The Hoosier Diaspora

Dani and I watched Food, Inc. this past weekend (well, most of it; still have to finish it) and it was a pretty powerful movie. I’ve been moving away from processed foods and meat for a while now, though I still eat whatever when I’m at a dinner party or other event. I guess I eat less of this sort of thing rather than none. I credit works by Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Walter Willett (Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy), and Super Size Me with a lot of this and consequently the movie didn’t tell me a whole lot I didn’t already know. That being said, I think it’s something everyone should see and at least be aware of what’s going on behind the scenes with the food we eat. I’ve made some changes in my life and feel a lot better in many ways.

Other than movie watching, I’ve been fixing a lot of mediterranean diet kind of foods: whole wheat pasta, vegetables, olive oil, and pasta sauce, with mixed nuts and greek yogurt for snacks. It’s a good mix and I’m happy with how good, easy, cheap, and healthy it is. I fixed some pasta and vegetables with tofu for Dani Friday night and was pretty happy with how it turned out. I’m trying to cook more to save money and lose weight, and it’s going well so far. I’m gradually becoming a competent cook I think.

Saturday night we had our dinner club gathering with Dani, Matthew, Phong, Monica, and Matt over at Matthew and Phong’s place. They put together an awesome spread of make your own spring rolls, egg rolls, and a bunch of other great stuff. I brought wine and beer (naturally). Dani and I made an asian salad her friends made for us recently and it turned out pretty well. Monica and Matt made really good meatballs with peanut sauce as well as a nice homemade kiwi ice cream. I spend a lot of time over at M&P’s place so it’s always fun to hang out there. A good time was had by all.

Sunday Dani and I took a nice walk, then headed out with Jeff and Khara for dinner, drinks, and hanging out at their place. I really liked the fries at Islands, and the food at Mod Market was great (they even put the calorie counts on the receipt!). We’ll have to go back there sometime. J&K have a cute new puppy with a lot of energy so that was fun.

This week I’m going to chain myself to my desk in the lab. It’s spring break so as a grad student that means I get real work done that week. Hopefully I can crawl out from under this pile of TODO items I’ve been accumulating.

Snowy cabin

Originally uploaded by khob

Danielle has some friends with a cabin in Winter Park, so we headed up there this weekend for a gathering of the couples. All told we had lawyers, a physician, and a philosophy professor so we had a great time talking and hanging out.

We spent the time drinking, playing board games, snowshoeing (while most of the other folks went skiing), video games, tubing (ridiculously fun), and in general just hanging out and talking. A great weekend that hopefully we can do again sometime. The cabin and the people were great.

I’m surprised how fun tubing was. I hadn’t done it in a long time so I had forgotten what it was like. I want to do it again sometime so if anybody wants to plan a weekend I’d love to go.

As always, some pics are in the Flickr gallery.

Added a Flickr widget to the sidebar, but I’m not too happy about how it integrates with the theme. If anybody knows of a better one let me know

It takes quite a bit of gymnastics to get an independently hosted Wordpress site (namely, tyrdrop.net) to post to Google Buzz. Hope this works.

I added a sidebar widget with my Twitter feed on it, in case folks want one stop shopping for the world of the Cobb. Still playing with the layout and other issues after the upgrade / reinstall.

The Wordpress upgrade blew up in my face. Still trying to un-fuck it. More details later.

This past weekend was our annual PhD recruiting weekend, and overall I think it went very well. I’m on the graduate committee for the CS department and it’s one of our more major responsibilities every year. I’m glad it went well but I feel that I had to step up quite a bit more than should be expected of one of the graduate students to make sure it went well.

We had a lot of activities planned and so it was a pretty intense weekend for all concerned. Dinners with faculty, grad students, etc. Tours, talks (including one of mine), and meetings. At least one student was impressed enough with our numerical analysis / scientific computing talks to want to potentially switch his research area. We also had snowshoeing trips, walking tours of the city, and a end-of-weekend party with all CS PhD students invited. The Saturday evening events with grad students only were one of the things I planned and organized, and I think that went well and was a lot of fun for all involved. We didn’t have the turnout I would have hoped for, but it was better than I expected.

It was a fun weekend, but I’m kind of glad it’s over. I had quite a bit more of my fair share of work to do so I’m glad that I can finally get back to the things I need to do after over a week of planning, etc.