Of course you do.

He started this thing, recently – well, not so recently I guess. It started with a television show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution where he came into American schools and attempted to get them to feed our kids better stuff. Now it’s at a new level – today, May 19, is Food Revolution Day.

I’m going to admit that I was excited to see that this was a “thing.” I’ve been trying to eat more fresh foods and more organic and more locally grown for awhile, but just didn’t have much of a grasp on it. Often times I found that those sorts of things were “too expensive” compared to “normal stuff.” It’s cheaper to buy ramen than it is to make your own pasta. That sort of thing.

So here’s something you may not know about me: I love documentaries. Love them. I like to watch them while I work, and over the past few months I’m pretty sure I’ve watched every single food-related documentary that Netflix can throw at me. And all of them said the same thing:

What we are eating is not food.

Let’s flash back a little bit. When I lived on the island, I ate a lot of Local and Fresh. I remember going to the local vegetable stand with my mom as a kid to get the veggies we would need for the week, I remember going to pick fresh strawberries. I’ve killed my own meal, pulling the fish out of the ocean and then watching my dad cook it up within hours. I worked at a restaurant that grew lots of it’s own vegetables and herbs out back. I ate fresh.

I was also slender, fit, and healthy.

Since moving up north, a lot of that has changed. I no longer need to ride my bicycle everywhere, so I drive. We have fast food restaurants and fresh fish is too hard to find and we certainly don’t have room for a garden. And I’m feeling it. I’ve gained weight, I’m sick more often, and climbing on my bicyle feels more like a chore than a reward. That isn’t how it should be.

So after watching documentary after documentary and feeling sicker and sicker all the time, knowing something had to change, I made two pledges: one, now that I’m working full time as a freelancer, I’m going to spend more time cooking. Cooking real food. No more frozen pizzas, I’m going to make my own pizza. No more hamburger helper, I’m going to cook up my own stuff.

Two, I am going to try buying more “real” food. Fresh food. Local food.

A few weeks ago, the Janesville Farmer’s Market had it’s first day of the season. And I went.

I bought asparagus first – it was big and looked so delicious, unlike the shriveled stalks at the grocery store. I bought mushrooms, fat and bright and white and they looked so good that I ate one right out of the box without cooking it. Then two more. They were amazing. A bag of spinach that I did the same thing with – ate it straight out of the bag. Like candy. I found freshly made donuts made with all local ingredients. The best donuts I’ve ever eaten.

And then I found beef.

It was by accident, a woman near me was asking for steak while I was looking at honey at the same booth. I didn’t realize they’d had ground beef, but I wanted to try it. The man sold me a pound for $6.00 – twice what we pay at Walmart – and suggested we throw a little olive oil in the pan while we cook it.

It sat in our freezer for about a week. We had other things to make, had fast food, other frozen meats from the grocery store, we just didn’t get around to it. A few days ago, we thawed it out and cooked it up.

Before we put seasoning in it to make tacos, Nick and I each tried a bite. Unseasoned, no-additives, just a half a teaspoon of olive oil to help it cook up. We both had the same reaction:

“When did I forget what beef tasted like?”

That was the eye-opening moment for me. You hear all these stories of “pink slime” in beef and watch the documentaries of all the awful things that go on at factory farms, but you don’t really think it could happen to you. You don’t really think about it. You just go to the store, you buy your meat, and you come home and cook it under a heavy helping of salt and pepper, and that’s life. You don’t need to know anything different.

I love couponing. I love saving money. But I also love being healthy, and I miss what it felt like to wake up early in the morning and ride my bike for an hour then go for a swim. I don’t want to do that anymore, and it hurts. I don’t eat fresh food. It’s taking a toll.

I’m still going to be a couponer. You can’t coupon for fresh fruits and vegetables anyway, but you can use them to get things like pasta, condiments, seasoning, whatever. Sure, some of those things might not be completely 100% super organic, but you know what? I can eat comfortably knowing that at the core of my meal is real food.

I bought three pounds of beef at the same stall at the farmer’s market today. Next week, I’ll probably buy more.  Hear me now – I will never buy beef at the grocery store again. Sure, it cost me near about $20 for three things of beef – but that beef was some of the greatest I’ve ever tasted, and maybe, just maybe, if we stop buying the crap and start buying the real stuff, the grocery stores will wake up again.

I’m happy to back Food Revolution Day. I want real food on my table, and I don’t care who knows it.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I suppose my pride started on the internet. I’m from North Carolina – more specifically, from a chain of islands off the coast of North Carolina. If you’ve been here awhile, you know this. If not, well, now you know. At any rate – I never often found other people from North Carolina on the internet. It just didn’t happen. In recent years I’ve heard of quite a few more people who live there, but still not nearly as many as I’ve met who live…say, up north. I guess because most people were too busy out working the farm or surfing or being hippies to use the internet. I don’t know.

A few months ago, Hurricane Irene hit. I lost contact with my family for 24 hours completely because a crucial strip of road that carried the electricity and phone lines to my parents island – which is only accessible by ferry – got washed out. No…this wasn’t a normal road wash out. A new inlet was cut through the sand. It took roads, electric poles, and parts of homes with it. For 24 hours, I was paralyzed with fear that I would never talk to my parents again.

When the lines came back up and the photos came in, it was terrible. Friends of mine were cleaning out their entire lives from their homes that had been flooded. Places I had played as a child were completely destroyed. My family was fine, of course, but one thing struck me – while all this was happening, the news was focused on New York. New Jersey. When they did get back to North Carolina, they skimmed over it and didn’t mention them at all. I begged, pleaded, sobbed at the television to show me something familiar. To show me home. To show people what had happened.

But they didn’t.

Now, it’s all eyes on us.

I still don’t consider myself a Wisconsin resident. I don’t know if I ever will. I’ve lived here for nearly two years and still carry my North Carolina ID, and it’s going to break my heart to turn it in when we move in a few weeks to get a Wisconsin license. I’ll probably be here for years more telling people “no, I’m from North Carolina.” They have my heart. My family is there. It’s Where I’m From.

Yesterday this amendment passed that…to be honest, I’m not surprised that it did so much as disappointed. It was being publicized as the “gay marriage amendment” – basically, that it would officially once-and-for-all state that marriage is between a man and a woman. Except it did worse.

It also took away the rights of long-term couples who aren’t married. Any kind of civil union or domestic partnership. It’s going to make life dangerous and uncomfortable for a lot of women in abusive relationships with men who are not their husband. It’s a very scary bill.

And it sucks, yes. But here’s what sucks more – the hate that followed.

It’s been very hard for me to be online since last night. The hatred, the animosity that’s been flowing in. People constantly talking about how bad North Carolina is as a whole, and how bad everyone there must be. Making jokes about how redneck and backwards our state is. And worse – threatening to boycott the state by not coming to vacation there.

Let me tell you a few things.

First and foremost – I have traveled the entire state of North Carolina. I know many people can’t say that about where they live, but I have. I’ve been up and down the whole coast, to the built-up city beaches of Emerald Isle to the homes built in the sand accessible only by 4-wheel drive in Carova. I’ve been so far west, through the mountains and the Nanthahalla Pass, that you could throw a stone and it’d land in Tennessee. I’ve been to the rolling hills of the Piedmont, to the wealthy cities (and less fortunate suburbs) of the Triangle, to Greensboro, to Charlotte, to Greenville, to Boone, to Ahoskie, to Kinston – I have seen North Carolina.

And, yes – we can be a little old school.

What saddens me is that when people stop to say how backwards our state is and how redneck or boondocks they don’t look at the larger problem. I have met a lot of people who genuinely believe that everything they see on the news is True. That means that if the news tells them that this amendment is going to protect families and if it isn’t passed that everyone is going to hell, yes, a lot of people are going to believe that. But that isn’t their fault. That doesn’t make them bigots. That makes them ill informed, and we need to work to inform these people better.

I will say it here and now: I did not realize that the news could lie to you until I moved to Wisconsin.

I didn’t. I just didn’t. I didn’t know why people hated Fox News so much, I didn’t know why the news was bad. Then I moved up here. I took part in a protest. And I watched them tear us apart on the news and straight up lie.

Meanwhile, people back home didn’t understand why I was at the protest  - because they genuinely believed everything they saw on TV.

That is the real problem here. North Carolina is full of a lot of really great, really genuinely nice people. Many of them – maybe not the full 60% of voters who voted in favor of amendment one, but I’m going to guess a huge chunk – are just ill informed. I’m willing to bet that a ton of common law married couples or civil unions with straight folks voted to take away their own rights on top of gay marriage rights, without even realizing what they did.

We need to EDUCATE, not hate.

Lastly – to those of you that wish to boycott, STOP. Please. Yes, the North Carolina government relies heavily on tourism tax dollars. But you know who else does?

My parents, who work for vacation rental homes. If you don’t come on vacation, they are out of work. They cannot pay their bills. They cannot feed my cat, which would make me really sad.

My friends Ruth and Bob who own a restaurant on the tiny island of Ocracoke. The restaurant is only open from March to October. If you don’t come, they cannot survive for the winter.

If the rental homes do not get business, the restaurants will suffer. If the restaurants suffer, the local fishermen suffer. Eventually they’ll all have to pack up and move up somewhere else – bringing the pacifists, the hippies, the bigots, the liberals, the republicans, the democrats - EVERYBODY with them.

You aren’t going to be telling the government that they suck. The governmetn didn’t do this. A bunch of ill-informed people did this. A bunch of people who can be educated, who can be brought to see the light, who can be talked to and encouraged.

But you won’t be hurting the government. You’ll be hurting my parents. My friends. My cat. People who did nothing wrong – and many, many people who were even against Amendment One. In the days leading up to the vote on Facebook, I saw nothing but “VOTE AGAINST” messages from my friends. Good people are out there – they just didn’t win this time.

Think before you speak. This is my home. A lot of people made a really bad decision –  I said it before, and I’ll say it again: Say what you want about the bad decisions, the politicians, the people who are genuinely bigots – but please don’t hate on my home state. North Carolina will always have my heart, and if I know North Carolinians the way I do – I can tell you that they aren’t going to take this laying down. We aren’t going to settle without a fight.

Vault 713  is an un-official Harry Potter role playing game that has been running since 2001. It is hosted on a phpBB3 forum and allows players to create unique characters to explore the wizarding world.

Manda has been the chief administrator of the site since 2003 and is responsible for it’s development and marketing. Manda also created it’s unique phpBB3 style as a custom design for the forum.

Charisma Bonus  is geek-centric, female-written blog dedicated to discussing and reviewing role playing games and other traditional gaming activities, as well as industry interviews.

Manda is the primary writer for this site and also developed the concept and Charisma Bonus logo. She is solely responsible for marketing the website via social media and monitoring it’s internet presence.

Three Pixel Pushers is a blog dedicated to reporting the wits, advice, and design-driven sanity of three young women working in the design industry: Bri the Web Designer & Developer, Nda the Graphic Designer, and Manda the Freelancer & Social Media Consultant.

Manda developed the concept for this site and also participates as a regular writer on the three-woman team. She also is largely responsible for establishing 3PP’s internet presence through social media.

Growing up on the Outer Banks, you couldn’t help but hear about the Ash Wednesday Storm. Sure, there have been lots of storms over the years worth shaking a stick at, but that one stood out among the rest. It’s the one people remember. The one they warn you about. The cautionary tale.

The other thing that people don’t know about coastal living is that not every bad storm is a hurricane, and not every hurricane is a bad storm. They don’t know how bad it can get on just a normal day.

“You’re not going out,” my dad might tell me. Or he might warn me against staying at a friend’s house on one of the neighboring islands, places where they’d block off the bridges if the wind got too bad.

“There’s a nor’easter comin’.”

Nor’easter. Most people up here, I’ve found, don’t even know what that is.

Sure, okay, the concept is easy enough. A storm from the North-East! Oooh! Spooky!

No. It’s more than that.

If I’m talking with friends up here and I mention I’ve been through hurricanes, the first thing anyone goes to is Katrina. They either think that nothing I have gone through could ever be as bad as that terrible, tragic storm, or they assume that’s normal for hurricanes. An astonishing number of people don’t realize just how frequent hurricanes are.

When Irene hit, I talked with a friend of mine who was scared that it was going to come her way. She lived up north. She was also scared that behind it was another storm forming. She was suddenly enlightened to the turmoil of the mid-Atlantic. I grew up tracking hurricanes, I know to expect four or five every year, more on a bad season. She had no idea. No idea that the average per year is eleven, though of course not all of those make landfall.

So when I talk to people about hurricanes, they’re terrified. When I tell them we worry more about Nor’Easters than hurricanes, they laugh. Nothing is worse than a hurricane, I’ve been told. Did a nor’easter cause Katrina? 

Well, no. But nothing caused Katrina. Katrina caused damage. It doesn’t work like that.

Back home if you mention hurricanes everyone laughs and asks which one and will tell you an anecdote from their favorite party or that time they had to bunker down with a neighbor.

If you ask about Nor’Easters, it’s solemn faces.

Then they mention the Ash Wednesday Storm.

You have probably never heard of the Ash Wednesday Storm. That’s okay. The problem with oral history is that it is lost to people who can never hear it. I mean, it’s recorded, it’s been written down, and it only happened in 1962 so it wasn’t a dark era of media blackout or something, but most people just haven’t heard of it.

Which means that most people have never heard of the crazy amounts of damage and flooding that occurred. They’ve never heard that there were 40 fatalities across several states. They’ve never seen the pictures like this one or this one.

And, of course, they have never heard of a Nor’Easter.

A local news website from back home described the storm as a “yardstick against which all other storms are measured.” It’s true. Hurricanes, Nor’Easters, it makes no difference. It was one of the most devastating storms in Outer Banks history, of course we’d remember it. Even since moving up here I’ve seen photographs of things that have happened during other hurricanes and muttered to someone “Well it’s not as bad as the Ash Wednesday storm, that one was bad.”

I wasn’t there. My family wasn’t there. None of my friends were.

But the people who were have passed down these stories. They have saved the photographs, they have written books, they have told us. They have warned us. We are still able to know what happened because of the word of those who were there.

The sea is a strange, powerful, beautiful, dangerous thing. It can create where there was nothing, it can destroy everything. And it can be a beautiful scene. It creates stories.

If it interests you, I suggest you read up about the Ash Wednesday Storm. Learn a story that you, yourself can tell someone one day. To some, it’s almost an old wives tale or a folk story – but I assure you, it was very, very real.

A storm can be devastating without being a hurricane – and a story can be powerful without being wide spread or etched in stone. These stories are a part of me. Without being there, without my family being there, without ever having to cower in fear or wonder if my home would make it through the night – they are a part of me.

Your stories make you. The stories of those around you make you.

It’s up to you to pass them on.

Admittedly, a lot of those things have gone over my head.

Until recent years, a concept that I am still having trouble grasping never really occurred to me an refused to make sense in my head: the idea that I am different because I am female.

As a younger child, I lived on a farm. I had an older half-brother and half-sister who occasionally were around in short bursts, but a lot of my childhood playtime was spent solo. We had pigs and sheep and goats and I would run around outdoors playing with the animals, getting dirty. We also didn’t have a lot of money,  so I might have fortunately missed out on being overloaded with “girly” toys, and though I’d love watching the Disney princesses it never occurred to me that I was supposed to be “getting something” out of those movies. I never wanted to be a princess. I recall very distinctly my parents leaving me at home alone when I was probably a bit too young to be home alone and they’d plopped me in front of the TV and the VHS player. I could operate it on my own at this point and they’d put Cinderella in for me and told me “We’ll be back before the movie is over.”

As soon as they left, I popped the tape out, and wrote what I thought at the time was “DISNEY WORLD” on the tape’s label in hopes to change the movie into a video of the most magical place on earth, rather than some boring princess.⁽¹⁾

My brother liked to build things and take things apart and as he got older he worked on cars. When he visited we would go fishing in the pond out back or play Duck Hunt on his Nintendo. My sister loved horses so when we visited her at her moms, that’s what I did. If I ever played dress-up as a kid and it didn’t involve some elaborate theatrical outfit, I don’t remember it.  When McDonalds asked me if I wanted a girl toy or a boy toy, my mom would lie and say “boy toy” and I loved it. I preferred the Hot Wheels to the Barbies, anyway.

I learned to read at a young age. My mother would fall asleep reading books to me as a kid and I’d have to finish the story on my own, and we only had so many books to read in the first place so I may have had them all memorized at some point. From my sister I received a ton of hand-me-down chapter books and poured over those as soon as I could understand them. A lot of them were Sweet Valley High. The ones I actually read were the Baby Sitter’s Club. I loved Kristy and Claudia and Mary Anne and Dawn and as far as strong female role models go, I think they were pretty good ones.

We didn’t live on the farm long. I moved away from there at the end of the First Grade, leaving behind my two best friends. One was a boy, one was a girl. We moved to the beach in North Carolina and I had to make new friends all over again and do new things and have new hobbies. I hated it.

The thing about the beach is that our culture exists a little bit in a bubble. I’ve been living up north for a few years now and am still having a hard time grasping the concept of Midwest fashion, because the things that we used to laugh at people for wearing back home are actually considered stylish here. You don’t go out in an oversized surf brand hoodie, that would just be wrong.

My childhood best friends lived on the edge of a wood, a place where the trees are all torn down now and the houses are built and the last hurricane wiped out the dock we used to run on. Their mother always made us go play outside. My mother hated me playing outside. At home, I would read books and make arts and crafts and watch Disney movies, and while I was at my friends we would build elaborate forts for our barbies outside or pretend like we were cheerleaders outside or run and get dirty in the mud outside. No summer was complete without at least one big water gun fight, usually against the boys down the street. Often we would come in covered in mud or dirt from whatever the day’s adventures had been.

When you have all this beautiful nature at your disposal….you don’t just ignore it. Even as we were running and jumping in the woods, we weren’t the only girls getting dirty. We would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and see our friends doing the same thing. Girls just like us were across the island learning to surf, swimming, rolling down hills of sand, exploring. The popular girls in our school weren’t popular just because they were the prettiest – they also were strong surfers, loved camping, loved hiking. The homecoming dance was never a big thing in high school, maybe because the girls back home just didn’t enjoy getting dolled up as much as they do up here in the Midwest. Who knows.

My best friends in High School were, by and large, boys. I would hang out with a group of boys and eventually end up dating one of them and we’d all have been friends to begin with, so often I was the only girl. Whenever we dressed up in costume for spirit days, I often chose boy’s costumes. One year I dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean (at this point there was only the one film out) but my costume was entirely in the school’s colors. I walked at the very front of the homecoming parade. I was the captain of our school’s Quiz Bowl team, an activity that – aside from our school’s largely female team – usually featured a squad of mostly males.

When I graduated and finally moved out of my parent’s house, I moved in with some of those same high school friends. Six boys in one house, and then me. I got the biggest bedroom.  One of the jobs I held was as a delivery driver where most of the employees were male, and I was female.

Maybe it’s because of this, because I grew up with boys and doing what boys did and nobody ever told me that I couldn’t do those things because I was a girl. I have been told I could not do things because I was white⁽²⁾ or because I was short or too old or too young or because I wear glasses, but I have never been told I cannot do something because I am female. I have never been told that I will have to have special treatment because I am a woman or that I won’t be able to fully receive all the things due me because I am a girl.

And yet, I realize this is not the case for every woman, it’s just something that I personally have never dealt with, so I have a hard time with it. I’m not going to lie to you. The concept of people tearing down others or denying others privileges or whatever because of their gender is something I have a very hard time grasping because I’ve never dealt with it personally. I grew up in a gender-neutral bubble. Somehow, in the deep south, where we didn’t have many LGBT folks running around openly and women are often still expected to do housewife-y things, I was in a bubble where nobody cared if I was male or female. And it was awesome.

The thing is, I have never been proud to be a woman. I have never been ashamed to be a woman. To me, for my whole life, my gender has been little more than a box I check on a form. 

I regret that more girls couldn’t grow up the way I did. That more women couldn’t be readily considered “one of the guys” like I was. If it were up to me, it would be a bubble that encompassed the whole world, not just a select few. Because up in till recently – and this is the honest truth – I didn’t realize that not all girls were like me. I didn’t realize that many women are still being treated unjustly or other people still believe that women don’t have the right to choose for themselves.

So, to the women who I may have offended or spoken too lightly to or not leveled with in the past – this is my humble apology. Not everyone is one of the lucky ones, and these issues that we are facing as a group, as a gender, these are issues we all face. You have probably had it worse than me, and for that, I wish I could do everything in the world to fix it. I wish we could have been friends as children and I could let you in to my group, I wish you could meet the men in my life who have been nothing but kind to me. Because not all men are terrible and not everyone is out to oppress us. Okay, sure, it may feel that way sometimes – but they aren’t.

There is light out there. I did not share this story to brag or to boast or to say that there are no wrongs in this world – I shared this story so that it may give you a sense of hope. If I can go 24 years without anyone personally telling me I cannot do something because I am a female, then there is hope yet that we have a future as a society that looks past gender norms and bullying.

To the ladies out there who are struggling, who are going through the hard stuff that I never had to – I raise my Nerf gun in salute. I am at your side, for better or worse – we are fighting this together.

_____________________________

^{1. As I would learn later on in life, the label actually had a squiggle that looked something like “~” on it. No wonder this didn’t work.}

2. I attended an all-black college for a brief period of time. This was also my only period of time living in an all-girl housing arrangement, incidentally, and I hated it. Anyway, I was told I couldn’t participate int he school play because I was white – it was a play about black women.

It’s not the spring I remember from back home. Back home I would never use the word spring while chunks of ice were still clinging to the curbs or while I still had to wear a full-fledged coat outdoors, but it just feels like spring. February isn’t over yet. It might snow again. But today…today is good enough.

Spring reminds me of visiting the Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival, freezing in a tent overnight while the temperature dropped and sweating under the hot Carolina sun when I woke up. Wandering around the hills from stage to stage, picking up a hoop for the first time, trying everything from fried alligator to vegetarian dishes I wouldn’t have touched at home, dancing all night long to Holy Ghost Tent Revival and Donna the Buffalo. Four days that felt like four years.

It reminds me of high school, stopping at the beach on the way home from school and wading knee-deep into the water, even though it was still freezing. The sun would warm you enough and once you got used to the temperature, it didn’t feel cold anymore.

Spring is riding a bicycle for the first time after weeks of wind and nor’easters, the first trip to the deli that had been closed all winter and the first scoop of ice cream that won’t yet get warm enough to melt while you walk home. It’s uncovering the hot tubs and cleaning the pools, making plans for summer.

It makes me restless. Excited. Nervous.

This morning, for what I think might have been the first time in my life that I really took note, I watched a flock of birds migrating north. They were coming back. The warm weather of the south was no longer needed, they could return home.

It might snow again. It’s entirely possible. I’ve learned that about living in Wisconsin, the winter weather will stick around as long as it feels like, overstretching it’s welcome. That’s fine with me. I still haven’t been sledding or built a snow man. I’d appreciate the extra opportunity.

But in the mean time, I’m going to roll my windows down and listen to some Carolina folk music.

Sure, it’s a little cold out still. But Spring is Spring. It doesn’t matter where you are.

Catch up posts are never fun, but I figured I would take the time to roll out everything I’ve been doing and working on lately, just to let everyone know what I’ve been up to. I have a lot of things going on and I’m honestly not sure how I’m managing to handle all of it, but somehow I’m keepin’ on, I suppose.

Bloggery!

In case you haven’t heard for some reason, I’m currently writing for two separate blogs – in addition to this one, which I admit is a bit abandoned while I’m busy elsewhere! :) You can find me here:

CharismaBonus.com – Blogging on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday about gaming, role playing, and general geekery.

ThreePixelPushers.com – Blogging on Monday with two co-writers also posting on Wednesdays & Fridays, talking about life as a freelance designer and web dev.

Games and Forums!

This one’s mostly a “you must be new,” but I spend a lot of my time on the ‘net running and maintaining online role playing games and discussion forums.

Roleplay Hub – A discussion forum for all things role playing, that I must desperately apologize for still being decorated Christmas-style. This will change soon, but maybe you’ll want to stop by and chat with us anyway in the mean time?

Second City – A newer, smaller “Vintage Chicago” role playing game that’s one part Mad Men, one part The Playboy Club, and one part Pan-Am.

Vault 713 – My main squeeze and longest running game, a Harry Potter-based RPG that follows the books one by one. We’re currently on Order of the Phoenix and have been going strong since 2001 with no plans to stop any time soon.

Manda Around the Web!

Chances are you probably clicked this link from one of these places, but just in case you needed to find me everywhere, you can stalk me however you’d like as per the following options…

Facebook – Newly decorated with a ’90′s Barbie-style logo that Facebook decided to butcher in quality, I sometimes post things here from my various ventures around the internets.

@mandarific on Twitter – where I like to talk too much about not much at all.

Google+ – I don’t post here as much as I’d like, but I’m still around and do love to carry on a good conversation from time to time. Maybe throw me in a circle and see what I’m up to?

…and other things!

I’ve been busy. Really busy. And it sucks.

Some of it’s been actual good work-related moving-forward-in-life things and some of it has just been…I’m not even sure. I can’t even recount what I’ve been doing half the time other than just being busy and very tired a lot, but such is life.

Things are changing soon. There are some very, very, very cool things on the horizon and some very cool projects on my desk. I’m loving blogging for +CB and 3PP – I get to write, I get to focus on specific topics, and I get to discuss things that matter to me. I’m also working on a few new things on the backburner (possibly of the forum variety? we’ll see) that I’d love to see happen in 2012.

There are a lot of good things coming. I have leads and ideas and contacts, it’s all just a matter of time.

We’ll see where things go, yeah?

For me, this falls into three categories. If people are interested, I’ll be glad to do some more blog posts, but this basically broke down into things I eat, money I spend, and crap I work on. I’m still going to be fidgeting to get the crap I work on organized for some time, and the money I spend is basically under control with this awesome app that I downloaded (Expense Tracker, I think it’s called?), so the easiest one to tackle ended up being things I eat.

Here are the problems with how Nick and I eat: I love to cook, but I never feel like I have time for it (part of the reason I’m getting organized in the first place), we always want to lean towards things that are quick or easy, and we always feel like we eat the same things over and over when we know we are capable of cooking many different things. Our typical week might consist of two nights of Hamburger Helper, a night of baked pasta, two nights of fast food, and one night of, like, anything we can find in the fridge.

That’s not how we should be eating. I am a huge advocate/fan of healthy food, and healthy seems to be so time consuming and you have to buy fresh things and it’s just hard. It shouldn’t be hard. It should be easy.

So I tried to get down to the basis of the problem – organization. Because we don’t know what we’re going to eat until we eat it, our meals depend largely on what dishes are clean or what we have in the fridge. This is backwards. We should be planning our dishes and our shopping around what we want to eat. It’s much easier, less stressful, and more cost effective.

I’m a huge fan of index cards, and I found these tiny 3″ x 2.5″ cards at Staples the other day. They were like this, but plain white. (Though I’m thinking now I need to get some of the colored ones.) I have a bulletin board outside of our kitchen that I wasn’t using, and somehow this idea just clicked.

I flipped over seven of the cards to the plain white side, and wrote a day of the week on each one. Then, I took more of the cards and wrote down what we ate for dinner and what ingredients it called for, down to the specifics. If we were having something that involved stuffing, I even wrote down the butter needed to make the stuffing.

I ended up with a bunch of cards like this, pleasantly surprised by how many meals I could think of off the top of my head that we could easily make that were cost effective, including three non-home-cooked cards: one “Wild Card” for fast food or takeout, one “Scavenger Hunt” (eat whatever you can find, nobody’s cooking), and one “Pizza Night” for us to get a $10 take-and-bake pizza from our favorite joint.

What was extra fun for me about making the cards was that it started to feel like a card game of some kind, something that – just in case you’re new here, I’m a fan of. Sure, it may be a little childish, but by making the selection of what we were going to eat that week “fun,” I think I made it a much more enjoyable process. Plus, since I listed out all of the ingredients and only made one card for each meal, it’s much easier to prevent us from slipping into the monotony of “baked pasta, again?”

Ultimately once I hug the board up and chose what meals we were going to eat, it looked like this:

If you couldn’t tell, the little ziploc next to the pinned cards holds all the rest of them. Since this is my first time trying this, I haven’t quite figured out what the process is going to be to switch the cards over, but I’m thinking after we get through Tuesday I’ll sit down and figure out those days again so I can include them in my weekly shopping, or maybe just shuffle the cards as we go. Last night we had Hamburger Helper, so I went ahead and pinned that card up so we don’t do that anymore this week. That’s it. Fin. No more Hamburger Helper.

So now I can see at a glance what we’re going to eat, I can know that at least at some point this week I’ll be able to have a nice slice of pizza, and make my shopping list much more effectively. As a bonus, I have like ten more recipes in the ziploc that I can use for the next few weeks, which is a nice assurance that I won’t have baked pasta eight times this week. It’s also right next to our kitchen and entryway to the apartment, so we HAVE to see it. No ignoring it.

I’m not sure if this will work for everyone, or how well it will work for me, but I’m feeling pretty confident about it, and the internet wanted to see what I had going, so here we go.

Do any of you out there have your own meal-planning systems? Anything as organized (or more organized?!) as this? Have a favorite quick-fix recipe we can add to the rotation for those nights we just don’t want to spend 3 hours preparing a meal?

Throw ‘em at me.