Local Yum

Fruit and vegetables were not making their way into our house often enough.

Eventually, I remembered the local organic produce delivery service in Toronto, and it turned out there was similar one here: Door to Door Organics. Hooray!

$25* gets you a box of 4 kinds of fruit and 5 kinds of veggies, including delivery. The produce is seasonal and random, which is nice: seasonal food is tasty, and random food is sometimes a challenge to prepare ("chard... sure, let's see what we can do with this!").

I told my eco-literate friend about the service — and as per usual, he rebutted with something cooler that I had never heard about.

Community-Supported Agriculture depends on local shareholders to raise capital for the upcoming growing season — you buy a share, and you get fresh local produce for the duration of the season. Big M puts it into more interesting terms, saying something along the lines of "money to support urban mad scientists!"

According to PASA's farm locator, I've got two nearby CSAs to choose from:

• Somerton Tanks Farm, and
  
• the super-local to me Greensgrow Farm (makers of Honey from the Hood)
  

Greensgrow also runs a market stand on Thurdsay and Saturday afternoons. Since they're so close (and CSAs don't typically deliver produce), I'm likeliest to buy CSA shares from them when the next growing season starts.

Philadelphians interested in local agriculture can also check out the cooking workshop at Weaver's Way Farm, on Saturday, September 29th.

For the record, no, I'm not a "localvore." I'm not saying you can't eat entirely of local sustenance (and if that's what you want to do, get down with your bad self). I'm just saying, way back when people used to eat strictly local organic produce, and they were often *hungry.*

But supporting the local economy, ensuring I eat my vegetables, and making sure urban mad scientists can do their thing? I'm all about that.


*Yeah, I know that those $25 could be either USD or CAD at the moment.

Impossible Places

Niihau jumped out at me as I was looking at the map of Hawaii,. It was then that I realized this was the island I had to stay on when I visited.

When I got home from Borders, I headed to the Internet to see what I could find out about this place - none of the travel guides made mention of anything you could do in Niihau. It turns out there's a good reason for that.

It's the Forbidden Isle.

You aren't allowed to stay there unless you're invited by the family that owns the island, or are in the US military. The 300 or so natives are isolated from the outside world (8 years ago there was a 100% unemployment rate among them). There are supervised tours of the beaches. I think I would be okay with that - or at least I would certainly take it if it was all I could get.

I have a backup, though. The Near Islands, the island chain furthest west (so much so it's technically east) in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands. More specifically, Attu Island. It's got snow and ocean, aurora borealis in a sky devoid of light pollution. There's even a travel agency specifically providing trips to the island, because of all the crazy rare birds that show up. Perfect.

Their last trip was in 2006.

They're not planning another.

That makes things a little more difficult.

There's always Unalaska Island, in the Fox Islands group of the Aleutians (I love the name Unalaska). That one is easier to get to, by an order of magnitude. Sure, Southwest won't fly to it, but at least the Alaskan Tourism Board representatives know where it is.

Foodstuffs

This past week or so has been a roller coaster of food quality:

Tiffin is amazing. This Indian food is delicious, they don't use trans fats, they deliver to our house, and they mix up the menu every month with different specials. Anyone who knows me well knows I love a menu with a bunch of unique dishes. If you find yourself in Philadelphia, you must find your way to 710 West Girard (especially if you're vegetarian).

New China has been our reliable local Chinese food delivery restaurant for almost two years. It has recently rescinded its duties by delivering a few meals that... weren't very good. I could understand if it was just the ma po tofu that was mediocre (and pretty bland, considering that they said they'd make it extra spicy), but the beef ho fun wasn't good either (and I thought it was near impossible to mess up). I'm now on the lookout for another local Chinese restaurant (suggestions are very much welcome).

Voila! meals are pretty damn good, considering that they start frozen in a bag, take about two minutes of prep, and are ready in ten minutes. I thought they would be a little boring, but they're not. Bits that should be moist are moist, pieces that should be crisp are crisp. Nom, nom, nom.

Wawa was recently written up at uwishunu. When I first heard the name about five years ago it was charmingly perplexing, when I was introduced to the first of many products (the 'Magnum' — a 44 ounce/1.3 liter cup whose intended use is to hold that much soda and ice) I was somewhat taken aback by the American egregiousness of it. Since then, I have grown to love Wawa. Not for its cups of soda as large as my head, but for its hoagies and salads made-to-order, its coffee, and its macaroni and cheese. I am a particular fan of the computerized made-to-order ordering system. The name, interestingly enough, is Ojibwe for Canada goose.

Oh, Philadelphia... How Are You So Awesome When Your Transit System Is So Awful?

While we're on the subject of public transit, does anyone know anyone who thinks SEPTA's elimination of paper transfers is a good idea?

I'd be all for eliminating the transfers if they were replaced with something else (DC's Metro, for example, has a fairly sophisticated transfer system), but they're simply disappearing. If you need to take more than one SEPTA vehicle — be it trolley, el train, subway, or bus — you'll need to pay an additional fare for each one (unless one of your transfers is through the subterranean routes at City Hall/15th St. Station, these will remain free).

While I never thought it made much sense to charge $0.60 per transfer to each additional vehicle, paying an extra $2 ($1.30 if you can get tokens) per route just seems ludicrous.

The Future Train to the Past

It's been more than two years since I've been back. Wait, scratch that. Two years since I left. I haven't even visited Toronto since I graduated from college.

It isn't that I don't want to go. It's that when I first moved to America, I needed to wait on getting a green card (in order to get back into the States), once I had that, I had to get my passport from Canada (my old one had expired — you guessed it — while I was waiting for my green card). The Passport Office swears they are still processing the application I sent in February. That's okay. I've got the patience.

I wonder, though — will I get back to old stomping grounds to discover most things have changed? I'm not so egotistic to demand that progress wait for my presence to continue, but what can I expect when I return? I don't even want to begin speculating, I'd do the research and no doubt be disappointed about a few things. Already, I've noted that any TTC tokens I may still have are invalid.

Although, hey, I do hope I still have some of those old dime-style tokens somewhere. Far be it from me to conceal my joy over transit ephemera.

It's Time to Get Citations

Sure, niche web pages on the Internet are nothing new. But one of the things I love about how the Internet is evolving (thanks to processes such as the catchphrased "crowdsourcing") is the sheer amount of detail in these incredibly focused pockets.

Take, for example, the Muppet Wiki. The articles range in granularity from Sesame Street, to Kermit the Frog, to Muppet Eyes. They're as obscure as Clerk Fraggle.

Personally, it was the Muppet Eyes article that made my day.

Postcards from New Jersey

Being the birthplace of the nation it resides in, Philadelphia gets *nuts* around July 4 (Independence Day in America). Now, I like colonial history as much as the next geek, but there's a point at which it's just not worth it to wrestle with the crowds.

Instead, Big M and I did a little crossing of the Delaware ourselves, and spent a few days in New Jersey. July 4th itself was great, we played some mini-putt and went go-kart racing (by the way, The Funplex has 36 holes of miniature golf, spread across two courses).

As fun as it was, The Funplex was plan B. The original schedule had us watching the Transformers movie, and the Google Maps directions to the cinema were pretty representative of some of the moves that need to be made while driving in Jersey:

[ New Jersey: Under no circumstances turn left ]

Ah, the distinctive "jughandles" of Jersey's highways. I find the u-turn needed near the end of the journey shown here to be particularly priceless.

As a hardly related aside. I love Turtle Pops. Turtle Pops are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters made out of ice cream, with gumball eyes. A few weeks ago, while at a picnic (in Babbage Park, New Jersey -- named after the person you probably think it is), Big M chased down an ice cream van to get me a Turtle Pop.

[ Mmm, cherry. Thanks to Will for the photo! ]

That, my friends, is love.