Life Begins at 30

Habit Coffee, Victoria, BC

Mother's Day Picnic & Holy Pinkberry

Mother's Day is an important day in our family: we all gather in a park and celebrate together in a tradition that has been taking place for over twenty years.  I wrote about it this week on Bay Area Bites.

Spent several days in LA last week and between furiously working I went to the Downtown Long Beach and Pomona Farmers' Markets, went to Father's Office for the second time and really enjoyed it, tried and fell in love with Pinkberry (turn down the volume if you're at work), finally tasted the delicious Nem Nuong Cuon at Brodard, went to an interesting sustainable food panel courtesy of the Santa Monica Farmers' Market, and had an embarrassingly large yet fantastic drink at Wilshire.

The next post you will see here is about the Penny-Wise challenge - I promise.

fridge (and freezer), unedited

fridgeunedited, originally uploaded by jen_maiser.

Sam put a challenge to us asking what the inside of our unedited refrigerators look like.  And it's been fun over the weekend to see the shots of bloggers around the web.  It took some restraint to open it and not fuss in order to set up the shot, but I just opened and snapped.

I personally think my freezer is much more interesting, as it has crab and salmon from my father and not much else -- when he visited last month from Alaska, I had to do away with some of my other frozen foods in order to make room for this precious gift. 

Update: this is addictive!  I just added a pic of my freezer and refrigerator doors. Freezer's on top, fridge is on bottom.

Click on the photos to get to the flickr pages and see notes showing what's what.

Lovely Spring

I have so many things to write about that I have been absolutely stunted and unable to write about anything!  The Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge has been over for several days now, and I have a post brewing on my thoughts about it.  I am such an advocate for the importance of eating locally, but I don't think you'll ever hear me saying that it's an easy thing to do -- even somewhere as bountiful as Northern California.  This challenge was particularly difficult for me, and I had some successes and some failures.

I am in the process of working with the people who took the challenge to get some overall results and information about the group as a whole, so keep an eye here and on the Eat Local Challenge site for more information about that.

I don't talk about my "real" work life much, but I spend most of my time working out of my home.  Starting last week, however, I am now out of the house for three days a week and working in an office for at least six weeks.  And while it was a great opportunity that I couldn't pass up,  I'm going into an office kicking and screaming.  While there are some things about working in an office and actually speaking to people during the day that are kind of nice, it's a hard adjustment, and the exhaustion I feel on a daily basis is part of the reason that you have not seen much on this blog.

Long-time readers of this site know that I usually become uber-reflective and weird during April ... it's always been a kind of big month for me.  Every year around April, the stars seem to align and big changes occur.  You can look back in the archives to see what I mean -- I'm not too motivated to dig up the memories and link to them right now.   And this April did not disappoint.  While many of my April reflections this year were super personal, I will say that I came out of last month much more optimistic and in a much better place than I have been in a long time.  And that's a really amazing feeling.

So you can look forward to some more posts around here, as soon as I get my schedule a little more settled.  And thanks for continuing to stick with me and continuing to read.  Your support means more to me than you'll ever know.

While you wait for more posts from me, take a gander at five things I am really enjoying right now:  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle | Sarticious Gin | 52 Projects | Baby Ben & his super cool mama | Feta Cheese from Achadinha - pick it up from Donna at the FPFM

 

Photo taken by me in Portland, Oregon - April 13, 2007.