Food Etc.

So the tactic I embraced last post of only using up half an hour worked pretty well. Another rapid word regurgitation coming your way right..... Now!

The commute is still going well. With my new phone (you'll hear about that in a minute, I promise) I've been taking pictures of funny things I see along my commute, as well as things I've seen at school. I'm starting to think I should create a blog just around my commute to Victoria, because you really do see so much more when you're not the one driving. I recently had my first carpool with another woman who lives here in the CVRD. She is a professor at Camosun, so our schedules work out quite well. Here are some photos of my commute:

Yup, that truck says "Skookum Tools". Would sending this picture to my Dialectology of Canada professor be really nerdy?

Here is a cute tiny bunny at UVic. I'm surprised there are still little ones around- it seems like they're usually only little in the spring time. I hope this one doesn't die... Actually, I think I had a dream about finding a warren of tiny baby bunnies last night. Or maybe it was reality. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

A cool stencil I found on a wall at Cornett. I've been seeing more and more spray-painted stencils around lately but most have not been as well-executed as this one. Maybe I just like the subject matter here more than the others.

This is the sky at UVic at 8am. Days like this make commuting not so bad.

So, my phone. As you may or may not know, as of August I had had a Motorola (not even sure of the model number because of reasons that will soon become clear) phone for around three years, although it seems longer than that because of how deep our relationship was, and how outdated it was already when I got it. It is so old I couldn't even find a picture of it online so here is a picture of it taken by yours truly:

Those are all fruit/vegetable stickers. I'm not sure how it started, but it became a mild obsession for me to see how abused I could make my phone look, not because I hated my phone, but because I wanted it to be unique in the growing sea of phone facsimiles. It served me well: it went through half a cycle in the washing machine before I realized it was in there and fished it out. It has been dropped more times than I could count. The ringer volume button is so worn that it's black instead of silver, and the stickers are so fused with the body of the phone that if I wanted to take the battery out it would be impossible to open the compartment. It might actually be waterproof now, with all the stickers on it.

Anyway, my phone and I have decided to part ways. It was getting tiresome to text when the phone's T9 vocabularly was so limited (it didn't know swear words, and those make up most of my texting speech). The plan was expensive, too, and it didn't even have a camera. I still keep it around for nostalgia and because GP and I have a friend with the same phone who periodically needs parts. I get the feeling he doesn't take care of his as much as I did mine. I now have a Palm Pre and I am continually in awe of the technology that most people have been acquainted with for several years.
Last night GP and I watched Food Inc. I didn't really learn anything new from it, but it did remind me why I continue to make conscious decisions regarding where I buy my food and especially my meat. It's fairly easy for us, here in the Cowichan Valley, to find locally grown produce and it's cheap as dirt. We're very lucky in that regard. Meat isn't much of a worry either, because of Quist Farms' Meat Market. I remember how difficult it was to find local produce and meat in Victoria, though. And what the hell?! Victoria is the greenest city I know, yet most of the organic fruit and veg in their stores is from California. Yesterday GP went to the store for dinner stuff and the only organic bell peppers they had were from Argentina and were six times the price of the BC hothouse peppers. They, of course, had every reason to be, given that they were shipped from way too far away.

It's a tough decision to make: do I eat obscenely expensive produce shipped using ridiculous amounts of fossil fuel, but that has no yucky pesticides, or do I eat pesticide-poisoned food that requires intensive energy to produce but has been grown a few hundred kilometers away. There's always the choice in this situation, if we really love bell peppers and couldn't live without them, to move to Argentina, which is ridiculous. I don't like bell peppers that much. I think the best, sanest choice is to eat locally, regardless of whether or not pesticides are used, because if it's a small operation many times there is very little pesticide use and, if they don't use any, it is labour-intensive and expensive to seek certification by an organic food board, so farms don't bother. Jesus, that was a long paragraph.

Speaking of farming (ok, not a great segue, but go with it), I plan to plant spring bulbs this weekend!What we have above is a delightful assortment of narcissus, tulips, hyacinths, bluebells, crocuses, and snowdrops. My mum has been busy making window boxes for us (me, I guess, GP has nothing to do with this) to put on the railings of the balcony. I'd like to fill them with flowers in the spring and then, if possible, grow veggies in the summer. Hopefully I will be done enough homework today and tomorrow that I'll be able to carry out this plan. Oh hell, who am I kidding? I'll be planting this stuff regardless of whether or not I'm done my homework.