Monday, September 20, 2010

UW Lecture Series...Food: Eating Your Environment

My friend Kari shared this on FB and it looks like a really cool lecture series.  We are going to attend the lecure on October 19 - "Food Politics: Advocacy for Social Change" Speaker: Marion Nestle - Paulette Goddard Professor, New York University
There are several others that sound really cool.  I wish I could go to them all.  They are free so if you're interested you should really check it out.
https://go.washington.edu/uwaa/events/2010food_lecture/details.tcl?ref=nfcture/details.tcl?ref=n

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Slow Food

This is an organization that politically advocates for sustainable healthy food. I have attached a video in my video section for you to check out.  If you visit their website they also have a petition you can sign too help put tighter regulations in place to help prevent the poor and unsafe farming practices that are running of  control. slowfoodusa.org

Sunday, September 5, 2010

UPDATE:Our journey is near!

I set the stage in my description of this blog and then, I sort of just started posting to this blog just about some local restaurants in Portland that I enjoy to get familiar with it. But the real focus is on our upcoming RV journey everywhere USA. So I just wanted to give a quick update on where we are on that.

We had a huge garage sale back in June and sold over 1/2 of everything we own. The rest we kept to stage the house and got a storage unit for keepsakes and such. I have to say that it was a great feeling to purge stuff. You don’t really realize how much crap you really have. When you make a decision to change your life and embark on a journey like this, it really offers you the opportunity to look at "stuff" differently. What you need, what you don’t, why you have been keeping it, storing it, shuffling things around for years…that type of thing. I mean, what do I really need? Granted, I like to have nice things and be comfortable. I certainly don’t claim to be Gandhi or some sort of live off the land kind of gal or anything. (As much as I admire it, it certainly wouldn’t be for me). We are purchasing a 40’ diesel pusher RV and towing a car behind it for God sake. I’m just saying how many cookie sheets do I really need? How many sauce pans and little dishes for olives and spreads and what not? It is completely ridiculous really. I honestly think we sold like 5 shovels. I mean what the Hell it isn’t like we run a landscaping business or anything. It just seems to happen. Well I am here to tell you it feels great to look around your life and really decide what you really need, really don’t and PURGE it. Other people are so happy to have it too. It’s almost as if it gets reborn and reenergized. Oh, by the way, I hate having a garage sale. I swear I will never collect enough again to warrant having another one. For the record, there were a few things I wondered if I really wanted to get rid of but did, and I haven’t missed them at all.

Since then, we have been prepping the house to put on the market. It was really tough in this particular market as you can probably imagine. The chances of getting any real return on your investment are slim to none. So mostly we just did the things to separate our house from the pack. A fresh coat of exterior paint, some interior paint, power washed the driveway and some refreshed landscaping ETC…Well, needless to say, it worked! We got an offer after 5 weeks on the market. We went through the inspection phase and now we are waiting on the appraisal to come back with fingers crossed. Soon we will be ready to move into this, or something very similar…

 
This is a 2010 40’ Itasca Meridian. We have not purchased it yet because we are waiting for the house deal to go through. But as soon as it does we will be on our way. The funniest part of this whole RV thing? Neither Chris nor I have even been RVing much less driven one. (Well my dad rented one when I was really little in about 1976 but I don’t really remember much.) Oh fear not we are going to purchase a video camera and shoot some videos for your and our enjoyment. It should be quite comical and entertaining. But for now we will just have to sit and hold our breath and hope the appraisal comes back favorably!