You've got to admit its getting better

Spring is coming (I hope). And things are looking up.

As some of you know, I wrote my education master's thesis on Alice Waters' program The Edible Schoolyard. It is a lovely example of how we can all live better and raise our children to be healthier, happier and more responsible citizens of planet Earth, mainly by growing and eating veggies.

Quickly following the November victory Alice Waters wrote an Open Letter to the Obamas imploring them, among other things, to plant a Victory garden. Well, this week Michelle put on some of her more rugged J. Crew dudds and picked up a shovel.

For whatever reason, I am having the same cathartic reaction to this that I had in November.

So I leave you with the words of the late, great 2Pac (we still miss you Pac):

We gotta make a change...
It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes.
Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live
and let's change the way we treat each other.
You see the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do
what we gotta do, to survive.

(changes)

I'm so sleeppy

Man, Spring Forward comes along every year when I do not want to lose on hour most. It's like its been sitting there for five months waiting to sucker punch me. Why oh why can't you be more like Fall Back and make my life better and not worse for once, Spring Forward? It was nice and warm here yesterday, like maybe this time things would be different, maybe this time Spring Forward would be an extra hour of light when I could use it best, playing frisbee in the park, spending time on reopened decks late into prime time. But I see that it is going to rain for the next four days. Did it really look like I needed this?

It might still be winter, but I have found some Sun

I first encountered Sunbutter in an United Airlines snack box along with dried fruit and crackers, and it made me wonder why airline food is usually so horrible. We just need to go ahead and accept that a mile off the ground is not the time to share a hot meal with a few hundred other passengers. There are plenty of great camping snacks more suitable to the circumstances, so lets embrace the ruggedness of commercial air and enjoy the best trail mix possible. JetBlue has embraces this philosophy with great snacks and no meals. If you want a burger (and you are lucky(?) enough to be flying out of LAX) get yourself an In-n-Out for the road. (Oh man, I could go for a grilled cheese about now. I could also go for some warm California sun, I guess I have the end of winter blues.)

Sunbutter is great. Yes, like most processed peanut butters, it has some added sugar and an emulsifier. But it is totally craveable, and there are no unprocessed options, so I choose to overlook that. Try it on an apple for dessert or a salty cracker for lunch. Yum, yum Sunbutter. And from the sunflower seed, who knew!

As a foil to A-rod, sunflower seeds are a pretty lame part of Baseball that turn out to have to have secret appeal. They usually come salted and in the shell. They are a huge pain to eat, but you do consume your fiber for the week. Or, you can spit out the shell and leave a huge mess. I find this is overwhelmingly the technique of the guy sitting next to me at Mets games. Its pretty gross to then step over a huge pile of shells covered in someone else's spit. Eww.

But it turns out that sunflower seeds clean up real nice after the game. My new favorite food is choclate covered sunflower seeds. They are like mini, oblong M&Ms, but even better. They taste like a slightly upscale peanut butter M&M. You are thinking, well that can't be improved upon. Well it can, its called a Sunny Seed Drop and it is delicious.