Today Was Awesome In An Ordinary Way

I'm in good spirits!

So here's an update on my birthday, and today, my first full day of being 22.

Yesterday was a pretty quiet day overall; I hung out, did homework and walked Cricket. BUT THEN, at 7:30 I went to go pick Maddie up from school and we headed downtown to THE MELTING POT, which is the coolest restaurant ever, but is also very expensive, so I've only been there once. The deal is that you get four courses, three of which are fondue, so the courses went like this:
1) Veggies, bread and apples fondued in cheese (we had a pot of Wisconsin Trio and a pot of a variety of Swiss)
2) Salad course. I had DELICIOUS lettuce wraps. I've never had them before and they were great!
3) Main course: entrees of choice fondued in one of two cooking-oil-type-things (we had a Merleau based one and a veggie broth based one). My entree was the vegetarian plate which had stuffed pasta, asparagus, artichoke hearts and other things, and also a side of salmon, which was SO GOOD.
4) Desert, which was fruit, cheesecake, brownies and marshmallows dipped in a choice of three chocolate sauces (we had a dark chocolate with amaretto, a white/milk chocolate swirl, and a banana's Foster dip).

Oh my gosh, I left there stuffed full of the best food ever, and with Lance and Dad to thank for footing the hefty bill. Yay dads!!

AND, on top of that there were presents! Dad gave me the awesome pasta maker I really wanted (I'm on this new thing about making all (ok, maybe most) of my own food), Mom got me the box set of Long Way Round and Long Way Down, and Joel Salatin's book You Can Farm, and Julia got me an awesome Barnes and Noble gift card! They were all totally great!

So, I got back from this dinner full to bursting and worked on a take-home exam that was due today until 3, then went to bed and slept in until noon.

I woke up this morning all rested and lazy and feeling awesome. Up for a grapefruit and I got ready for class, then biked on over to campus, went to lecture and then had a sandwich and hung out at Espresso Royal for a while. Then a work out at the gym and over to the Bell Museum of Natural History for a look at the food exhibit and a viewing of "A Farm For The Future," which was totally inspiring.

I know that doesn't sound like a super awesome day, but I feel productive for doing a good job on the exam, eating well, biking, working out and discovering the coolest museum on campus!

That movie was seriously inspiring. I've been stuck in a major rut in my thesis, wondering how I'm supposed to solve all of agriculture's problems in one paper, not wanting to write something that just moans about all of the aforementioned problems without offering something of my own. But it all seems to make sense now! This movie started out talking about the problems with agriculture in Britain, mainly in that without fossil fuel large scale food production in the way we've been doing it is impossible. But instead of just stopping there like so many do, this movie went on to suggest several different ways of farming that provide as much as or more food than we're producing with our current system in totally new ways. I feel like I've got my faith in the future of agriculture restored!

So now I'm gonna try and get this paper started. We'll see what I can come up with!