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Month: February 2014

top ten reasons you should stop eating devil's syrup

top ten reasons you should stop eating devil's syrup

i know i posted a food post yesterday, but i wanted to do another one after trying to think of 10 reasons to stop eating DS.
high-fructose-corn-syrup-corn-sugar
1. it’s an easy way to reduce support of the overwhelming amount of government subsidies corn receives, especially the huge corporate farms. that money could be used elsewhere. like food for kids.
2. you eat too much corn anyway in all the processed foods we eat and as a byproduct of supermarket meat, so at least getting rid of some of it would be good.
3. you’ll reduce your sugar cravings.
4. monsanto is the devil, and by eliminating GM crops from your diet, you’ll remove money from its pockets.
5. you’ll buy and cook more “whole” foods. devil’s syrup is in so much stuff, that you eliminate practically 2/3 of the grocery store by avoiding it.
6. the processed food you DO buy will generally be better for you and/or organic. support your body and organic farmers! (although do your research on organics – some are just as bad as conventional or don’t make much of a difference compared to conventional.)
7. just using regular old cane or beet sugar tastes 100X better. your tastebuds will thank you. (i have a beef with the sugar industry as well, but one hurdle at a time.)
8. lots of times “low-fat” foods have more sugar and salt in them so they actually taste better. lots of times the sugar is DS. sugar converts into fat. this “low-fat” food is not truly “low-fat.” shhh, don’t tell anyone. they don’t want you to know.
9. another shout out for sugar tastes better! drinking pop with DS has a metallic aftertaste when i drink it now (well, i haven’t had a DS soda in YEARS, but i remember) and cane sugar pop is DEEEEElicious.
10. if everyone would stop eating processed crap with corn and other subsidized foods and started eating better, farmers would grow actual FOOD for HUMAN CONSUMPTION. you know, like stuff we can actually eat straight from the field. what a concept!

if you care about food

if you care about food

i talked to my coworker about a chest freezer she might have to sell/loan me. i’m excited because a chest freezer means that it’s time for a quarter cow (local, of course) and hopefully some local pork, too! i’m really excited to start eating happy animals as opposed to walmart animals. 
here is an excerpt from my “a little more whole” devil’s syrup chapter. if ever i were to become a vegetarian, it would be based on environmental factors. 
PS- i recommend everyone read the book “Just Food.”
However, there are some things to consider when buying local. The first thing is that what you do buy is in-season – the vegetables and fruits on the tables are what normally grows right now. To go truly local is to make sure everything you eat is from a local source, meaning no more bananas, oranges, or mangos for those of us in the Midwest. It also means eating and saving what you can while it’s in season, which is why canning is a huge saving grace to those who do go local. Barbara Kingsolver in her book “Animal Vegetable Miracle” embarks on a year-long quest to get almost all of her family’s food from within a hundred mile radius of her home with very few exceptions (like olive oil). This included planting ninety tomato plants and spending days canning them. Reading the book, you realize what a large task this actually is.
Another thing to consider is the energy used to get the food to your table. There is a lot of concern about food miles and how far a vegetable has to travel to get to your plate, but there is a lot more to consider than just the miles – one needs to take into account all the steps along the growing process. Life-cycle assessments do just this.
James McWilliams in his book “Just Food” discusses the LCA and how buying local is not necessarily always greener. For instance, he gives the examples of winter tomatoes that are imported from Spain to England that cover a lot more miles than the local tomatoes that are grown in England. But those tomatoes that are grown locally are done so in hothouses, which use a lot more energy than that consumed by the miles traveled by the Spanish tomatoes. It’s also important to take into account that a single tomato may have traveled 1500 miles, but it’s also traveling with how many other tomatoes? Its per-tomato fuel usage may be so minimal that it would make more sense to buy that tomato when taking other energy processes into account. This is also an important thing to keep in mind when deciding to buy something that isn’t in season in your area. Californians have the luxury of fresh tomatoes year round, but for most of us in the US, is that mealy, artificially ripened tomato really worth it in the middle of January?
And what if you live in an area that isn’t hospitable to any kind of natural growing? The earth’s population keeps growing, and these people need food, no matter where they live. If you’re like me and live in an area that allows for seasonal growing (and storage), that’s all well and good, but my aunt who lives in Arizona doesn’t have that luxury without expending a lot of water usage and unnatural means. In her case, local is not necessarily the answer. What we do need is a smart, environmentally healthy way to produce and transport food to areas that need to import. Yes, you can eat local, but think in a global way as well.
Surprisingly, McWilliams writes that a lot of energy usage goes toward home preparation, second only to the actual growth of the food.
“…how much energy could be saved if we threw out less food, cooked smaller amounts, ate less in general, used energy-efficient ovens and refrigerators, composted all organic matter not eaten, and developed more energy-efficient menus (say, by eating more meals that did not require extensive and prolonged applications of heat).”
Is this a point for the raw food movement? I can see how it would be more environmentally friendly, but I’m not heading down that path anytime soon. I’m not even giving up meat anytime soon, as I said before. McWilliams does mention that in doing the research for his book, he did decide to become a vegetarian (much to his wife’s chagrin). On the meat production issue, he says that if you aren’t going to stop eating meat, at least make it grass-fed and for special occasions; in short, eat less meat.

growing up in the faux country

growing up in the faux country

inspired by a thoughtcatalog list on great things about growing up on a farm, i’d like to introduce my top ten things about growing up on a faux farm (a couple of which are duplicated from the article).

1. chasing fireflies
Flint Hills

late summer months in southern minnesota means you get to see some fireflies. my sibs and dad and i spent more than our fair share of time capturing the little blinky guys.

2. horse troughs
horse trough

oh, there is nothing like filling up one of these bad boys with cold water from the hose on a hot summer day. usually the water was so cold that we had to let it sit a day before climbing into the old horse trough we had. poor man’s swimming pool, is what it was. but it was glorious.

3. drinking from a hose in the summertime
hose

yep, there is nothing that beats drinking from a hose in the summertime. or running through a sprinkler. or filling up horse troughs (see above).

4. the space
space

living on a farm means having a lot of space. we ran around like hooligans on the farm for most of the summer months, not giving two hoots about running on to anyone else’s property because guess what? we had enough space that we didn’t have to worry about anyone else’s property.

5. the smell of springtime
mud boots

ah, this could be a bit controversial, but in the springtime when the snow begins to melt and things become a bit slushy, you know it’s truly spring when you can start to smell the cow manure melting from the surrounding fields and pastures.

6. privacy

(see space above.) one plus to having the space to run around like hooligans is that we didn’t have to worry about being decent or dressed all the time. ha!

7. bonfires
fire

anytime i want to have a fire these days, i have to drag out my fire pit and set it up in my driveway. in the country, all you have to do is head out on the back forty where all the brush you’ve been throwing in a pile all year has collected and set the pile ablaze. we’d have bonfire parties!

8. the creek running through the pasture
creek

there was a creek that ran through our pasture and also our aunt and uncle’s pasture a mile north of us. those creek times were some of the best times. in the winter, we headed down to the pasture, laced on our ice skates, and took a few turns around the creek. in the summertime, on more than one occasion we headed out to our relatives’ creek (bystepping the cows) and built little waterfalls that flowed down a silty hill and into a shallow area of the creek.

9. barn cats
kitties

not much to say here! one can’t have too many barn cats. (my uncle squire was a huge proponent of the barn cat. he got many “schmeichels” from a few of our so-called ferals.)

10. sunsets over the field
sunset

you can’t really expound upon perfection.
 
i would like to say that none of these images are mine EXCEPT the final sunset one.

my favorite olympic moment

my favorite olympic moment

so during this olympics, i like to wax eloquent about the olympics. i’ve already made a stink about human rights in russia, and i would like to look a little more into the IOC, but let me take a break from serious stuff and share my favoritest olympic moment.
[as an aside, if you want to see how i feel about primetime olympic events, i am a pretty vocal tweeter during events. you can follow me over @prairey on twitter. i mostly tweet through skating events, but i will also comment occasionally on snowboarding, skiing, skeleton, etc…]
back to the task at hand. i’ve seen some pretty intense skating upsets. michelle kwan never winning, the kerrigan/harding mess, oksana bayul winning over that whole mess, elvis stojko never winning. but my favorite moment came during the summer olympics.
the gymnastics team event is to the summer games as skating is to winter for me. and in the wallace household, you sat your butt in the living room and watched and cheered the olympians (i care about NO OTHER SPORTS).
in 1996 in atlanta, shannon miller was the big name, but there’s only one name you remembered after the team event. it was the final rotation for the US, the final athlete, and the points were so close that there was no room for error. kerri strug got ready for the vault. bela karolyi, former soviet coach, was the coach for the gymnastics team (and i think he should be EVERYONE’s coach, really). kerri did her first vault.
and didn’t stick her landing.
she got up and was limping. OMG.
we were so close to beating russia, and now our last hope was injured. aahhhhh.
she took her place for her second run, sucked it up and ran. vault, and wonder of wonders, she STUCK THE LANDING. you could not believe the uproar in our household. amazing! bela ended up carrying kerri off the mats.
this was brought up to me all over again because there is a commercial running during this olympics that shows this, and i get goosebumps all over again each time i see the commercial.

fitbit

fitbit

caitlin asked how i liked my fitbit.
i do like it! i don’t know if it’s actually worth the retail price of $100 (i paid about $75 for mine after amazon rewards), but if it motivates you, then the price is worth it.
it pretty much gamifies getting your steps in. i got a badge for my first 10,000 steps, then one for 15,000. my guess is there’s one for 20,000, but i haven’t gotten there yet. if it’s 8 p.m. and all i’m doing is watching netflix and i only have 4,000 steps in for the day, i’ll take my laptop downstairs with me and watch netflix while walking on the treadmill. (this normally happens on my days off of running.)
its also nice that you can sync it to your phone/music device, so you can see what’s going on as far as steps, miles, calories, etc. it also will sync up with myfitnesspal if you use that. it might sync with runkeeper but i haven’t used RK yet this year. it will track your sleep patterns as well – let you know how restless you are during the night. i don’t really track that much anymore because it was pretty consistent over the first couple weeks.
i think the biggest change i made was that instead of running 20 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, i run to 10,000 steps (on a normal day). this lands anywhere from 20-45 minutes, and it makes sense to run to the steps instead of the time.
it’s easy to wear – a band on your non-dominant hand. i wear it above my watch. waterproof, so the only time i take it off is when i have to charge it – about once a week. there are different colored bands, but i just have black for now. if i want to get fancy, maybe i’ll pick up a different one. there are also different types of fitbits – i got the simple one; it has 5 dots that light up with your chosen progress (default is 10,000 steps). so after 2,000 steps, 2 dots light up, 4,000, 4, etc.  but if you want to track height or have a display on your wrist, there are different kinds you can pick out.
so, that’s it. novelty hasn’t worn off yet. it is a motivator!

daily walking

daily walking

i’d been really good about getting my 10,000 steps a day in with my fitbit as inspiration. but these olympics are just putting a dent in my steps per day. if i had space for the treadmill upstairs so i could walk and watch at the same time, i totally would. if my tv area were downstairs were my treadmill was, i would also totally walk/run and watch at the same time.
ALAS, it’s not to be. so for the next week, i guess i’ll be a schlub. after the olympics are done, time to get back in gear with my treadmill time. of course, by that time, it might be 40 degrees out already and i could take a run around st charles! (i’m really really looking forward to outside running.)

surprise!

surprise!

i love it when i get a check in the mail and i know it’s a check, but i have no idea it’s coming. i had a rebate for my washer/dryer that nate and i got way back in november. 3 months later, and i got my rebate for $100! woo!
know what else would be an awesome surprise? getting something for valentine’s day, but i doubt that’ll happen :/

mr king

mr king

i FINALLY convinced one of my sisters to read a stephen king book. lord knows it took ME forever to pick one up, given that his name is pretty synonymous with horror writing, but, finally, after comparing “running man” to “hunger games” for jane, she picked it up, and LO AND BEHOLD who now is running to the library to borrow all of king’s books??
(i keep telling people that he doesn’t just write horror. that he’s an awesome storyteller. do they listen? noooOOOooo…welllll…eventually.)
anyway, jane wanted to know what she should read next, so i put together the list of all the king books i’ve read in order of how much i liked them. here you go!
1. 11/22/63
2. Green Mile
3. Under the Dome
4. Running Man
5. The Stand
6. The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon
7. Joyland
8. first three of the Dark Tower series (“The Gunslinger” is the first book i read of his, and i went wow he can tell a story. still need to read the whole series)
short stories i listened to on audiobook, both excellent:
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (obvs shawshank movie is based on this)
The Body (the movie “Stand by Me” was based on this)
I should add that none of these books are straight out horror. some have a weird sci-fi angle to them or are mystery, but i have read a lot scarier books than these. the next book of his that i’ll pick up is “the long walk.” i’ve heard good things about it.

Review: The Goldfinch

Review: The Goldfinch


The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
stephen king liked this book? OK i’ll read it! he did, after all, recommend “the hunger games”.
this book has beauuuuutiful writing (although some egregious uses of a semicolon). donna tartt knows how to craft a sentence. unfortunately, from the perspective of a late-20s man writing about his teenage years? what teenage boy is perceptive enough to pick up that his therapist is most likely newly married with a baby merely from the ring on his finger and tired eyes? i don’t buy it.
plus it seemed like 20 lbs of writing in a 5 lb story. did we really need all that detail? this book could have been half the book and still have been lovely.
some favorite sentences:
“…a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.”
“what if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? what if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?”
“a great sorrow, and one that i am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. we can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or whats good fro other people. we don’t get to choose the people we are.”

View all my reviews

this ain't mt. olympus

this ain't mt. olympus

did you know russian TV edited this faux pas out, and they saw an earlier dress rehearsal?  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/7/olympic-ring-malfunction-mars-sochi-opening-ceremo/
did you know russian TV edited this faux pas out, and they saw an earlier dress rehearsal? http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/7/olympic-ring-malfunction-mars-sochi-opening-ceremo/

there has been so much discussion on the gay rights issue in russia – will the corporate sponsors take a stand? will the olympic village truly be a place of tolerance? would the russians really arrest olympians who hold protests or rallies?
i think it’s a cover.
why was this brought to the forefront so close to the olympics? what prompted this sudden, “hey! they hate gays over there!” rush of protests and news coverage? because when you look at russia, it turns out they have a problem that extends beyond gay rights: let’s take a look at basic HUMAN rights.
there were mass protests in russia after the 2011 elections, when putin was elected back as president with a start to his term in 2012. (you might remember this little music group called pussy riot from that mess.) although the elections were supposed to be transparent and putin won by 60+%, the opposition to his presidency was pretty clear.
the previous president, mr. medvedez, had made a few advances as far as political freedoms, but once putin was back, he pretty much obliterated these and enacted new laws restricting non-governmental organizations and freedom of assemblies/expression. the basic rights we have as US citizens, like freedom to assemble and protest, are not found in russia.
a law was passed that blocks internet content that is deemed extreme or harmful to kids. “homosexual propaganda” is banned. in chechnya, a republic of russia, a virtue campaign for women is in full force for women to wear headscarves at all times, and they must wear them in public buildings. you could go on and on, i’m sure, but you’re not going to read anything that long. google it.
as for the olympics themselves, sochi certainly did its fair share of eminent domain to get the buildings up, but in many cases the compensation for land was unfair and the process not entirely transparent. there was one family of 6 that was evicted without any reimbursement. migrant workers reported excessive work hours, unpaid wages, and failure to provide contracts.  and then journalists who decided to report on the issues faced censorship, and activists were detained when protesting. let’s not even get into the police force corruption.
so, you can protest these olympics for the gay rights issue, sure. but know that is just the very tip of the iceberg, and you should really be protesting for basic human rights.
which brings up the ultimate questions: why boycott an event whose organizational president made it pretty clear that discrimination of any kind during the games would not be tolerated, even if you didn’t see it on NBC? why boycott an event whose goal is to “contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised in accordance with Olympism and its values”? why boycott an event that most athletes only dream about competing in, because its location is less than ideal? i agree that the IOC could have made a better choice, but there are better ways to protest this event than by not watching our US athletes compete on a worldwide stage to promote a better world.
sources: http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2013/country-chapters/russia?page=3