It's durian season!

It had been nearly a year since I was last able to buy a whole durian. Sure, you can always get those little plastic boxes with the saran-wrapped durian. But it's just not the same. In Seattle, you can get a whole durian just about any time of year from any number of different Asian markets.

Up here in the mountains of Asheville, we are not so lucky. There is one Korean market in town that carries whole durians. They get them by driving down to Atlanta (about 4 hours away) every Sunday and bringing half a dozen back with them. If the durians don't look good that Sunday, they don't get any. During the winter months, they don't bother bringing any back. In spring, they get them if they look good. Once May arrives, they apparently get them every week.

But even so, if you don't act quick, you still miss out. We've gone down there every week for the past 4 weeks to pick up a durian but with no luck. "Oh, we had some, but some guy came in and bought the last 2 about an hour ago." "Sorry, a women bought the entire case as soon as we brought them in." Why they don't buy a full dozen I will never know.

But this week, we called down there just as the store opened on Sunday to ask if there were any whole durians. Hooray! There were! 10 minutes later we arrived at the store and bought the most delicious durian this side of the Pacific Ocean.

foodscout is finally done!

The last several months I have been doing little else besides working on this health food website. I didn't mind, because I've been very excited about it. But I am glad it's done. Or at least done enough to launch it. I still have a list of half a million enhancements and additions I'm thinking of making.

http://www.foodscout.org

I don't have much more to say about it, except that I LOVE FOODSCOUT and I hope that you do too!

Leaves fall in Asheville

I haven't experience a real fall since I left New York state to go to college in Texas almost 15 years ago (yes, it really has been that long). In Texas, people joked, we had two seasons: green season and brown season.

In Seattle, I suppose a few trees actually turned red and yellow and were kind of pretty. It was very similar to autumn. People there certainly insisted that they had a "real fall."

Yesterday, I looked out my front door at the always beautiful tree-lined street, and it was raining leaves! Beautiful gold, orange, and red leaves, fluttering to the street below. So amazing!

I know, it's no New Hampshire or even New York. But it was definitely an honest to God fall.

Raw food recipe of the week - Turkey Loaf

I made this for an early Thanksgiving raw food potluck. People were bringing the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie, but no one was brining the turkey! This is a very simple recipe from Living on Live Food, by Alissa Cohen. The recipe didn't call for dehydrating it but I thought it would be better with a hint of crispiness on the outside.



Turkey loaf: Pumpkin seeds, cashews, Brazil nuts, celery, scallions, and dried sage, blended well in a food processor, formed into a loaf, and dehydrated at 105 degrees for 6 hours.

Cranberry sauce: Fresh cranberries, agave nectar, blended in the food processor. Excess liquid drained.

Mardi Gras for kids

I took a break from my usual evening of watching online clips of The Daily Show and other online time wasters, to participate in everyone's favorite holiday, Halloween. No, that's not a picture of my front yard. That would be a neighbor's fine handy work.

As it turns out, my neighborhood of West Asheville is a very popular spot for trick-or-treaters. "It's like Marti Gras," a neighbor told me. Well, I don't think that neighbor has ever been to Marti Gras because it certainly wasn't anything like that. I didn't see a single kid who was falling down drunk or flashing people to get candy. But it was pretty busy. There were hundreds of kids all along the main street that runs down my neighborhood just in the 5 minutes that I spent over there. Apparently, the people who live on that street spend as much as $300 on candy to hand out. (I know it's hard to see, but that picture is a line of children at a neighbor's door. Click it for a bigger version.)

I live just 1 block west of that street, and most of the kids don't bother walking that far out of their way. So I got about 40 trick-or-treaters and didn't even go through all of my first bag of candy - gum that looks like eyeballs. They were a big hit with the kids.

Raw recipe of the week - BBQ Chicken Fingers

These were quite delicious! We had our very first house guest yesterday, and she was mighty impressed with them too. The recipe is from Alissa Cohen's Living On Live Food.



Ingredients: Sprouted lentils, carrots, orange juice, onion, olive oil, agave nectar, curry, vegetable seasoning, Celtic sea salt. Blended in the food processor and dehydrated at 105 degrees for about 16 hours.

I'm a quitter!

Sure, who hasn't quit a job? But I've quit two jobs within less than a year of each other. This last one only lasted 4 1/2 months. That's called a pattern. The shorter time between hating my job and leaving it has shrunk significantly, which means my quitting skills are improving.

Of course, considering the fact that this job pays about 30% of what my last job paid, with no vacation time or other benefits, some might say it is easier to give up. On the other hand, my last job didn't have random adorable dogs running around the "office" (it's actually just a shit load of computers crammed into the owner's house). On the other other hand, my last job also didn't have random adorable dogs peeing on the furniture. I guess every job has it's pluses and minuses.

When I took this job, I thought it would be different. Somehow, working for chump change seemed synonymous with meaningful job. And I thought the flexible schedule, easy-going atmosphere, and hourly pay, meant that I could spend less time working and more time living. But with such a low pay rate, I can't afford to work fewer hours or do anything fun, and all I do is obsess about money.

As it turns out, there is a reason the job doesn't pay well: the company pours all of its money into projects that have no value. There is no market research, no project management, no product planning, and no forward-thinking technical vision. What takes a "real company" 4 months to build, takes this place over 2 years, and when it's "done", half the features don't work and the other half are stupid.

People in this company generally fall into two basic camps - the believers and the freeloaders.

The believers have tremendous enthusiasm for the noble mission of the company - to create a MySpace-facebook-Rhapsody-
[insert-already-existing-and-wildly-popular-website-here] online network on a Googlesque scale that will save the world and make billions of dollars. The believers also have a very naive view of the company's current place in this space. They believe they are competitive. They believe that their competitors know or care that this company exists. They believe that all they need to do is fix a few little things, and they will take the internet by storm. Their understanding of the internet is stuck in about 1999. This group accounts for approximately 10% of the company.

The other 90%, the freeloaders, are not bad people. They moved to Asheville, were excited to get a job - any job, as Asheville has so few of them - and genuinely thought this would be a pretty cool place to work. When they realized that the company was more of a summer camp for wayward souls than an actual company, they either started searching for better jobs (some have been looking for months), or they settled in for the free ride. They show up well after noon and leave before 4 PM. They "work from home" an awful lot. They sometimes skip Mondays entirely - sometimes sending an email to let others know, sometimes not.

The owner of the company finds this "frustrating". Phrases commonly uttered are "Does anyone know if [-----] is coming in today?" and "It's really hard to get everyone into a meeting when you're never all here at the same time." Does he not understand that he is in charge? Actually, he's terrified that these freeloading good-for-nothings will quit if he lays down the law. And then how will his dreams come true?

I went through a few phases in my time here that I think are fairly common:

1. Enthusiasm - I came on board, found all kinds of ways that the development process was broken, and endeavored to fix it. I even made some improvements, like putting together internal code documentation, and engaging in some actual project management.


2. Frustration - I worked hard to get a good project completed while other team members didn't show up or do any work and others were constantly moved around from my "critically important" project to some other "critically important" project. I finished the project almost entirely on my own and was reasonably proud of how it turned out.


3. Acceptance - Once I no longer had that initial project to focus on, I had time to look around and really assess the situation. I had LOTS of time because there was no one to tell me what I should be doing. It didn't take long to see that this was not a real company (don't tell the believers, they really hate that phrase). It is, in fact, a tragic waste of money, time, and human potential. So when asked to do some work, I did it, but I stopped wasting any time taking initiative to try to polish this turd.


4. Annoyance - It was fine when little was being asked of me. Having some money coming in was nice. And while it was boring as hell to be here, it was easy and fairly stress-free. But when the boss suddenly started to demand that progress be made on his latest boondoggle, I knew it was time for me to go. Any progress that gets made here is guaranteed to be progress in the wrong direction. Not a good use of my energy. So I gave my notice. Today is my last day.

Lesson learned: If I work for someone else, I work for money - as much money as possible for as little work as possible. Meaning can be found in other areas of my life.

So what will I do now? I'm lucky enough to have 2 things going for me; 1) a savings account and 2) a very supportive and loving partner who doesn't mind paying most of the bills for a few weeks.

In the meantime, I'm going to be finishing up some personal web projects that I think will make money and be useful and meaningful to people. Because one thing I now know for sure: it just isn't that hard to keep a company afloat.

Raw food dish of the week - Sea Vegetable Crackers

I seem to have a hankering for seaweed lately. These crackers are soooo good.



Ingredients: Sunflower seeds, flax seeds, sun-dried tomatoes, Celtic sea salt, and fresh ginger, blended in the food processor. Herbamare seasoning and dulse flakes sprinkled on top. Dehydrated at 105 degrees for about 15 hours.

Statistics Addiction

Some people get up and grab a cup of coffee first thing. I grab my laptop. In fact, I grab my laptop before I even get up, as I keep it next to my bed. It's the last thing I look at before I turn my lights off at night, and it's waiting for me first thing in the morning.

I used to be hooked on email, but now that I've moved to a new town and don't get so many emails anymore, my compulsion has expanded into other, more statistical areas. I check stock prices, how much campaign money Ron Paul has raised, whether anyone has clicked on my AdSense ads, which search engines have crawled my websites and when, how my search engine optimizations have affected my google rankings, etc etc etc. And I do this many many times a day. OK, I'll be honest: many times an hour. Sometimes, if I run out of things to check, I even check the statistics of other people's websites. I can't seem to stop myself.

What's worse is that there are so many free online tools that help feed my addiction to statistics. Tools to see not just how many people visited my site, but how long they stayed, how many pages they visited, what countries and cities they are from, how they found my site, whether they've ever visited before, and probably data I have yet to discover.

While my addiction to statistics checking might make me an excellent candidate for geeky internet work, it makes for a pretty dull daily life. This is not why I moved to Asheville. I was supposed to be divorcing myself from chronic computer use. I was supposed to be working less and living more. I was supposed to be making the most of every single day.

So here is my promise, to myself and to all 16 of you who visit my blog (spending an average of 30 seconds, viewing an average of 1.5 pages, 56% coming from referring sites, 5 returning visitors, and hello to you guys in Belgium and New Zealand!): from now on, I will only check online statistics 2X per day: once in the morning and once at night. Starting.....in about 10 minutes from now.

Raw food dish of the week - Sea Vegetable Soup
I've finally, after several disastrous tries, succeeded at making a tasty raw soup! This recipe is from Eating Without Heating, by the Boutenko family. If you have the book and want to try the recipe, cut it in half first. I have enough to feed an army.



Ingredients: Almonds, water, olive oil, lemon juice, agave nectar, bay leaves, Celtic sea salt, cayenne pepper, blended well. Arame, wakame, and dulse flakes stirred in.

That yowling cat is divine music

Early every morning I wake up to the incessant yowling of my hungry cat, Gregory. His appetite is insatiable. As soon as he's done eating, he's yowling for more food. I am pretty sure he naps all day while I'm at work just so he'll be well-rested for another long evening of more yowling.

Last Saturday, I slept in late. My sweet Gregory had lost his voice. He was coughing and laying around a lot. Sunday night, he didn't even feel up to eating.

I don't know how old Gregory is but he's been with me for over 12 years. 12 years of cuddling with me on the couch. 12 years of purring like a motor in my ear. 12 years of the most annoying persistent affectionate floppiness you could ever find in a cat. He's awesome. And I can't imagine not having him around.

I was not looking forward to his vet appointment on Monday. For one thing, I was half sure that Gregory was going to die. For another, I believe veterinarians are about as useful as MDs - not very. It's always the same. They look the cat over, order a couple of expensive tests, tell you it was all inconclusive - well, it's either kennel cough or cancer - and then send you home with a bottle of antibiotics.

$320 worth of inconclusive lab tests and about 6 doses of antibiotics later, Gregory's melodious yowling has resumed. I can hardly describe the joy I feel as he wakes me up before dawn, begging for food.

Today, the vet called with his lab results. Everything looks normal except for one anomaly that might be nothing. She said I need to buy a home urine kit to collect a sample for further testing. Not that the test will necessarily tell us anything. The price? $390. That's just to collect the urine, not to test it. Up yours, Dr! We'll take our chances.

Raw food dish of the week - Creamy Fudge Squares
It's not that this dessert (recipe adapted from Eating Without Heating) didn't taste good, but it was pretty much just sweet chocolaty cashew butter. What exactly qualifies something as a recipe worthy of being in a published book? My sister and I used to mix peanut butter and jelly in a bowl and eat it with a spoon when we were kids. Should I put out my own book?



Ingredients: Cashew butter, water, agave nectar, cacao powder, Celtic sea salt.

Gardening for procrastinators

I love growing my own food. Especially those foods that only come in wasteful little packages, like mint. Or those that come in giant bags when I only need a small amount, like basil. Or those that I can't find organic, like aloe vera. Without my own garden, I constantly struggle with the choice between buying something I don't quite want, or doing without.

Having my own house means that I have the freedom to tear up the yard any way I please and plant vegetables to my heart's delight. It also means that I am so constantly busy with endless house-related projects that a garden never makes it to the top of my priority list.

When I do have free time, planting a garden seems like such a huge overwhelming project that I can never even get started. It's more than just throwing a seed in the ground and watering it. I've got to decide which part of the yard gets the right amount of sun, truck in quality dirt, put up some kind of little fence to keep the dog from watering my vegetables.

But I really want to have fresh mint for my green smoothies and fresh basil for raw pesto without having to throw away most of the bag. What's a girl to do?

Just go buy the plants. The rest will follow out of necessity. I saw a lovely little aloe plant at the co-op the other day that I couldn't resist. I took it home and let it suffer in it's tiny plastic container with crappy dirt for a good week. But it started to look weak so had no choice other than to hunt around for an appropriate planter and some high quality soil.

During my recent trip to the grocery store, I happened upon some beautiful basil and a lovely little mint plant. I couldn't see for myself, but I'm pretty sure my face lit up like a kid on Christmas day. I've been thinking of planting an herb garden along the front of the house, but hadn't looked into how much sun shines there, how much sun the plants would need, etc etc etc. Maybe I should wait, I thought for a few moments. Screw it! I'm getting those plants!

I'd better figure it out quick. Those herbs won't last forever in their tiny plastic cages.

Raw food dish of the week - Vanilla Ice Cream

I scored a brand new ice cream maker for $25 at my favorite neighborhood thrift store last week. My first ice cream attempt didn't go as well as I'd hoped. I think I need a recipe with more creamy fattiness in it - maybe some cashews or something. This was more like ice milk. The other problem was that I didn't realize I was supposed to fully freeze the ice cream maker before using it. I put it in the freezer for a few hours but then got impatient and used it anyway. So the ice cream was a bit runny. Tasted good though. Ice cream for procrastinators.

You can bet there will be many more ice cream experiments in my future. I'll definitely be picking up a copy of Vice Cream, written by my friend Jeff. I've tried his ice cream and it's the best ever.


Ingredients: Almond milk (almonds, water, dates, blended and strained through a nut-milk bag), vanilla bean, agave nectar, Celtic sea salt.

Male or female?

It's not just you. Computer programs also think I'm not as girly as I should be.

The Gender Genie is a great online tool that takes a piece of writing and analyzes keywords to determine if the author is most likely male or female.

The conclusion? Gender Genie has no idea what I am. Some posts came out more female, others more male. All of them were borderline. Not shocking news.

Coworkers have always treated me like "one of the guys", which, in the software industry, means they feel comfortable saying disgusting things about women when I'm in the room. I have baffled many-a-boyfriend by not fitting into the role they've tried to shove me into. A clairvoyant in Peru even told me that I'd been a man in most of my past lives.

I'm not sure what I am supposed to be like. Should I spend more time on my hair? Should I stop tracking the stock market? Should I support Hillary rather than Ron Paul? I make potato chips from scratch, for God's sake. Isn't that enough?

Not according to Gender Genie - this post was definitely written by a man.

Raw food dish of the week - Potato Chips



I cut the sweet potatoes into thin slices with a mandolin, which is a device used to cut chips, french fries, and other fun food shapes. Then tried out three different varieties of chips.

Plain: Just sweet potatoes, with nothing on them, dehydrated for 15 hours.

Cheesy chips: Sweet potatoes, marinated in Braggs Liquid Aminos, water, and nutritional yeast, dehydrated for 15 hours.

Chips a la John: Sweet potatoes, marinated in Braggs, pressed garlic, and pressed olives (pressed through a garlic press), dehydrated for 15 hours.

Google is my master

Last night, I came to the realization that I spend way too much time and energy frantically (and unconsciously) protecting myself from financial ruin, in the form of a job I find intolerable, obsessive tracking of my financial assets, and a compulsion toward to-do lists and other organization techniques.

For some reason, the take-away from that realization was to sign up for Google AdSense, in yet another frantic attempt to ensure my financial security. A good friend of mine recently told me that he had an ad on his blog, which he didn't think anyone ever read, for only one day and it earned him $8.85.

Wait a minute, I thought to myself, I too have a blog that no one reads. Maybe I can make money by putting an ad on my blog! So there it is, in all of it's Googly splendor, in the top right corner of the page.

I have officially sold out. I now await the throngs of fans who are angry and disappointed with my fall from grace.

Raw food dish of the week - Pancakes with blackberry sauce

These were remarkably pancake-flavored for such a simple recipe. Must be the brazil nuts. And they were simple as can be to make. The recipe can be found here (scroll down to the second recipe).



Pancakes: Brazil nuts, bananas, water, cinnamon, blackberries.

Sauce: Blackberries, agave nectar.

Feng Shui

We had a feng shui expert come to the house. She said we needed a "water feature" in the back yard to help with our prosperity and prevent money from flying out of our life. So far she seems to be right because before we had that fountain hooked up, $99 flew out to pay for the feng shui expert and another $300 went for the water trough and solar pump.

Other feng shui rememedies the house needed: tons of metal in various rooms, some furniture rearranging, and a "mountain feature" in the front yard to protect us from the onslaught of "chi" coming from an oncoming street.

I actually love the changes so far. The living room looks cozier, the bedroom is much more bright and open, and the fountain fills me with glee every time I catch a glimpse of it. I'm not sure what to do for the mountain feature. Right now, we've just got the car parked out front to block all that darned chi.

Raw recipe of the week - Whipped sweet potatoes

This is one of those recipes that seems great when you take the first bite and then you're totally done. It might make a decent side dish at a raw Thanksgiving, but it's definitely not so great as a main entree.



Ingredients: Sweet potatoes, cauliflower, pine nuts, leeks, onion powder, flax oil, filtered water, Celtic sea salt, and parsley.

Make me bendy

A big problem with being unemployed is finding the motivation to get up at a consistent hour or leave the house on a regular basis. I've been getting out of bed anywhere from 6:30 AM to 11:30 AM. And I've gone days without talking to anyone other than my cats and my dog. They are better for conversation than you might expect.

That all changed last weekend when I won a 1-month unlimited yoga studio membership in a silent auction. The studio is only blocks from my house and offers several classes a day to choose from.

My first yoga class was Hatha Yoga, which is focused more on stretching and relaxation. The instructor asked if any of us had any "issues" we wanted to work on. I told her that I have eight years of hunching over at a computer to work out of my body. The two women on either side of me nodded in understanding. On almost every pose the instructor corrected me by pushing my shoulders down and out of their high-tech hunchback position.

My second yoga class was Power Yoga. It was awesomely painful. I was holding myself up in positions I didn't know were possible. Some weren't. Again, the instructor kept coming over and pushing my shoulders down. I wonder how long it will take to undo my computer posture.

Power Yoga kicked my ass so hard that I had to skip yoga yesterday. Everything hurt. Even my ribs were sore. They still are actually, but I'm going back today anyway. I'm going to squeeze everything I can out of this membership.

The only downside to daily yoga is that it seems to break up my day in ways that often prevent me from getting things done. I'm hoping that I just need to readjust to the new schedule.

The major upside is that now when I think about caving in and looking for some high-tech contract work, I immediately decide against it because it will interfere with yoga. Yeah, life is pretty good.

Raw food dish of the week - Enchiladas

This dish was so good and very easy to make. A bit time consuming though because I had to keep checking on the tortillas.
You may notice that the enchilada pictured is rather short and fat, rather than long and thin. I rolled it in the wrong direction. By the time I realized my foolish error, it was too late to fix it.

Corn tortilla: frozen corn, ground flax seeds, fresh orange juice, Celtic sea salt, and garlic, blended in a food processor and dehydrated at 105 degrees.

Filling: spinach, shitake mushrooms, zucchini, red pepper, and onions marinated in olive oil, Celtic sea salt, and chili powder.

Learning to draw

I have my beloved iBook back and the wonderful people at the Seattle Mac Store even recovered most of my data, which makes me not even mind their dreadful customer service. They weren't the ones having to suffer through using the ancient computers at the neighborhood library so I guess they didn't see the urgency. What's important is that I have it back and I can now rejoin the human race.

Of other significance is that I have finally gotten used to the idea that it's OK to not be working. I spent the first couple of weeks of my unemployment looking for part-time jobs, thinking I should really bring in some money. The fact that the Seattle Mac Store had my computer for so long is probably largly responsible for this shift in thinking since I was unable to look or apply for jobs without a decent computer and my resumes. Thanks again, Seattle Mac Store, for helping me to realize that I deserve a little vacation time after eight long years of soul-sucking software work.

So what to do instead? I decided to go to the art supply store, which happens to be right next to the Seattle Mac Store, to look for inspiration. And I found some! There on the shelf was a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. Three people in the same week recommended this book to me, all saying that if I really want to learn how to draw, I should take a class and not read any of the drawing books out there, unless it's this one. So I picked up a copy along with all the required materials I will need to complete the lessons.

So far, I have only done the preliminary pre-course self-portrait. I had no intention of ever letting anyone see it but actually it's not too bad for a girl with absolutely no artistic training and no experience drawing anything better than cartoon-like pictures. Expect more (and hopefully better) drawings to follow.

My dad called the other day to ask what I was up to now that I am a "woman of leisure". I said I was learning how to draw and he responded, in a slightly disapproving tone, "What, you're gonna be an artist now?" No, Dad, it just sounded like fun.

Raw food dish of the week - Broccoli with Cheese and Spicey Jicama Fries

This tasted ok. Not terrific.



Cheese sauce: pine nuts, macadamia nuts, sunflower seeds, red bell pepper, lemon juice, Celtic sea salt.
Poured over cut broccoli and dehydrated at 105 degrees for 5-6 hours.

Spicey Jicama Fries: Jicama marinated in olive oil, agave nectar, Celtic sea salt, cayenne, and chili powder.

My first (successful) fast

I tried to fast for 24 hours once, my first year in college. I made it only to hour 21 before I caved in and ate something. I felt like I was dying. I guess the cleansing reaction from fasting is pretty severe when the main staples of your diet are ramen noodles and macaroni and cheese.

So I was nervous when I started another 1 day fast yesterday, per my new year's resolution #2. But it really wasn't bad at all. I'm sure my body has way fewer toxins to rid itself of these days. I've been vegan now for 12 years, mostly off sugar and processed foods for about 2 years, and mostly raw for about a year.

In the morning, I felt great. Spacey, but in a good way. I had big ambitions for the day, but pooped out at 3pm and decided to just stay at home. By 4:30 I felt my first, and only, stomach growl. And by 6pm I was bored out of my skull.

Food is such a big part of what occupies my day, as it turns out. I love to eat. I wasn't feeling that hungry, I just wanted something to do. My iBook is still in the repair shop so I didn't even have the internet to fall back on.

I decided to pass the time by reading Eating for Beauty, by David Wolfe. Very interesting book about raw food nutrition, but perhaps a poor choice, since it talks about the most delicious, nutritious, energizing foods on the planet.

Per new year's resolution #1, I also decided to pass the time by starting on my first weekly new raw food dish. Not a great activity for one who is trying to abstain from eating.

I was determined to not eat until breakfast, which I arbitrarily decided could come no earlier than 6am. But when I was awake at 2:45 and feeling a bit queasy, I gave in. Screw it, I would eat at 3am. I just had to wait 15 minutes. I kept checking the clock, checking the clock. Finally, only one minute to go.

I must have fallen asleep because I woke up again and it was 6:30. I wasn't even hungry anymore, but I got up anyway and ate a couple of oranges. Best damn oranges I ever had. Then I finished making the crepes. Fan-freaking-tastic crepes.

Raw food dish of the week - Crepes

Wrapper: bananas, blended and dehydrated
Filling: macadamia nuts, walnuts, lemon juice, agave nectar, and salt, blended
Sauce: strawberries and agave nectar, blended