Friday, October 30, 2009

Forest Hill Farms in San Ramon was leading the race for most sincere pumpkin patch in the area this year, until this appeared:



Hard to see in this photo (click to enlarge), but it's an inflatable slide. Of the Titanic. What lunatic decided to make a children's amusement out of a tragedy in which over 1,500 people died? In which you get reenact how many of them actually died... for fun! Whee!

I've seen the Titanic slide before, several years ago at the Tracy mall. Birgit and I were appalled then, too, but my phone did not take photos then.

(I also found out that Forest Hill Farms' pumpkin patch has dumb little rides that they charge extra for, which makes it as insincere a pumpkin patch as you can get in a neighborhood where people don't actually grow pumpkins on a large scale.)

Monday, October 26, 2009

The cats went to see the vet last week for their annual shots and exam, and also because Isis has been barfing a lot, usually around 5am. The vet said she seems to be fine, it may just be a hairball that got down into her stomach. She's only barfed once since then, so hopefully it's not chronic kidney failure.

I found out today that someone I worked with for several years died yesterday at age 33 of a rare form of cancer, a tumor in her pituitary gland. I first met Rannie at E3 when our PR agency had just hired her, a completely green kid who had been putting together comic book cons. After helping me stuff many, many folders with press releases and fact sheets (the days before electronic press kits and ftp sites), we had a nice dinner on 3DO's tab. She was such a sweet person, always ready with a big hug and a smile, even if we hadn't seen each other in ages, and she always said she never forgot that dinner at E3. No one deserves to die of cancer, but this one seems especially unfair.

This evening I made a vegetable soup completely from scratch (no, I didn't grow the vegetables). Using guidelines from Alice Waters, I threw together some chopped onions, carrots, turnip, leek and some of the veggie broth I made last weekend and it magically turned into soup! A good soup, even! It's finally cooling off again after another few warmish days, so that coupled with a not-great day, made a hot, comforting meal pretty essential tonight.

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Sunday, October 04, 2009

I experienced a pretty drastic example of saving money by shopping at Windmill Farms vs. grocery stores yesterday when I went to pick up a bunch of ingredients for a huge pot of Black Bean and Wheat Berry Chili (very good--highly recommended, but probably too spicy for Mom and Bob). At Windmill Farms I spent $4.92 on my produce (I also bought a couple of other items, including some organic spices that were being sold by the producer as a special thing). The same basket of produce at Safeway would have cost me $9.73, even with the Club Card discount. The only item the cost more at Windmill Farms than Safeway was the avocado.

Whole Foods is the only store around here that carries wheat berries and millet, but in the bulk bins so I was able to get out of there for a grand total of $1.86.

The weather today could actually be described as chilly. I had to turn off the ceiling fan this afternoon for the first time in about six months.

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