My housemates and I are planning to get a farm share at a local CSA (community supported agriculture) this summer. The main options I’ve found for the Amherst area are Simple Gifts Farm, Riverland Farm, Brookfield Farm, Stone Soup Farm, and Foodbank Farm. Here is some info on each one.
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For my birthday I received In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.  The book covers how the American diet has changed over the last century, mostly due to influences from processed food companies. It is more than a little disturbing how much control these companies have gained over government health advice, and in turn, over our diets. Pollan argues that the food companies are increasingly trying to push processed foods into consumers’ shopping carts since they can be made more cheaply, and allow for a higher price markup, than regular food items. Pollan’s suggestions for a healthy diet make sense to me: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Read more »

I recently got a shiny new Macbook from my advisor. While I’ve briefly used a Mac a few times in the past, this is the first time that I’ve ever really worked on one. I can appreciate that it is a very attractive laptop, but I’m less convinced that this machine is supposed to provide the ultimate user friendly experience, particularly for users who like flexibility in how they work on their system. I make an effort not to complain about things here since that is what 90% of blogs are, but unfortunately I need to relax that rule for this post… Read more »

About a month ago I spent a lot of money on a Canon Xti Digital SLR camera. It has been fun learning about photography and how all this stuff works. While I’m still taking lots of pictures of people with telephone poles and such coming out of their heads, I’m gradually getting a bit better. I have learned a great deal about the technical aspects of photography such as apertures and shutter speeds which didn’t apply to point and shoot cameras. Here are my notes and some useful resources.

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