My housemates and I are planning to get a farm share at a local CSA (community supported agriculture) this summer. The main options I’ve found for the Amherst area are Simple Gifts Farm, Riverland Farm, Brookfield Farm, Stone Soup Farm, and Foodbank Farm. Here is some info on each one.
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An Eater’s Manifesto
Adapting to a Macbook
I recently got a shiny new Macbook from my advisor. While I’ve briefly used a Mac a few times in the past, this is the first time that I’ve ever really worked on one. I can appreciate that it is a very attractive laptop, but I’m less convinced that this machine is supposed to provide the ultimate user friendly experience, particularly for users who like flexibility in how they work on their system. I make an effort not to complain about things here since that is what 90% of blogs are, but unfortunately I need to relax that rule for this post… Continue reading
Beginner Digital SLR Resources
About a month ago I spent a lot of money on a Canon Xti Digital SLR camera. It has been fun learning about photography and how all this stuff works. While I’m still taking lots of pictures of people with telephone poles and such coming out of their heads, I’m gradually getting a bit better. I have learned a great deal about the technical aspects of photography such as apertures and shutter speeds which didn’t apply to point and shoot cameras. Here are my notes and some useful resources.
Sledding
Megan’s friends Scott and Jess visited us with their two year old daughter this week. They came up from North Carolina, so we wanted to show them what real winter is like. We had a great time sledding down some of the hills on campus. First we had to acquire a sled from the hardware store (our third try after Stop and Shop and Walmart). It was all downhill from there.
Ode to Cushman Market
The Cushman Market is a small grocery store and cafe up the road from where I live. The front half of the store has an eclectic mix of groceries, many of which are organic or locally made products. Walk back past the reasonably stocked wine and beer section and you get to a nice cafe that serves sandwiches for breakfast and lunch, and serves drinks all day.
It is great to have such a nice place within walking distance. We often head over there on weekend mornings for breakfast, particularly on Sundays when there is a small jazz band playing in the back. I’m partial to the “egg, cheese, and bacon on an everything bagel”… delicious.
Tonight we were short on food and it was beginning to snow, so I took a quick walk over there to pick up some food. I snapped this shot of the cafe, which is the first night time picture I’ve taken with my new camera. It’s a little blurry from me shaking (or shivering–it was cold out!), but it still came out pretty well.
Hadag Nahash in Northampton
Last Sunday I went to see Hadag Nahash at the Pearl Street Night Club in Noho. For those not familiar with them (ie, probably you, me, and most of the world), Hadag Nahash is a funk/hip hop/jazz/I don’t know what else Israeli band. The show was a lot of fun, with a diverse range of music. Of course I couldn’t understand any of the lyrics – as far as I can tell they never said “mazel tov”, the only hebrew I know. Despite that, we had a good time, and I enjoyed myself by singing along with my English interpretations of their songs. I’m also pretty sure there was a Bob Marley cover near the end somewhere, but maybe that was just my brain looking for patterns in randomness.
Some of their songs are online here:
Breaking News: I’m a dog, not a pig!!??!?
I was utterly shocked to discover today that my Chinese zodiac sign is not the pig as I have thought for years, but instead the dog. This means that I am not a “model of sincerity, purity, tolerance, and honor” like I originally thought, but instead I am “cynical, lazy, cold, judgmental, pessimistic, a worrier, stubborn, and quarrelsome.” For years my life has been a mockery since I trusted those deceiving place mats at Chinese restaurants. You see, it turns out that while they typically only designate your animal by the year of birth, this ignores the fact that the calendar is really based on a lunar calendar that begins in mid February.
My sense of self identity has been utterly shattered… I’m just not sure what to make of this. Dogs may be “man’s best friend”, but they drool a bit too much for my taste. Pigs on the other hand are the source of bacon, which in my eyes places them up there as one of the noblest of beasts.
Blue House Dinner Recap 9-12
I’ve fallen behind in posting about the important stuff (food). Over the winter break we had a bit of a slowdown in the approximately weekly “family dinners” my house started in the Fall. Now they are back in full swing. Here is the quick run down of eating Filip’s pet birds, Megan and Gal’s slow cooked meals, and my crepes. As usual, it was a delicious exploration of traditional and world cuisine (I should go into marketing!).
Canon Xti Test Pics
For my quarter century birthday I decided to think about the future and started a retirement fund at Vanguard. To balance out that amount of fiscal responsibility, I also bought myself a Canon Digital Rebel XTi SLR camera. I bought a refurbished model from Adorama.com, so it was (relatively) cheap, but probably still one of the more expensive purchases I’ve made in dollars per cubic inch. I’ll post more about my thoughts on the camera later, but here are some sample pictures I have taken. Additional photo credits go to Megan and Gal.
