A couple years ago, a friend and I did a hiking trip of the John Muir Trail in eastern California; the trail is 210 miles, from Yosemite in the north to Mt. Whitney, tallest point in the lower 48, in the south. We originally specced it as a full month, August of 2008, right after I (was supposed to have) graduated and right before she started grad school at the University of Washington, though I ended up punting about halfway through and hitching down to Fresno because of problems with my ankle. Anyhow because commercial backpacking fare is uninspiring as food goes, and often doesn't provide enough calories for the level of activity you're doing, my friend put together a nice variety of meals and dried them, and we ate them happily for the trip. (After our first three days, I bought a salt shaker in Tuolomne Meadows, because we were sweating enough that we needed it. Later on we started adding Crisco to them to bulk up the fat and calories, and I still felt a bit hungry for most of the trip, but they were better by far, and packed lighter and tighter, than anything commercial.) After the trip, I got the recipes from her, and then life happened, and it was only in the past few months that I've started to work them into my home cooking.
The first one such (and only so far) is what my hiking partner called Convict Lake Chickpeas (link for recipe), a simple stewed combination of chickpeas and tomatoes. It is, among other things, vegan, and gluten-free if you make it with quinoa as I do.
Crappy cameraphone picture!
The original recipe was, in its entirety,
2 servings: ----------- 2/3 can chickpeas 2/3 can tomatoes 2 tbsp dried onions spices 1.5 cups couscous (combine all but couscous, cook couscous separately)
So you can see that I have expanded and elaborated on it slightly. It's simple, fast, and tasty and gives lots of room for experimentation if you want it. I tend to find a whole can each chickpeas and tomatoes makes two days' food for a mostly sedentary coder who tends to eat only one non-breakfast meal a day. It is also excellent cold and/or used as a topping for crackers, which is good since it's summer here in Boston, we have no AC, and cold food is significantly more palatable during the heat of the day.
(which, ironically, I use a lot in the same way as a terminal for other systems elsewhere). It’s kind of becoming my primary machine, just because I do appreciate the larger screen (and my, is it a beautiful screen). The unibody has possibly the best build quality of any laptop I’ve encountered ever, which I appreciate a lot — it just feels sturdy. It’s about 5 pounds, and I’m lucky to get three hours of battery life out of it (I think average is more like two or two and a half), so it’s much more a machine which wanders between outlets than a true portable. Most of the things I don’t like about it are impedence mismatches between the software and me, not problems with the hardware, and if I had one of my own I’d definitely try installing Linux on it. (Last I asked around, I think wireless had issues, but these things change fairly fast?) Mostly I like laptops way better with a tiling windowmanager, Linux has a way better handle on multiple desktops than any other OS, and Steve’s Way is otherwise only about 75% congruent with the way I want to use my computer. But it’s being an effecive work machine, so that’s the most important bit right now.
, which has a hardware keyboard (a requirement for me in a smartphone, since, in what you are no doubt beginning to recognize as a trend, one of my prime uses of it is a SSH terminal). I miss the G1 keyboard, which was about as close to a real, full QWERTY keyboard as I’ve seen anyone do on a phone (a full 5 rows), but I’ve found the Slide’s 4-row keyboard to be acceptable enough that I’m not considering upgrading to one of the newer phones with a physical keyboard. Android 2 is wonderful, and the ability to pull in phone numbers from Facebook is something I didn’t expect to find useful but I like a lot. I am annoyed that T-Mobile discontinued the 300 text message plan I was on, so I’m now paying $60 instead of $50 for the same service, since I never use more than 300 text messages a month anyway. (I’m still on the no-longer open Google Friends and Family plan, thankfully, so I save ~$10/month over what you’d see just starting out new now. I can’t quite see paying iPhone-level prices for the Slide, no matter how much I like it.)
, and I like their earphones, a pair of which I just got.)
in brown and wore them to Iceland, and they’re quickly becoming my everyday shoes. (I in fact liked them so much that I bought another pair in black — I think of the as latter as “going to dance clubs in foreign countries” shoes.) They’re light, they look great, they fit well, and they’re comfortable to walk long distances in, as I did in Reykjavik — in fact they’re possibly the most comfortable shoes I own. I’m extremely happy with them. (If you expect to walk a lot with them and you like the fit out of the box, do treat them with some kind of waterproofing compound, wax, shine, whatever. I got caught in an unexpected rainstorm and my brown pair got soaked, and they relaxed more than I wanted.)