Kyle’s May Challenge Recap

What was I thinking?

I’m not saying it was awful, but I imagine this is what it’s like to use the Internet in a country with heavy amounts of censorship (China? Singapore? Cuba?). Then again, the communist approach to the Internet was not without it’s benefits.

Seasonal Food Finder

Just a quick post about a cool feature on Epicurious.com

Here in Toulon, it’s easy to figure out what is in season.  There’s a farmers market 6 days a week here.  Every time I walk through the market, there’s one item that seems to be at every stand.  Whatever it is will be cheap and beautiful.  By the next week, it might be hard to find anyone selling that vegetable at all. 

In American grocery stores, finding what’s in season can be a little trickier- since the produce section at Safeway sells basically the same items year round. If it’s not in season, they’ll truck it in from somewhere it is or find a green house or warehouse that still has it. America might be defined by the availability of tomatoes in December or Pumpkins in July.  Still, your best value and best quality can be had by knowing what is at it’s peak.

A lot of food websites will suggest general things like “Summer means Strawberries”, but the US is just too big for that kind of broad advice. Summer might mean strawberries in California, but it probably means something else entirely in Maine.

Enter my new favorite seasonal veggie finder. I love it.  Thought I’d share.

Anne’s May Challenge Recap

It’s now Sunday evening and I’m just hours away from ending my media fast. While I have to admit that I did cheat some, I mostly kept to French media for the week.

It’s a digital camera with a built-in compass

Ever since I discovered that Google Photos will display my photos as points on a Google Map, I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities.  I love the idea that I can view my photos from college as a map of the college’s campus. I could browse by dorm instead of by date.  I could browse through photos from an old road trip by looking at the route.  In fact, since the photos are tagged with a date and time and a location, Google should be able to tell me what the route was automatically.  How cool is that? What a great way to look at photos from a vacation or compare different hiking routes for a day trip.

The only problem is that it’s really tricky to go through and manually tag photos with exact gps coordinates.  But I’m convinced that this is a technical challenge someone should be able to solve.  And, finally, a couple of solutions are appearing on the market.

Should I Really Pay for Software?

When Anne and I were in Budapest last month, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the budget hotel we’d chosen not only offered free wifi, but had a computer set up for guests to use.  An even bigger surprise- the computer was set up with Linux.

I’d never used Linux before, but I had some important fantasy baseball transactions to make so I gritted my teeth and dove in.  And it wasn’t so bad.

Kyle’s May Challenge

As many of you know, the Pink of Perfection May Challenge sounds a lot like my France Telecom March Challenge . . . except the latter was involuntary and resulted in a 6 week media and telecommunication blackout. While it did give me a chance to catch up on my reading, the France Telecom challenge is not something I’m eager to repeat.  A little too isolating for me.

So I’ve crafted a new challenge a little more suited to my time wasting habits. I’m calling it:

One Window, One Visit, One Week.

The Internet. En francais. (Anne’s May Challenge)

Aujourd’hui begins my version of the Pink of Perfection media detox. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to give up–blogs, facebook, the little tv I actually watch–before coming to my conclusion. I just bought my return ticket to the United States (I’ll be in Seattle July 10th in case anyone wants to welcome me back with a much missed chai latte), and my remaining time in France is starting to tick away. There’s still so much I want to see here, and still plenty of room for my French to improve. Instead of wasting time mindlessly clicking through blogs, I’ve decided to make the most of my stay and use only French media for the week.

POP May Challenge

I spend too much time online. Between job searching, travel planning, blog reading, and speculating about the weather (please weather.com, get someone to check up on your toulon forecasts–they are always, always wrong), I find myself wasting whatever extra time I have. Time that could be spent on reading, exercise, drawing, or actually hanging out with friends instead of just scanning them through Facebook. I’m finally prepared to do something about it.

Ironically, my decision to take a web break was inspired by a bit of blog reading. Sarah from the Pink of Perfection has challenged her readers to take a 7 day media fast. The fast can be defined in whatever way works for the participant–one reader will be going without internet, phone, movies, books or music while another will forgo her beloved magazines.

Kyle and I are both going to do our own media fasts. Because we’ll be traveling at the end of this week and including those days in the challenge would be cheating, we’re going to start a week from Tuesday. Stay tuned for details. And visit Sarah’s site to consider jumping on board.

Brooklyn Book Festival

Almost as soon as I finished the alphabet and thought I was out of the Brooklyn woods, I discovered that this Sunday is the second annual Brooklyn Book Festival. There’s no way I could let it pass without a post! I really enjoyed the event last year–just when I was feeling nostalgic for new books and the start of school, the festival came along and made my September a wordier one. An array of writers speak on panels (Colson Whitehead! Paul Auster! Mary Gaitskill! Dave Eggers!), the Borough Hall courtyard becomes a massive book fair of (mostly) independent publishers, poets’ voices echo off of outdoor staircases, and general literary merriment reigns. And all of the readings and discussions are free!

The “mainstage” readings were very crowded last year, so I’d recommend getting there early (the festival starts at 10am) and planning a military-style course of action on a program. You might have to skip “Developing Stories” to get into “Africa Now,” so make sure to prioritize! Of course, I’ve found that the best readings are often ones with the less popular, still almost undiscovered writers.

The Brooklyn Book Festival is this Sunday, September 16th from 10am-6pm. It will be held in various venues around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. See you there!

X: Xtra-Special Literary Festival

OK, so this is a bit (a lot) of a stretch for the “X” entry, but Kyle and I wanted to be sure to plug the annual Fort Greene Literary Festival in time for you to attend. The event is intimate and community oriented–last year many of the writers were from the neighborhood, and I later ran into some of them on the streets.  Think booths from places like the library and independent publishers , lots of families sprawled out on picnic blankets, and musical interludes.  Really, what could be better than a sunny day in the park complete with books and readings?

The festival will be held on the hill in the park this Saturday, August 18th at 4:30pm. Authors attending include Gloria Naylor, Jennifer Egan, Chris Abani, Staceyann Chin, and Roger Bonair-Agard. Students from a neighborhood summer workshop and the P.L.A.Y.E.R.S. Club Steppers will also perform.

This promises to be the kind of event that makes you very glad to live in Brooklyn. And (no small feat) it even tops the Halloween dog costume parade as my favorite Fort Greene Park gathering.