Green Festival, garden, chainsaw, work, babies, eve online... All things!

I always have a hard time to decide if I should write a title to a post before or after the post itself. In general I try to do it before to restrict the contents of the post, but what it does is that it ends up being out of sync with it. So today I decided to just add everything in the title and see what I can cover in the post. If some things are not mentioned, oh, well... Just know that they are important somehow to my current mental state.

Starting with yesterday: we went to the Green Festival mostly because we've received a free admission by shopping at PCC. It was interesting. There were about 4 types of groups represented: home improvements (solar panels and windows being the most common), green associations (like some sustainable neighborhood groups), organic/natural food sources (with lots of things to try - with an very large amount of teas, actually), and natural clothing/diapers/beauty stuff. There were also a few other things, like the Rachel Corrie Foundation with tasting of Palestinian olive oil and Za'atar (but they weren't there for the food).

In general, the festival wasn't terrible, but it wasn't that exciting either. Maybe it would have been better if we actually watched some of the talks. Just going around the people selling/advertising things you don't really get all that the festival was about.

Then today the day started with family things: talking with my parents, then talking with A's parents and then transformed into working at the garden and cutting down trees with a chainsaw (yes, I still have all my fingers - although it's not that easy to cut a finger with a chainsaw. It's easier to get a tree falling on your head, or things splintering into your eyes, or a chain breaking and flying to your arms, torso or legs. None of those things happened). Now the garden is a little bit more open, has two new trees, a rhubarb plant and I'm US$550 richer (through not being $550 poorer). There is still a lot to do, but we are slowly getting there.

Now going back to the past and considering my two new "projects" (not in many details. More details to go onto the other blog some day): a new recipe organizer project and EVE Online. A and I (where I is not an acronym) have decided to cook more often. What that means is that we plan recipes on the weekend and days each will be cooking. It's been interesting, but I feel like I can make the experience better.

First it still seems that we end up wasting food, because we try to diversify our meals and end up with ingredients that we have to buy in a larger quantity than we need for the recipe and don't use that in another recipe. Maybe if we were more aware of ingredients that would be left over, we could plan meals around those (if we could easily search for recipes by ingredient). Second, I would like to force more variety, especially on vegetables. Having something to make us aware of our imbalance might help on planning. Finally, I want to keep track of what we've tried and how it worked so that we can know what we can suggest to other people.

There are some websites out there with the ability to search by ingredients, to keep track of recipes and nutrition. However, they have two main problems: they are great for the recipes they have, but it's painful if you want to add recipes from different sources, like magazines. Also, in the nutrition side, they focus on calories/protein/carb/fat counting, and I don't think that this is what I want to track. What I want is to track things like grains, fruit, vegetables, etc. I don't mind much those nutrient counts.

Now onto EVE Online... Well, not much I can talk about this one that I haven't mentioned before. I'm still playing. Maybe 15 minutes to 1 hour every day or so. But I've reached the point where I was disappointed last time: one that your enemies get much better than you and you have to keep killing one or two and getting back to fix your ship. Then go back to it and slowly finish it. That's hard to do playing only at most 1 hour at night. So, we'll see...

I guess that's it. I was planning on going to a concert tonight, but spending the afternoon in the garden drained all the energy I had (ignoring the fact that the concert starts in 5 minutes and we finished the garden work for the day only half an hour ago and had to shower...). Now it's time to sit down and rest until dinner time.

Did I cover everything? Almost... I've skipped babies... That's just friends getting to the "having babies" period of their lives. It's exciting!