to Blue Goose Produce in Loomis, CA. My reason for doing this was not to get fresh, locally grown produce as you may expect from a store with such a name, but rather to pick up some of their grass-fed beef. While there, I had the opportunity to pick up some pork from another local producer – Coffee Pot Ranch. I had the good fortune to run into Bob from Coffee Pot selling his wares at the Foothills Farmers Market yesterday afternoon. I asked him if it was a regular occurrence and he confirmed that it was. Pickings were a little slim due to the late hour, but I did score some pork fajita meat for a nice price. There was a little over a pound in the package and about half of it became my breakfast this morning.
This particular farmers market is held in the same parking lot as Whole Foods, who have started to promote a new supposedly healthy eating initiative. Unfortunately, it’s the same old low-fat nonsense that has made Americans fatter and sicker over the last 20 years. This is a shame, because Whole Foods is one of the few places I can find grass-fed beef and other high quality meats. In fact, it’s where I got the bacon I ate for breakfast with the pork. Hopefully their new found enthusiasm for the way of eating they’re promoting doesn’t stop them stocking the good quality meats they carry. If they do, Bob and I will get much better acquainted, which is probably a good thing.
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Somewhere around a year ago, my wireless router took an unplanned shower. Fearing the worst, my wife went out and purchased a new router – a Linksys WRT54GL to replace the older Linux powered WRT54G that we already had. Until tonight, the old router sat in a kitchen cabinet. That was when I took a notion to install the Tomato firmware on it, assuming it still had life in it. Thankfully, it did. I performed the upgrade and configured it to replace the one that I had in place.
Since the upgrade went so well, I upgraded the other router and set it up as a wireless bridge to improve the signal on the lower level of the house. I found this tutorial, which made it nice and easy. My current setup is the original WRT54G (named Nitrogen) upstairs acting as the host or primary router and the WRT54GL (named Oxygen) downstairs acting as a bridge. I’ll write about my naming scheme at a later date, but it’s based on the periodic table.
Despite the relative ease of the whole process, I did run into a snag. The upgrade kept failing with the delightfully Engrishy ‘Upgrade are failed!’ when I tried it from Safari (on Snow Leopard). Once I switched to Firefox, it went through first time.
I’ve been updating my daily stats, menus and photos for a week on my tumblelog. I’ve been trying to keep the order the same – photo first, stats second. My main reason for doing it in this order is that I’m including the two most recent posts on this site in a sidebar widget. The main drawback to that is that I have to wait until I get dressed in order to publish my first update. If I get distracted, like I did yesterday, the photo update may not happen until quite late in the day. I was at work and the lighting was awful, so the photo turned out grainy and dark.
One of the motivations behind this is to be able to track what I’m eating and see what’s giving me the best results. I also want to see if there’s anything tripping me up. Hopefully it will inspire me to prepare more meals for myself on work days, since those days seem to cause the most issues. I’m also noticing that I need to stock up on beef and bacon.
On a farm in coastal Maine, a barn is going up. Right now it’s little more than a concrete slab and some wooden beams, but when it’s finished, the barn will provide winter shelter for up to six cows and a few head of sheep. None of this would be remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that the people building the barn are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post’s gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it. “Why?” asks Coleman, tromping through the mud on his way toward a greenhouse bursting with December turnips. “Because I care about the fate of the planet.”
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