Hi. It’s been a while, and no video this time either. I swear I still call myself a videoblogger, and I still think like one…just not getting any videos up to the internets.

In the meantime, a quick update because I am inspired by the fact that my entire family is now blogging…which is amazing!

You can read for yourself here:

• Moms (via Muheza, now Victoria)
• My sister Rachel (in Korea)
• Ambrose & Leah
• Griffin
• Simon

Now I’m trying out Google reader so that I am made aware of their updates. It’s been a while since I’ve followed blogs that aren’t aggregated by a planet. Time to push myself to get out there more and break away from my school-induced tunnel vision.

In my corner of the world, I moved into a new apartment and have done some basic things to make it a comfortable homework-hovel.

The Living Room (aka homework cage):

Well-Adjusted Hound who will follow me anywhere so long as the bed is there too:

The Kitchen


My first home cooked meal: fishcakes, sauteéd turnip green, red pepper aioli

Finally, I’ve been listening to lots of great music lately. Been going to quite a few more live shows that usual. Recently I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Santogold, Sunset Rubdown, Rae Spoon and this coming Friday I will be seeing The Dears and Metric because my sister Lisa is playing bass for The Dears now.

If you want to check out some of the music I’ve been listening to, download this playlist ( file size: 117MB) and enjoy.

So I left California and the blog got all quiet…sorry.

A lot has been happening – returning to school, working part time for Mozilla, going to the nolose conference and meeting lots of amazing activists.

One of the ideas that came to me while at the conference was to start a FatPlanet. Mozilla and OpenSource at Seneca both use planet to aggregate feeds, so why not a FatPlanet?

Well – it’s here. I got FatPlanet.net and got the ball rolling.

Now I just need feeds to add to it – so send you feed information to: admin@fatplanet.net and get your blog feed into the planet stream.

Last night I had the pleasure of eating at Ubuntu, not to be confused with Ubuntu. Apparently this relatively new restaurant is getting high praise for its vegetarian menu, which is really quite diverse and also features a fair amount of items from it’s nearby bio-dynamic garden.

The following pictures are only a couple of the dishes I got to try, not pictured is the amazing corn pudding with roasted peach. I’ve been having a good time with corn this summer, at the Front Porch I fell in love with grits, and I intend to learn how to make them when I get home. After reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s dilemma, I got a bit corn-phobic for a while but now that revulsion has mellowed into a “if it’s organic, it’s okay in small quantities” take on the issue. Three food related goals for myself based on this summer’s reading:

1. Eat sitting down. This may seem obvious, but I think that I do sometimes tend to eat while doing other things and just stopping to make eating its own task will go a long way towards slowing down my eating and making me appreciate what I’m eating more.
2. Avoid high fructose corn syrup. Sad but true: Orangina contains HFCS, as do a lot of other beverages. It’s a small thing I can do, even if I am not great at cutting out all sugars, I can do this one.
3. Avoid meat from CAFOs. I will continue to eat meat (for now) but when I do it will be better quality, and supporting a local meat economy.

And now for some food-porn…(photos courtesy of Naomi)

cauliflower in a cast iron pot with our vadouvan roast-puree-raw-“couscous”, brown butter toast amuse bouche:

our carta da musica with truffled pecorino fresh-picked GREENS, lemon, ROSEMARY, trumpet chips:

and finally deep-fried egg with tartar sauce & black garlic smoked potato salad, grain mustard, roast cippolini onions:

Can’t wait until I get an iPhone so I can blog about the food I’m having, while I’m having it!.

Stay tuned for my wine tasting notes, I will try to transcribe them when I am back in Canada next week.