Wow, 4 months since my last post. I guess I'm not that good at keeping the WWW abreast of my life. Well, outside of Facebook ... those privacy-stealing buggers.
Let's see ... what's new...
NMTB is gigantic and consuming more food than we are growing. Not too big of a surprise since we only get 3-4 cherry tomatoes and up to 5 string beans a week. He's off the goat milk and was drinking a local, big dairy's organic milk. One day though we all got really sick and figured out it had to have been that Alta Dena milk. I've had milk allergies since I was young, coming and going depending on the milk quality (i.e., hormones, antibiotics, etc). Let me tell you how much I hate the FDA and their claims that no significant difference in the milk from cows treated with or without rBST/rBGH has been found. I know there is within 12h of consuming the former and would be happy to testify about the minimum 72h lingering aftereffects of that milk. Our local nutrition store, as it turns out, was sued successfully for $10M (that's million) for selling raw milk. Yeah, I'm still trying to figure that one out. And, unlike our co-op market in Washington, they no longer sell unhomogenized milk in glass bottles since customers found it to be a hassle and weren't returning the bottles. *eye roll* Since we joined a group here that has organized cooperative buying (buying club) for organic produce from a wholesale distributor, I figured I'd ask them if they knew of any local dairies selling their milk straight from the farm. Despite CA's progressive nature, laws here are pretty stringent regarding the sale of milk. Some raw milk farms have gone under due to campaigning by industrial dairies in this area. The only farm-direct source now would be to buy a share of a dairy cow. We're not exactly rolling in the dough these days, what with my meager scientist salary (pitiful) and LB's continued unemployment. To make an already long digressing story short, we found a grocer near the university (not the one I work for) that sells both raw milk AND unhomogenized milk in glass bottles. Jackpot! Sure this stuff is pricey ($7/half-gal and $4/half-gal, respectively), but for the nutrition that hasn't been filtered and cooked out, it is well worth it. LB calls it NMTB's liquid buttah.
Some more good news ... LB finally got work! He'll be an engineering tech for the county. This is great news and really comes at a good time. We're both kind of in a funk, him having not worked in over 1.5y, me in a job that was supposed to be the segue into industry that is totally flopping. I struggle nearly every day with whether I should just tough it out or find something more satisfying that doesn't involve the kind of things I do (i.e., move away from research but stay in science, like education). California isn't exactly the state you want to be in if you want to be a teacher, unfortunately. Anyway, we're on the road to some freedom with his newfound job, even if it means that NTMB has to go into daycare. For now.
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