rebron.org: Everyday Life, Work, Ironman Training

This is our box for the week from Eatwell Farm.  We’ve got apples, oranges, lemons, strawberries, lemon balm, parsley, sugar snap peas, green garlic, spring onions, spinach, carrots, mixed greens.

We’re on the 12 week program (13th week is free) w/ a half dozen eggs, which comes to about $29 a box.  Considering we get our box next door, the fruits and vegetables are organic AND they’re picked the week of delivery, it’s a no brainer value — and ridiculous from a freshness standpoint.

You also get things you might not normally buy at the store like romanesco, daikon, rainbow chard, jerusalem artichokes, rutabagas, and watermelon radish.  And you learn to eat seasonally, which makes you realize we actually do have seasons in Northern California.

There are a few drawbacks.  It’s not always easy to eat everything in a week, and you do have to cook.  You might get weeks of weeks of something you might not like for example red cabbage or kale.  You might not have enough of something to finish a recipe — need one more eggplant or one more onion, so you’ll have to supplement that at the store.  You’ll also never get bananas (obviously) and probably some other “non-standard” vegetable.

Sign up with Eatwell if you’re in the Bay Area or I’d encourage signing up for another Community Support Agriculture (CSA) program like Eatwell Farm.  A lot of them are popping up all over California and the rest of the United States.

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* Hard to say whether or not CSA is scalable, I’m sure less than 1% of the country subscribes to a CSA.  But it would be great to see because in practice we feel healthier and feel better knowing where our  food comes from and the knowing the people who farm it.

Oakland has some pretty good drinks.  A few that I really like:

• Gin and Tonic from Pizzaiolo; the tonic is a house made tonic by Cate Whalen
• As good as the gin and tonic is, I like their whiskey cocktail better.  It’s made with Buffalo Trace bourbon whiskey (my favorite liquor)
• Linden St. Black Lager or their Common Lager are really nice, can only be found on tap at just a few places.
• Blue Bottle’s Bella Donovan coffee is what I normally drink for coffee (daily basis)

Haven’t really tried Numi tea, another Oakland company.  We want to but just haven’t pulled the trigger we have so much tea in the house.  I get tea from Teance in Berkeley, their ba bao chao and pu-erh teas and we also get tea from Republic of Tea, Ginseng peppermint and several other kinds.  We’ve got a lot of tea.  We’ll try Numi eventually.

These are the sites I visit almost everyday:

• Google News, Google Finance, WSJ.com, Economist.com, SFGate.com, NYTimes.com, ESPN, News.com (I open these all at once in a Tab, and I’ve been visiting these sites for years)
• The most interesting/entertaining: Facebook, Twitter, HuffingtonPost
• New to me: Groupon (group coupons), Pandora (web radio, w/ a great music recommendation engine, Oakland company) – knew about them but was hesitant to sign up

I access Gmail via Thunderbird so only go to Gmail every once in a while to check out new features.

The other sites I visit are only through a quick scan of their feeds, i.e. Lifehacker, Engadget, All Things Digital, Oakland North, Oakland Local, etc.

Would love recommendations on other sites to check out.

General Happenings

• Chilean Miners rescued after 69 days trapped in a mine
• Earthquake in Haiti
• Volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull
• Deepwater Horizon Oil spill
• Wikileaks releases cables/documents
• Republican’s win control of House of Representatives
• Slow recovery Dow at 11,000.

Tech

• Apple releases iPad (and an updated MacBook Air)
• Android making gains, Nexus One and Nexus S released
• Rise of the App stores
• Facebook/Twitter continue to grain traction

Sports

• Winter Olympics in Vancouver/Whistler
• FIFA World Cup won by Spain
• Saints over Colts to win Super Bowl
• Lakers beat Celtics NBA Finals
• SF Giants beat Texas Rangers to win World Series

Obits

• JD Salinger, President of Poland, Gary Coleman, Dennis Hopper, Manute Bol, Robert Byrd

Personal

• General: Attic insulation w/ new attic ladder, other home energy work
• Travel: Kirkwood/NorthStar (good snow), Whistler, Turks & Caicos
• Races: Oakland 1/2 Marathon, Ironman St. George, Ironman Canada, NorthFace 50k
• Work: Thunderbird 3.x releases
• Restaurants: Commis and Rikyu mostly
• Too many purchases.

One bike is good but if I could have three, one would be a steel bike from Sacha White of Vanilla Bicycles, their alter ego of Speedvagen, or a Dario Pegoretti bike from Italy.  (The second one would be a titanium bike from Moots and the third one would be a Parlee carbon fiber bike…ok, fine, and a fourth Parlee triathlon bike).

The bikes from these two guys are well built and just pretty — construction, paint job, geometry.  Steel isn’t the lightest frame material but can be made pretty light and supposedly the ride is fast, responsive, and fantastic.  Steel is also supposed to be pretty durable and easy to repair.

Oh, well.

I’ve been experimenting with different communication tools lately: Facebook, Twitter, text, Google Voice, Skype, email, etc, and blog posts have been few and far between –  mostly due to writer’s block, a bit of posting and un-posting, and uncertainty as to who’s actually reading what I write.

It’s obvious the majority of my friends aren’t reading my blog posts but I can probably do a better job of linking Facebook and Twitter to this blog.

Anyhow, short update:

• We’re on version 3.1.4 for Thunderbird, working on Thunderbird 3.2 due out later this year;
• Working through updating Mozilla Messaging to coincide with mozilla.org/.com updates;
• Wrapped up Ironman Canada in August (and Ironman St George last May), signed up for Ironman St George for next year;
• Starting up trail running and doing a lot of it in the East Bay hills, which is neat, this is in place of road running which is super high impact;
• Might be re-upping to be an Executive Board Member for Alameda Council, BSA;
• Doing some more Boy Scout related stuff this year mainly driving and camp outs (local program is good, National politics not so good);
• We have a 10 year wedding anniversary trip in November to Turks and Caicos;
• Starting to plan for snowboarding outings, hopefully will be another good snow year;
• and then we’re in 2011.  That was quick.

I’ll post some race reports and photos soon from Canada, and a few things I’ve stumbled upon and like.  Turns out at the age of 34 and male and married, I’m in the very desirable target market for a lot of companies and I’m obviously observant of the advertising being thrown at me/us.  Some of the marketing does make it through unfortunately.

The other next up is figuring out how to integrate blog, Twitter, Facebook, email a little better.  It’s not as cohesive as I’d like.

I ran the Oakland 1/2 Marathon yesterday, the inaugural Oakland running festival which had other running events like a relay, 5k, and of course the full marathon.

I had a lot of fun, the course is super fast and flat, folks were great/happy/excited, the running shirt was nice.  The support was awesome, no shortage of volunteers and spectators.  I was surprised by the number of people that were out and about cheering (moreso than the San Francisco marathon).

Ran into a few folks Derrick and Dr. Bean from IronTeam.  Ben was at the finish line volunteering.

More thoughts from other folks

The other day, I encountered eight (eight!) people who had come to town just for the marathon. All of them made a point of saying how surprised they were to discover what a beautiful city Oakland is. It was totally heartwarming.

A friend of mine was telling me that the prettiest money she ever saw was the Dutch guilder.  I had to look it up and I now have to agree.  Wouldn’t be a bad collection to framed up on a wall somewhere.

Top of lift six, Cornice Express at Kirkwood.

What a great snow year in Tahoe!  We’ve been up a few times, wished we could have gone up more.  We’ve really only gone to Kirkwood which gets a ton of snow early in the season and it got dumped on this year, so we just kept going there.

Here, I’m all Burton-ed out.  Jacket is from the Shaun White collection.  Shirt is a snowboarding shirt from Burton too.  Snowboard pants are denim (goretex but it does still get cold and wet so good for warm days…but they do look cool).  Boots are Burton Hail.  The helmet is Giro, the bindings are Flow, the sunglasses are Oakley, the cap is from Rapha.

I’m more than happy to model Burton’s 2011 collection next year…Call me :-)

[Apologies for the lack of writing, going back to writing now, hopefully a post a week if not more].

Great job!  Lot of great changes to help move the web forward.

Check out http://hacks.mozilla.org to test drive our new toy.