We joined Eatwell Farm, from which we get a box every week, and we joined Marin Sun Farms, who deliver a box of meat once a month. Last week was our first week, and we got a box from each farm. The prices are very reasonable for the amount of food we get: much cheaper than comparable quality foods from the Expensive Yuppie Market, and only slightly cheaper than the same things we can get at the nearest grocery store (and much higher quality).

First, let me tell you about the meat. We got 15lbs of meat, which is way more meat than we usually eat in a month but will allow us to have dinner parties with meat, and also we can make stock and sausages. We opted for a mix of types, with no exclusions so we'll have beef, goat, lamb, pig, and sometimes chicken (there was no choice to opt out of chicken or we would have). It comes frozen (this is good) in vacuum-sealed packages (very good). We ate a couple of pork chops that were very tasty, and then last night we had goatburgers. Yes, they sent us ground goat, which tastes, not surprisingly, remarkably like a lean ground beef. No "goaty" flavour. It was OK. I think it would have worked better in a stew or something, but it made a decent burger.

The pork chops were awesome. It's almost enough to make me really like meat, which I haven't been (see also previous rant about barbeque).

And the vegetable box. A nice-sized box of mixed stuff, including a bunch of tomatoes (nice, because we're heavy on the cherry tomatoes now with no eating tomatoes yet), from potatoes, radishes, basil, plums, some other stuff. It was pretty good. We can definitely eat all that produce in a week because we've torn through much of the box already and we don't get the next one until Friday. And this with a massive bowl of nectarines in the fridge from our own tree.

Sunday night I went to the store to pick up some stuff and it was like Dairy Week: the only thing I can't find a good CSA for is dairy (and bread, but let's be reasonable). I got some disappointing non-homogenized milk at Trader Joe's, but it was pretty old and the cream stuck to the top of the container it was in and will have to be extracted by destroying the bottle (which is plastic: 10 demerits). I may just start buying Strauss Creamery products at the Expensive Yuppie Market.

The point of this is not so much about becoming locavores, but really more about eating more kinds of food and trying new things. When we shop for ourselves we are distressingly dull, so we decided to mix it up and get a bunch of stuff that just isn't available in our grocery stores. We're enjoying the challenge of cooking from the box instead of falling back on old standbys.

I swear that on a regular basis, maybe once a month or so, for all the years I've been in California, somebody has told me that they would not be able to be a vegetarian because they would have to give up barbeque. Now, given that I couldn't be a vegan because I would have had to give up brownies and butter-fried eggs, I expected barbeque would be something special.

It turns out that barbeque is meat with sugar syrup basted on it.

I'm sorry, but that is gross. I've had grilled meat, which is just fine, nice stuff, a great way to eat meat. But slather on a mixture of sugar and a few spices, and you've taken what could have been a great piece of meat if it had been minimally processed and turned it into an attempt at dessert.

The biggest disappointment is the local barbeque restaurants, touted to me as a great place for really good food. Not only is everything slathered in a fairly unappealing sugar sauce, but for the most part, the quality of cooking on the side dishes leaves a great deal to be desired. I'd order the vegetarian option but there usually isn't one, or if there is it manages to combine the worst of both worlds, slathering a piece of tofu with sugar sauce. And since tofu has no inherent fattiness or saltiness to balance the sugar, it ends up even more sweet.

The question I have is this: why can't you just cook the meat as meat? What's wrong with the taste of ribs that you have to make them so sweet? I can understand marinating a piece of meat before cooking to tenderize it, but does it need to be sugared to be edible? I've eaten ribs cooked straight up on a grill, and they seemed really good -- the meat had decent flavour, and they were cooked just enough to bring out the juices, so you got the flavour of the meat in every bite. It was delicious. Then I have barbeque, and I can hardly tell what sort of animal I am eating for the over-seasoning. What is wrong with meat-eaters?

Next week on the grumpy diner, corn bread: would it kill you to make it fresh every day?

The museum is on a pedestrian alley that connects Market St. to Mission, the location of Beard Papa (which is closed when I make my commute, so no temptation to stop and get a $2.25 cream puff every day, thank goodness) and some interesting water features. There are a few of these pedestrian alleys along Market and they are always interesting, although not always very alive. This one is more so because it has a few restaurants along it, and also it is wider than the usual ones.

This is one of the fountains, which are very subtle but look like a lot of work (see the mineral stains on the bottom there?). I like how they add the sound of moving water without having spouts of water shooting everywhere. In a windy area, spouts of shooting water always mean wet pedestrians.

On Wednesday, I got a different view, because a few of us went out to the UCSF Mission Bay campus to do a materials study (holding material samples up to the walls of existing buildings and photographing them for comparison). The building I'm working on is out there, and the client wants the colour scheme to fit with the neighboring buildings to reinforce the sense of campus. While we were there I took this photo, from the terrace on Genentech Hall looking downtown.

The campus is remarkably postmodern, which is not a great thing in my mind -- I think the whole pomo thing is going to look very dated in a very short time. Also, I think it tends to look a little sterile and contrived. Fortunately, most of the buildings have managed to avoid looking like they belong at Disneyland (Michael Graves designed much of Disney's corporate architecture).

UCSF Mission Bay is the research/technology campus (hence places like Genentech Hall) on the edge of a big redevelopment of Mission Bay into a biotech center. It's pretty ambitious on the part of the city, and it seems to be doing well so far.

Technorati Tags: architecture, san francisco

And that would not be so horrible in itself, except of course it's an urban canyon, so wind goes up and down the street, blowing the smoke right in your face. Combine that with bus fumes, car exhaust, cleaning fluids, and homeless people, and downtown is not exactly a great place to breathe in. Not that I can, either, because cigarette smoke makes my chest tighten up and I end up walking down the street holding my breath. For eight blocks.

On the other hand, the exercise is nice, and it really wakes me up first thing in the morning to go for a brisk, airless walk into a strong headwind. And when you get over the fact that you are in a crowd of tourists All. The. Time, downtown is a pretty good place to work. Lots of good places to eat that aren't even too expensive, good public transit access, and if you want to go to Bloomie's during lunch it's right there. Much better than past jobs in corporate wastelands, or even a job in Jack London Square which would like to be a tourist trap but simply doesn't have anything to attract tourists.

Sometimes I just want to kill that dog.

Technorati Tags: crafts, dogs, knitting, lace

So here it is, now large enough that it can't be spread out on the needles I'm using (I guess I could swap out a larger cord, but I can't be bothered for only fifteen more rows of knitting).

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace

There are two rows of Lily of the Valley in this shawl, offset from each other. Now I have an edging pattern that is largely yarnovers and the occasional decrease, then a bind-off.

I think I will finish this shawl next week, which is a nice thing. If I'd sat down and worked on it every day this week, I would be done by now, but I would work on one row, then go do something else, then come back. And yet it has still gone every so much more quickly than the budding lace pattern at the beginning.

I'm actually rethinking another shawl pattern because of this. I'd been thinking of doing a shawl that is an all-over pattern much like budding lace, but if that sort of dense, repeating pattern is so easily messed up, then maybe making a substantially larger shawl that has nothing but that sort of pattern in it is not a good call for me. Or I could do it as penance.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace, nupps

The pattern for a nupp is very simple, but practise is a bit more fiddly. On the knit side you k1, yo, k1, yo, k1 all into one stitch, to turn one stitch into five. On the purl side you have to p5 those five stitches together, and that is fiddly, because the needle doesn't want to go through that far. I followed a suggestion online and slid the piece down to work it over the cable of my circular needle, and that works really well.

So in fact this portion of the shawl is going much faster than the previous portion, even though it seems like much of the web is filled with people freaking out that the nupps are so difficult. You can't blaze through them, but they're more detailed than complicated.

Here I have a half-nupp (the red arrow at top) and completed nupp (the blue arrow). I spent a bit of time being super careful about lining the five stitches up nicely on the purl, before realizing it would all come out in a soak and block, anyway.

The one thing I think I could be doing much better on this is handling my tension. For some reason the first half of the nupps get very tight so I've been loosening up on my yarn, but that makes the final nupp very loopy. But, you know, first time nupper and all.

Now on to page 2 of the pattern. The part that's apparently difficult.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace

I would probably make a lot more progress on this thing, a lot faster, if I were not such a perfectionist that messing up one stitch makes me rip back two or three repeats in frustration, or rip the whole thing out and restart. But lately I've been using lifelines to mark "known good" rows and thus control the extent of the ripping back, and that's made things much better (except for that one time when I managed to pull a bunch of stitches off the needle when putting in a lifeline, of course).

See:

I'm on repeat 11 of 14 for the "budding lace 2" pattern. Apparently it gets much harder from here on in. I made the mistake of going to read the knitalong blog the other day, in which we see many knitters either knitting this thing very quickly (I just don't have that much time to knit), or totally freaking out about fairly simple things.

And here are my lifelines. I'm using one really long piece of string back and forth for the lifelines, so it's easier to manage if I leave it in for previous rows until I need more string.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace

Technorati Tags: brains

And she's also focusing on details, which she will assemble to create a bigger picture. Indeed, in response to a question, she explained that as she ages and accumulates more information, her ability to put things together gets better, because she has more information to work from in creating those bigger pictures. She reads a lot about a lot of different things.

Normal people tend to filter a lot of those details out of their minds: when she pictures a church steeple, she sees several very specific steeples. When a normal person pictures a church steeple they see a diagrammatic representation of a non-specific steeple. Autistic people are not very good are generalizations like that.

In addition, Grandin noted that her thinking is very associative, not linear. When somebody mentions a church steeple she will picture specific steeples and then move on to things those pictures remind her of in quick succession. And her brain works such that verbal problems have to be processed as visual problems, so there is a translation delay in her thinking when working directly with words. (She noted that her slide shows drive verbal people crazy because they are so associative and visual.)

Normal people, she noted, look around a lot. Autistic people tend to focus, and they tend to focus on things rather than people. Autistic people do not multitask.

She told us she groups autistic people into three groups:
1. Visual thinkers, who think in pictures, and are bad at very abstract things like algebra. This is how Grandin classes herself, and when she originally wrote her book Thinking in Pictures she thought this was the only way autistic people came.
2. Music and Math, or pattern thinkers. These people are very good at patterns and analysis.
3. Verbal Logicians, who are storehouses of data and factoids. These people are very bad at drawing because they cannot think visually.

One point Grandin made several times was that special education should be working with the autistic kids' talents, rather than hammering on their deficiencies. When an audience member asked about how to get her autistic kid to do school work in other areas than rockets, she suggested that he be told to read books about rockets, do math for rocketry, draw pictures of rockets. Take his interest and use that as a lever to make him do the kind of work he was not interested in.

In addition, she emphasized the importance of apprenticeships and career-focused learning for autistic kids. "Happy aspies have careers," she said, and they need structure and training to help them hold onto those careers. Indeed, a lot of strict social training is necessary so they learn what the rules are for being good citizens.

In talking about the structural differences between autistic brains and normal brains, she talked about the white matter in the brain, the interconnective tissue. Autism is basically a problem in the structure of that white matter: there's much more of it in certain areas and not enough in other areas. She also said that autistic people have immature lower brain areas and use their frontal cortex less than normal people.

There are some basic differences that come out of this: research has shown that language capacity covers up other areas of the brain, particularly visual and musical thinking. So when a lot of connective tissue is going to those visual areas of the brain they are overriding language.

In addition, Grandin explained that she has no subconscious: her cognitive processes all happen in her conscious mind. One of the beginnings of cognition is the "orienting response," the moment of orienting to a stimulus in order to make a decision about what to do with it. For normal people that happens subconsciously, but for her that is a conscious decision, which can be distracting.

Other distractions are hypersensitivities. High pitched sounds (like from PA systems, TVs, other electronic equipment) can be overwhelming, and auditory detail will be reduced so just hearing somebody talk is hard work. Flickering lights (fluourescents, TV screens, CRT monitors) can seem much more flickery.

Some suggestions she had for temper tantrums/issues in autistic kids:

- don't let them get overtired
- make sure they're not over-stimulated (rose coloured glasses help, incandescent lights, hats)
- make sure there is no medical problem (constipation, infection, toothache)
- get them lots of exercise
- try special diets (try for three months to be sure it's working, but no more if it doesn't)
- if you do use medication, use much much lower doses than normal; if a little bit is good, a lot will not be much better
- give strict rules and guidance for social behaviour

One question was about physical tics, and she said that tics should be left alone as long as they are not harmful, but there should be limits on when they can do them. So kids with tics should have a time when they can specifically go off and perform their tic, and times when they are absolutely not allowed to do it (like at the dinner table). The thing is, tics are calming for the kids, and in some cases they can help with auditory processing, so you definitely do not want to try to make them control the tic all the time if it is not harmful to anybody.

Lastly, one question that came up was about whether she thought autism was good or bad. Grandin noted that very social people tend to sit around being very social, while autistic/aspergers people tend to invent things and create things. So in many ways our culture is dependent on the spectrum for its technology. Removing it from the gene pool would be very complicated and would not be good for us. (Let's leave aside for the moment what on earth that guy was thinking to ask somebody if she thought her genetic stock should be removed from the gene pool. Kind of like asking a Jew if they thought the Holocaust was a good idea. Sheesh.)

I call it the Sketchy Swift, because it's kind of sketchy. That's because the material I had on hand was some really horrible exterior-grade plywood left over from the foundation work. On the other hand, I spent $3 on a nice piece of lazy susan hardware (the only money I spent on this) so it rotates very nicely. I may rebuild the structure from nicer material at a later date. Maybe something that doesn't shatter when you drill holes in it.

Also, I may have lost my mind because I recently made a small purchase:

The last thing I need to do is pick up another hobby. Right? Well, we will see. Fortunately, spinning yarn is a pretty low-tech and cheap hobby if you want it to be.

Technorati Tags: spinning, yarn

I was facing a couple of hours of driving with that hair in my way and I couldn't stand it. It's a bit uneven now and I'll have to go get it cut, but I feel a lot better. That hair must be made of pure lead.

Technorati Tags: hair

Beekeeping is a really interesting mix of practises. You really should know something about insects, of course. You need to know about the weather, because that affects what the bees will do and when. And you need to know a lot about local plants and when they bloom, because nectar and pollen from flowers is what bees eat. I have a good handle on the weather and the bees part, so the survey is to get more in touch with everything blooming (not just what I planted, but the weeds as well).

When you keep bees in the country, your nectar and pollen crops are from wild plants or crops, and those have very definite seasons because they're either untended or managed to harvest times. So the honey flows in the country are very cyclical and definite: the almonds bloom at a specific time and there may not be much else growing there as food for the bees. But in the city, the bee food comes mostly from landscaping, with a bit from street and park trees if you live in a city with a lot of trees (maples have particularly useful flowers, in my opinion, but some cities have cherry trees on the streets and those are awesome). The city nectar flows can last year round in a mild climate, so instead of having a couple of distinct honey flows a city bee will be packing in honey all over the place, as long as they can fly. (Lately it's been in the mid-50's which is a bit too cold for bee flight, but it does warm up on occasion and they will break cluster on days when it gets over 60F or so.)

Knowing all this, I thought it would be good to really know what foods would be available to my bees, since I admit I think very little about what blooms when apart from a few seasonal plants, and even then I don't track it very closely.

My survey surprised me. 21 plant types blooming in the garden -- and even more that I decided not to survey in my neighbors' gardens. I had definitely thought December was a little less floriferous than that. I made a list of the flowers in bloom (including flowers just in bud and notes about which ones were blooming with only a few flowers), then added the temperature high and low for the day. If I do that twice a month for a year that should give me a nice record of nectar flow times.

Technorati Tags: flowers, beekeeping

Noel took this photo of me presenting at the final crit on Saturday. My boards are on the wall behind me; the rest of that stuff is my classmates' projects (I'll post more about them later).

The crit went very well. We had the conversation I was interested in having, and I got some good directions to explore. I probably won't explore them for this project, but the saying is that you spend the rest of your life working on your thesis, and I think that is definitely going to be true.

The next day we cleaned some things out of my studio, went to my apartment in SLO and packed up a bunch of stuff, and drove home, where I have basically been asleep.

Technorati Tags: school, thesis

Technorati Tags: architecture, model building, school, thesis