So it’s official. CPwr and I are going on our 2.5 week trip to Indonesia/Malaysia. And can I just say? WOO-HOO! Return-trip for me, first-big-trip-ever for CPwr.
I’ll post more goodies… but check out our neato accomodations in Penang.
Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion
Okay, seriously. How can it be *this* hard to find something to eat?
I went to dominion today. To be fair, I could’ve bought one of the Yves veggie dishes (if i had wanted to go up to the 10th floor to heat up my meal). But I went instead in search of a non-microwaved healthy lunch food. Found a “garden salad” – Read: sick looking iceberg lettuce with some shaved cheddar cheese and three cherry tomatoes. Pass.
The “spinach salad” looked much more promising. But unfortunately it included “real bacon bits!”. Pass.
Finally decided on a pasta salad from their pasta bar, a raw veggie tray, and some sierra fruitn’nut mix for protein.
Now I’m eating the pasta, which I can only describe as SBB (salty beyond belief), with chewy noodles. And the whole thing is WET with oil. I mean actually dripping.
I’m only half way through and I’m giving up. Yuck. Geez. I mean, people eat this stuff as food. Good god…
Lunchtime for office workers makes baby jesus cry.
I’m going to physio for my knee. So it would be really helpful, and nice for the big money I’m shelling out, to have the various physios be consistent in what I’m supposed to be doing. Heck, I’d settle for consistent in what the problem is.
Doctor: Your patellas are really moveable in all directions, which means that they slide all over your knee. Which is good because you have a wide range of motion, and bad because your tendons have to work extra hard all the time.
Physio 1: You are really tight on that one side of your knee, so your patella always slips in to the inside when you walk.
Physio 2: Your knee movement when you walk is fine, there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about there.
Doctor: Ice your knee 4x a day, and take 2 advil twice daily with food.
Physio 2: It’s really stupid to bother icing your knee, it won’t make any difference.
How about a little harmony here people? I mean, *you all work in the same office*. Sit down together, say once a week, just have a coffee, a little chat ferchrissakes…
So… in my ongoing efforts to eat well, I bought Greens+.
For the uninitiated – Greens+ is a powdered mix of greenery you dissolve in juice or water “for when your diet, just isn’t enough”. It is of course crazy expensive, weighing in at $35/jar of powder.
Oh yes, and it tastes like poo.
1-3 teaspoons a day, preferrably on an empty stomach (so you won’t throw up that much?). Sigh. But I think it’s actually a good solution. And until I find a way to cook kale so that I can swallow it *and* keep it down, Greens+ is the life for me.
I promised this explanation a while ago – better late than never…
This is why I eat organic whenever I can, and why I have a problem with genetically modified foods. Genetically modified foods are food crops modified in a lab at the molecular level to enhance desireable traits, such as resistance to pesticides.
Here are the two most common arguments I’ve seen in favour of GM foods (tell me if I’m missing another biggie):
1) GM foods lead to higher crop yields
2) GM foods can prevent deaths from malnutrition
Here’s the other side:
1) Sometimes – not always. Some GM crops lead to higher yields – at best temporarily (see ‘Biodiversity’ below). Others are actually producing less than conventional varieties. This has led to class-action suits by some farmers against biotech companies for misrepresenting their product.
2) Biotech/GM companies spend a lot of time hyping up the idea that there isn’t enough food to go around on this planet – so clearly we need to increase food production.
False. Most countries suffering from malnutrition are acutally exporting their food away – to us, “developed” nations. Why? Because they are heavily in debt. For instance, Brazil sells 85% of their grain and beans for livestock feed in North America, Europe and Asia.
Bankers, such as World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Inter-American Development Bank, “won’t fund anti-hunger initiatives [in these countries] linked to agrarian or economic reforms that encourage production for the domestic market. That might upset the prospects of earning foreign currency to pay off debt.” (NOW Magazine, April 1-7 2004) Most food shortages aren’t related to food production ability, but to political and social causes.
Besides which, most of the traits biotechnology companies are breeding into foods have nothing to do with increased nutritional value. These are companies and they are trying to turn a profit. Developments are heavily concentrated on GM development for processed foods and livestock feed -> products almost exclusively consumed by wealthier countries.
Other key points:
Economics: Organic food is much more expensive, right? Only because you’re paying the actual cost. In 1988, taxpayers paid nearly $74 billion in federal subsidies for conventional foods. Other hidden costs: pesticide regulation and testing, hazardous waste disposal and clean up, and environmental damage. (GEO)
Energy: ‘Modern’ farms (not-organic) use more petroleum than any other single industry – 12% of the US’s total energy supply. “More energy is now used to produce synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate, and harvest all the crops in the US.”(GEO)
Chemical and Carcinogens: “Now the EPA considers that 60% of all herbicides, 90% of all fungicides and 30% insecticides are carcinogenic.” Tasty. (GEO)
Package Deal: GM crops are often sold as a package – you buy the crop, and you buy the (expensive) pesticide it’s bred to be resistant to. For example, this holds farmers hostage to buy Monsanto crops with Monsanto pesticides.
Biodiversity: What happens when you plant just one kind of potato? It’s arrogant, ignorant and irresponsible to have absolute faith in our technology – especially when it’s so unproven. Besides the vulnerability of the ‘one key-one lock’ pesticide-to-crop design, planting large crops of just one kind of crop year after year destroys the soil. “While this approach tripled farm production between 1950 and 1970, the lack of natural diversity of plant life has left the soil lacking in natural minerals and nutrients. To replace the nutrients, chemical fertilizers are used, often in increasing amounts.” (GEO)
The Environment: Pesticides, those that the genetically engineered crops are bred to be compatible with, contaminate ground water. We don’t even know for sure the extent of the impact on our ecosystems. But what we know isn’t good. Farms don’t operate in a bubble – they leak pesticides down to the ground water, crop pollen blows away with the wind, and insecticides can’t discriminate what ‘pests’ they’ll wipe out. One side-effect of this unfortunate lack of bubble-farming is “Gene transfer to non-target species”. This is a really good one. Crop plants engineered to resist herbicides can cross-breed with the weeds the herbicides are designed to kill. Then these “superweeds” are herbicide tolerant as well. (GM Foods For and Against) The suggested solution? Create buffer zones around GM crops of 6 to 30 metres or more, or make GM plants sterile, or plant non-GM crops around the GM crops and use those crops as a decoy for insect pests to destroy. We would of course not be able to harvest those ‘decoy crops’. Yes, that all makes perfect sense. Obviously a much more efficient system.
Taste: Buy an organic orange and a “regular” orange. Come back, and tell me whatcha think…
Just chose to watch a TVO documentary on the Rwandan genocide instead of The Apprentice. And it was an active choice, I completely admit that most of me wanted to watch The Apprentice. I pulled myself away too so that I’d watch something that wouldn’t push me further into my box.
How can we all be sitting down every night, and most choose to watch pretty white people scheme to get more money, at the same time as someone is trying to tell us about the loss of 800,000 people. How do you reconcile that? Is it that we just physically can’t comprehend the juxtaposition? I feel like I can’t. I can’t contain that in my body – I can’t make sense of what that means about the world.
How could I not know that 800,000 people were slaughtered? How could I not know that? That every day people went out with knives and hacked people until they died. Hundreds of thousands of times. How can I already be starting to feel numb again, a few sentences later.
How can we not be doing better than this?
Praise-singers are fat, Truth lean,
Carrion-eaters swarm the streets,
Infant limbs between their teeth
Those who know no thing
Trade wisdom with believers in nothing
Between faith and farce a common creed
Do not take my anger away
My stubborn noun, my adjective which,
Like the scorpion, carries a burning tale
(“Ode to Anger” – Niyi Osundare)
Took advantage of my pretty metropass to go out and get Juice for Life for lunch today. Call in the order. Jump on the subway for a couple of stops there and back.
Then the good part. Where I sit down in my cube with my Magic Tofu Sandwich, side of fries and Miso Gravy (
Those not familiar with Juice for Life may not know about Miso Gravy. It is ambrosia. Its sweet scent caused three co-workers to come into my cube nose-a’sniffin’ saying “that smells fantastic! what are you eating?” (naturally I reply by offering them a fry and a dip)
Vegetarians are sneaky. They tenderize you with their tasty vittles and then spring a way of life on you…
Thought:
Do you know what is fairly rare, but very embarassing?
When you open your mouth to speak and a bubble forms between your top and bottom lip. I’m not sure what the factors are that lead up to this. It happens probably twice a year. It may be connected to the use of lip balm?
Alls I know is that I’m coming into work early, stop off at a Starbucks, the regular guy looks at me to smile and chat and I open my mouth to say hi and blow a spit bubble at him.
Classy.
Thought:
There was a time when the above would have mortified me. But now I have it chuckled off by the time I put the lid on my cup (Grande Soy Tazo Chai for those wondering).
I wonder how much this has to do with age, or maybe it has to do with CPwr. I think it was pretty much the same time we got together that I stopped giving a rats ass what everyone else thinks. Nothin’ like the regular snuggles to steady the nerves…
Thought:
My right butt cheek is in pain from slamming into the wall at squash yesterday [4-0 for Mud 🙂 ]
Nothing really to say on that, other than I’m thinking about it right now.
Thought:
Why is it socially unacceptable to talk to homeless people? Why is it socially acceptable to *not see* them? We actually pretend they’re invisible. It goes way beyond our usual “I don’t talk to strangers” dealio. Granted, I’m now working in swanky Yorkville, and I think some of these highly coiffed fur-wearing bitties actually can’t see them. But why do I feel this wall of pressure that stops me from asking if I can buy a sandwich?
Sheesh.
Okay, so I am now working for the government. And we all now this couldn’t possibly just go smoothly…
First – the project I was hired to work on is cancelled. Well not cancelled *exactly*, just relocated to another team. So the end of my first week I went to a “you’re fired, you’re all fired!!” meeting.
No it wasn’t really like that.
There are still jobs for everyone. They were just announcing the end of the project, and letting everyone know that they will be moved to other projects (if they are interested in keeping their jobs). Which means that everyone now gets interviewed again in order to be slotted into the new projects.
Fine.
But I still don’t have my contract. Which leads me to…
Second – I found out today that I have two choices in order for the vendor of record (this is even more complicated, I’ll just brush past it) to pay me. I can become incorporated, or I can become a sole proprietor. In either case, I gotta become a company.
To do this I have to go down to the ‘Companies and Personal Property Security Branch Public Office’ and register Me as a business ($80). Once I get that all sorted out, I can finish up my contract with the vendor, with them paying me as a business.
But wait, there’s more. In order for the vendor to pay me, they will be issuing my cheques to my new “business”. And we all know that you can’t just take a cheque issued to a company and stick’er straight in your account.
This means that I have to set up a small business account to deposit my cheques to. Then I can pay myself.
AND even once I get this all sorted out, the earliest I will see a cheque is… oh, the end of April.
Smashing.
I got tired of losing all my thoughts by the time I get home – so this Friday I wrote them out on a tiny post-it whenever they came up.
Here’s what I got:
-no organization comes up with unique products/solutions/thoughts. They have summer students/young employees come up with 2 or 3, then they get recycled to death.
-if there is one employee who causes problems with *everyone*, why do other people get fired? Through sheer numbers shouldn’t they be overwhelmed and pushed out?
-endless corrections are demotivating. This is a problem when managers don’t generate anything, so they “participate” by editing other people’s content.
-how is it that there are hordes of young people who take jobs at companies/in fields they are completely opposed to (e.g. the pharmaceutical industry), but think it’s okay because “they know it’s wrong”
-I spent the last half of my Friday alternately chewing on, and wearing my ring on the tip of my nose (it’s a mesh beaded thing). Yet, because I didn’t leave before 5, I didn’t feel guilty. If I had admitted that there was nothing doing in my cube and gone home early, I would have beaten myself up about it all weekend.
-our online folders for work are organized so tightly that it’s a big fat mess and you can’t find what you need because there are so many subdivisions. So people don’t really use it properly. Why not just admit at the beginning that you need an equivalent to a “misc” folder. For instance, give all employees a personal folder online, named for them. Most people know who wrote the file they’re looking for, and they could just go to “rinjava” and find it.
-any project CAN have lots of management, but not all projects NEED lots of management
-note to self: design a dream office
-what came first, the privacy or the efficiency? How incredibly hard it is to generate good content in a loud open space. What I wouldn’t give for a door.
-our office uses pass cards. Which you wear clipped to your belt loop. You put it against a sensor by the door to get in. I’d love to set up a camera just to record people doing the “pass card hump”
That’s all. Have a good week folks!