I Never Promised You an Organic Garden

Matt and I had a great trip back to Virginia for my mom’s and sister’s birthdays. We had a wonderful time, including some hilarious Wii antics with my mom and sister. (Check out the pictures) Neither of them had ever played before, and it turned into a full contact video game pretty quickly.

We were quite glad to miss out on all the snow here in Richmond and enjoy the 50 degree weather in Virginia. I have to say though, as we were driving home I realized this was one of the first times in my life that I did not dread leaving the comfort of my parents’ house.

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Anyone who has a cat, as I do, will find this quite familiar:

Since two full months have pasted since I made my New Year’s Goals, I thought it would be appropriate to check in and update everyone on my progress. This is probably more helpful for me in keeping myself held accountable for completing my goals than for anyone else.

Just as a reminder, here are my goals:

1) Blog twice a week – this is something I have been neglecting.

2) Go to the gym twice a week – I really need to get back in shape. If nothing else, I need to keep from gaining more weight and not being able to fit into my bride’s maid dress this May.

3) Start recycling at home – Matt and I are actually working on this one together so hopefully it will happen. We need to start with the first sub-goal of calling and ordering recycling services.

4) Learn Javascript – This is a somewhat work related goal, but I definitely want to accomplish it. It will definitely require some sub-goals to complete, but I know it is attainable.

How am I doing?

#1: This has been going pretty well. It was hard to come up with things to blog about to start with, but now that I have been doing it for two months, I often find myself blogging more than twice a week. I have also set to work on refining my blog some and using some of the more useful WordPress plugins.

#2: This is not going as well as I had hoped, but Matt and I have taken up playing racquetball. We are playing at least once a week, often twice a week, but we don’t get in any weight training time. It is definitely good cardio, but we need to work harder to do more.

#3: This is going great!! We have been doing extremely well with this, and it has been very fulfilling. It also has the added bonus of allowing us to use less trash bags.

#4 I have barely started to scratch the surface when it comes to learning JavaScript. I have finished two chapters of O’Reilly’s Learning JavaScript, and I feel like I have a better idea of what is going on but definitely don’t know how to start from scratch.

All in all I, think I am doing well.

Do you have any goals for the new year, and how are they going?

I am feeling very inspired by the presentation that Elizabeth Keller and Turner Ritchie gave this morning about their recent trip to Nepal and the time they spent with a grassroots organization called Women Empowerment. The group is working to help women overcome poverty and oppression in a society where they are considered less than second class citizens.

And while it would have been easy to become overwhelmed and saddened by the stories of oppressed impoverished women in a far off country so different from my own, I felt inspired. Not only by the stories of women who have learned to provide for themselves and their families and to speak out for the basic rights of all women in their countries, but also by the amazing women in my life.

Women like Elizabeth who are unabashedly strong and forthright. Women who reach out to others with compassion and an honest desire to help support and lift one another up. These women go far beyond simply being opinionated and stubborn and are truly empowered and a force to be reckoned with.

Along with Elizabeth Keller, I think of:

Anna Lisa Gross

Emily Mingle-Hershberger

Amy Gall Ritchie

Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm

Tracy Stoddart

Karen Poling

Ashely Saylor

Katie O’Donnell

These women are an inspiration and example for men and women alike!

This weekend Matt and I participated in Iron Chef Bethany. For those of you who don’t know a lot about Iron Chef, it is a Food Network TV show where two chefs (an Iron Chef and a competitor) compete to cook six dishes in an hour using a secret ingredient. Each dish is judged on plating, taste, and originality and an overall winner is determined by three celebrity judges.

Obviously, Iron Chef Bethany had to be slightly different, but we had a blast anyway. There were three teams, four judges, and one very orange secret ingredient — CARROTS. Matt, Karen and Travis Poling, Chris Hardie, and myself formed the Fairview Five and made 6 carroty dishes:

• Carrot jello jigglers
• Carrot, cabbage, broccoli, and bean sprout spring rolls
• Homemade carrot pasta with carrot marinara sauce
• Spicy peanut carrot soup
• Carrot ginger sorbet
• Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting

All the dishes turned out great, and I even helped cook. I didn’t burn anything, break any dishes, set anything on fire, leave out any ingredients, or cause anything to fall on my head. All in all it was a very successful day in the kitchen.

Unfortunately our team only received the “most creative use of the secret ingredient” award, but there were lots of great carrot dishes, and everyone had a wonderful time.

If you want to see some more photos, checkout my Facebook photo album or, if you don’t use Facebook, my Picasa Web Album.

Well, after two false alarms it seems we might actually be getting a “real” snow storm. It has been snowing all evening, and it is supposed to continue for most of the night. Of course, the last time the meteorologist said we were supposed to get a big snow we got 1/2 an inch.

Oddly enough I am actually looking forward to some snow. Normally it just annoys me, but this year I am longing for a good snow that I can play and sled in. It seems to snow more often here in the mid-west, but we got bigger, more substantial snow storms back home in Virginia.

I remember getting at least one big snow storm almost every winter growing up in Virginia. My sister and I would put on layer after layer of warm clothes, boots, gloves, and itchy wool hats and spend the whole day outside sledding, making snowmen, and eating snow. Then we would come in and set our wet clothes and boots in front of the wood stove to dry for round two.

Living here in the city, where the closest “sledding hill” is a 10 minute car trip away and the snowplow wipes the streets clean before any really accumulation can build, I am missing my country winters in Virginia.

I just finished reading The Golden Compass for my book club and loved it. After some rousing conversation about what our daemons would be at this evening’s meeting I took the online test at the Golden Compass website.

Now you can see the results and chime in about whether you agree.

Matt and I took a trip to Indianapolis today to visit the new Smart dealership and take a test drive. Unfortunately we forgot to take a photo of me with the car, but we had a great time.

After a 30 minute wait ,we were able to each take a turn test driving the tiny car with the very friendly and somewhat overly helpful sales person. I really enjoyed the car and could definitely see myself driving one in the future.

The sales person seemed somewhat surprised and impressed by how much Matt and I already knew about the car and by my spirited driving. He was ultimately very helpful and not pushy, so if we do buy one, we will be sure to go through him.

Here are the pros and cons after our test drive experience:

Pros:

• Plenty of head and leg room inside the cabin: Matt, who is 6′1″, was able to get in the car and sit comfortably with the seat still being able to slide back even further.
• Cute!: The Smart is absolutely adorable, and it comes in a variety of attractive colors. Matt and I both agree the metallic blue is our favorite.
• Great gas mileage: It is rated for 33 mpg city and 40 mpg highway. With only having an eight gallon tank, it won’t hit your wallet quite so hard every time you fill up either.
• Eco Friendly: Not only does the Smart get great gas mileage and have the lowest emissions of all non-hybrid cars, but the entire production process has been designed with environmental friendliness in mind.
• Lots of storage: While there isn’t a backseat, the Smart does have a reasonable trunk that could easily hold groceries, a days worth of shopping plunders, or an average size dog. There is also a storage compartment in the fold-down tail gate for holding things like jumper cables, a first-aid kit, and other emergency essentials.
• Great handling: The Smart has an electronic stability program, anti-lock brake, brake assist, automatic hill start assistance, and quite a few other active technologies that help improve the handling and acceleration in all conditions.
• Comfy: Both the standard cloth and upgraded leather seats are very comfortable and come with optional seat heaters to keep your buns warm.
• Unique: The Smart is nothing like any of the other cars on the road today, and you aren’t likely to run into twenty cars just like yours on the way across town.

Cons:

• No Clutch pedal: Because the Smart has an electronically controlled automated manual transmission, there is no need for a clutch petal. This left me, an avid manual transmission fan, feeling a little disconnected from the car.
• Sluggish: The 1L 70hp engine does not have the pep of our 2.8L 170hp Passat.
• Rough idle: Because the Smart is a 3 cylinder tuned for peak efficiency, it idles very low and can feel a little rough or unbalanced.
• No cruise control: From the perspective of a lead-foot, who uses the cruise control to keep from getting pulled over, the Smart’s lack thereof is somewhat troubling. However, because it is designed primarily for in-town travel it is not a surprising omission.
• Blind spots in the cabriolet: Matt and I both tested the convertible version, and because of the way the back window is designed to accommodate the convertible top, it left me feeling like I couldn’t easily see what was going on behind me. Fortunately the non-convertible version has plenty of visibility.

All in all it was a great car, and Matt and I both gave it a 9. There are still a few more cars we want to checkout before we decide what to buy, but the Smart is definitely high on our list.

I just read an article in our local paper about an Indiana senator who is using the recent Virginia Tech shooting to further a bill in the senate that would reverse the bill that keeps gun owners with concealed carry permits from carrying their guns on college campuses. This article is quite disturbing in many ways.

First, the senator is quoted as saying that he used Virginia Tech as a rallying cry to convince other senators to back his bill. Being a Virginia Tech graduate and having quite a few friends on campus that day, I am appalled. This event was tragic and devastating for so many people, and should by no means be used as a springboard for politicians to push their personal agendas no matter which side of the gun debate they are on.

Second, when I read articles like this I can’t help but feel like those involved have missed the point entirely. This shooting was not caused by guns or the availability or lack there of guns on a college campus. This was caused because people feel the need to treat others badly. Whether it was the students who tormented Cho ruthlessly or Cho himself who felt he had the right to take the lives of other students for mistreating him, our society is full of people with an “I am the most important person in the room” mentality.

Instead of compassion and a desire to help those around us, we have an inflated sense of entitlement and need to put others down in order to make ourselves feel good. The issue here is not who had a gun or could have had a gun. The issue here is why do we as a society treat each other so poorly and what can be done to correct our behavior.

Lastly, as someone who enjoys guns and is a firm believer that individuals have the right to own them, I do not think that college students being armed would have or will keep this situation from happening. There are far too many “what if’s”…

• what if none of the students in those classrooms had guns?
• what if the students weren’t able to shoot their attacker before being shot themselves?
• what if students trying to disarm the shooter harmed other students?

Also, while I have heard many comparisons to this and the Appalachian State shooting where students were able to run to their cars and retrieve guns they used to stop a shooter, that does not necessarily carry to what happened at Virginia Tech. The most obvious difference is the layout of the Virginia Tech campus and the fact that because parking lots are so far away from the educational buildings, students who might have attempted to retrieve firearms from their cars would not have been able to do so quickly enough to make a difference. Second, unless the students happened to have a gun on their person in the classroom, civilians would not have been able to help from outside the building because the doors were chained.

There is simply no way to look back on that day and say with utter certainty that students being allowed to carry guns would right this situation. Instead of focusing all of our time and money on “what might be or could have been,” I suggest our government start looking deeper in to the social issues that cause tragedies like this and so many others within our country.

This has been quite a fun filled and varied weekend…

Friday night we had a group of people over to have dinner and play with our new wii. It was quite a spectacle! Seeing 7 grown adults shaking the wiimote like sugar crazed children was very entertaining. We took plenty of photos, and after looking at them, I think I will definitely have to create a wii photo gallery in my Picasa web album.

Here a few samples of what is yet to come:

Saturday Matt and I joined a large group from the church and went to the ice skating rink at Miami University of Ohio in Oxford. We only skated for 2 hours, but it was quite a workout. Unfortunately, at the end of our time I took a catastrophic fall and landed hard on my knee. I have a nice black and blue goose egg but fortunately no real damage.

I also spent some time indulging my geekie tendencies.  I built the newest version of banshee (an open source Itunes equivalent) from the source.  It was a quite a different experience than installing a program that comes prepackaged.  After installing things from the command line, I felt a much greater since of accomplishment than just clicking install in Windows and letting the computer do it itself.   I also spent time playing tech support for my grandparents.

All in all it was a great weekend!