Homemade & HFCS-free Granola Bars

So for the past few days I've been couch-bound due to an injury I sustained on my knee. I talked to the partner of a physical therapist who knows a good deal about the matter and has experienced similar injuries. She has identified my shoes as the culprit and says that they haven't been very supportive on my long walks. This past weekend I walked over twenty miles with friends and the injury I've sustained to my knee is the result. Thus, on top of that, two miserably boring days off from work is what I get.

With all the free time I had, I spent some trying and find things I could do to occupy myself that didn't include Facebooking, instant messaging, and continually refreshing my Flickr pages. I sifted through numerous bookmarks looking for suggestions of activities I could do in a time like this. I finally reached my bookmarked recipes folder and came across a recipe for homemade granola that looked easy and very rewarding. I hadn't made my own granola bars before now, so I thought why not give it a try?!

When some friends came over to pay me a visit and to see how I was doing, it didn't take much convincing to get them to help me out with the recipe and share the fun. The recipe we used was inspired by recipe from this blog entry, here. Thanks to the folks over at Joyful Abode! We used toasted oats, almonds, brown sugar, local wildflower honey, maple extract (due to a lack of vanilla), dried pineapple, dried banana, raisins, craisins, and dried papaya to make these healthier-than-store-bought, HFCS-free granola bars and we're proud!

Coldplay Viva La Vida Tour At Darien Lake

I love when I plan to make an entry about a very interesting event in my life, but then get so caught up in other things that I completely forget about the entry until a week later. This is one of those times.

So, the day was June 1st, 2009, a Monday. That day I woke up, showered and shaved, did some chores around the house, and waited around to be picked up by a friend. Later that night, my friends and I would be attending an event that we'd been wanting to attend for a long, long time. We were going to see Coldplay live in concert for the 2009 Viva La Vida Tour at the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center at Darien Lake. A mutual interest in Coldplay's musical style was the main reason the friend who was coming to pick me up and I became friends. Going to a Coldplay concert was something we thought we could never fluidly orchestrate, due to conflicting schedules and potential obstacles such as transportation and money. Fortunately we planned it out well and ordered the tickets about a month and a half in advance. There was so much excitement going through us on the way there, that I could barely keep liquids down.

The concert opened with a band known as The Howling Bells from Australia and then with Pete Yorn, a singer-songwriter from the United States. They were alright as an opening band, but I would have preferred to hear Elbow. Elbow is the band touring with Coldplay for the summer leg of the 2009 Viva La Vida tour. A long wait later and Coldplay came out with a blast of energy playing Life In Technicolor and performed the following setlist:

1. Life In Technicolor
2. Violet Hill
3. Clocks
4. In My Place
5. Yellow
6. Glass Of Water
7. Cemeteries Of London
8. 42
9. Fix You
10. Strawberry Swing
11. God Put A Smile Upon Your Face (Partial Techno Remix)/Talk (Partial Techno Remix)
12. The Hardest Part/Postcards From Far Away
13. Viva La Vida
14. Lost!
15. I'm A Believer (Neil Diamond cover)
16. Death Will Never Conquer
17. Politik
18. Lovers In Japan
19. Death And All His Friends
20. The Scientist (Encore)
21. The Escapist (Encore)

When the band played I'm A Believer and Death Will Never Conquer, they played way in the back (about 30 feet from us) on what is known at the most recent concerts during the Viva La Vida tour as "Stage-C". When they came back near us, two thoughts ran through my head. The first one was this: "Oh my god! They're actually coming back here and performing for us?!" The second one went a little like this: "Wait, if they come back here, everyone will want to migrate closer to them, thus trampling anyone and anything in their path." And you know what? Unsurprisingly, that's exactly what happened.

In any case, they finished up the night with Lovers In Japan (arguably my favorite song on the Viva La Vida album) and Death And All His Friends. They said their goodbyes and left, but the audience starting singing the bridge in Viva La Vida (the ooohh-oooh-oh-oh-ooh one) to call the band out for an encore. Sure enough, they answered the call and performed an encore consisting of The Scientist and The Escapist. At the end of the show, each member of the audience was given a free copy of Coldplay's newest live album, Left Right Left Right Left, featuring a green butterfly on the cover that is representative of the butterfly-shaped confetti that is used during the performance of Lovers In Japan. And so concluded a very stunning and energetic performance by Coldplay.

The Wonders Of Springtime

This is unequivocally my favorite time of the year for many reasons. Like every student, I'm very relieved that the semester has finally come to an end and that a long summer of relaxation is on the horizon. I also enjoy the sounds, sights, and smells that this time of year has to offer. It always feels like everything that suddenly ceases to exist or function during the winter has come out of a long dormancy and is reborn. Plants are green and blossoming again, the sky is once again blue more frequently than not, and people are outside being productive and enjoying life. I know I'm not the only person that feels this way, but I just like sharing my thoughts on the matter.

Yesterday, my last day living in a dorm room, I spent a better part of the morning and the afternoon packing and cleaning. I looked forward to having just a few boxes to take home, unlike all the other consumerist students that attend the neighboring school and whom live in the same residence hall that I do. I find it hard to believe that these students require enormous moving vans to transport the belongings that they somehow managed to fit into a dorm room about the same size as said vehicle, while still living comfortably. However, some of the students without the luxury of a whale-sized moving van simply throw away the belongings they can't bring back home. It's a sad truth and a very wasteful behavior. 

The positive side of this wastefulness is that frugal people like myself who come from lower-income households are given access to a heap of free stuff. It's really incredible how much these students discard simply because they can't take it back home and have the option of spending more money the following year on the same product. I often go rummaging through the trash rooms during the year, but the last week of school is where the real dumpster diving happens!

By about 10:00 in the morning I had already started making an inventory list of all the free items I was finding and that list included a full pack of index cards, five unused legal pads, a couple of unused spiral notebooks, four unopened packs of college-ruled looseleaf paper, three brand new staple removers, a pencil cup with two new highlighters and eleven unused Bic pens, a fully operational electric pencil sharpener, a working three-hole punch, a nearly full bottle of glue, a practically new pair of size ten (my size!) Nike running shoes, two under-the-bed storage totes, a black wire mesh trash can to match my existing Mac OS X-like silver wire mesh trash can, a pack of diet Pepsi, thirteen unopened packages of Ramen, and much much more. I planned on saving all these items for my apartment next year. This would definitely help reduce the costs of purchasing things for the apartment!

Due to my successes that I'd already had on just my floor alone, I invited a couple friends to come with me to rummage through all the other trash rooms in my building. We got a team of four of us together and tackled sixteen other trash rooms in my building. The yields from the first trash room already amazed us. We didn't plan to find much food while picking through the trash, but that made up a large portion of what we found. We obtained probably four or five unopened boxes of quaker oatmeal, a pack of canned Minute Maid lemonade, unopened boxes of granola bars, fruit snacks, cereal, more shoes, trash cans, an unopened bottle of sunscreen, an unopened bottle of Listerine mouthwash, a working hand vacuum, and a myriad of other items. In total, we probably obtained over $250 worth of items. It was incredibly successful and totally made my day! We ended up saving most of the unopened and non-perishable food for use in our apartment in the fall and we couldn't have been more satisfied. I had introduced my three friends to the wonderful world of freeganism.

Not only does the end of the semester and the start of the summer signify free stuff, but it also signifies a time of productivity and enjoyment of the outdoors. I am now free of stresses from school work and deadlines and am able to begin planning out and starting projects that I'd like to complete before the end of the summer. I think four months is plenty of time. With the inspiration of nature, my level of productivity will be much higher than it is during the winter when I am plagued by seasonal affective disorder. The smell of blossoming plants and newborn vegetation coupled with the feel of warm sunshine is enough to bring clarity to my mind and body.

Some of the major projects I'd like to undertake during this summer include starting up a thriving garden of vegetables and herbs, successfully growing at least one cuboidal watermelon, fixing up my old Cabriolet road bicycle, de-cluttering the house, replacing the cheap particle boards of my desk with a more structurally sound and aesthetic material (any suggestions?), and putting together a stunning stop motion video. I believe this is a reasonable enough list of projects to complete or at least make significant accomplishments toward. In between all that, I'd like to maintain a splendid job and spend as much time as I can with the friends I love! Do you think I can do it?

Photography, Chemistry, Ecology, etc.

Each semester for the past one and a half years, my school, SUNY-ESF, has hosted a stream cleanup and water quality assessment project along waterways in the Syracuse-Chittenango area to help improve the health of the waterways and to educate students, via firsthand fieldwork, about how to accurately assess the quality of a stream or a river. At the same time, we try to help cleanup these waterways in an effort to improve overall water quality, health of the aquatic ecosystem, and the natural grandeur of the waterway by removing trash and debris.

Last year, I helped spearhead the first ever Adopt-A-Stream event hosted by SUNY-ESF and maintained the role as a member of the executive planning committee. It was an incredible opportunity that I was given, to work alongside new people and collaborate on such a substantial project. Aside from helping to plan the event, I helped remove debris and took film photographs with my old Asahi Pentax Spotmatic at one location along Chittenango Creek.

This year, instead of helping plan the event, I was appointed as one of the two photographers for the event. My position was not as high ranking as the previous year, but it was just as integral to the entire project. My friend Anthony and I were the two photographers for the Adopt-A-Stream event and we traveled from one location, where SUNY-ESF freshman and other student volunteers were working, to the next. We traveled with some friends who were initially supposed to be chauffeurs for the freshman, but were instead chauffeurs for Anthony and I. So the six of us traveled in a tiny, five seater Honda Fit all day from one location to the next. I won't say it wasn't cramped, but it wasn't anything to complain about either. We had a great time together, driving around and stopping by locations to shoot some photos.

Fortunately, the weather was magnificent and we were able to make it out to Chittenango and Pratts Falls. Chittenango Falls is a bit larger than Pratts Falls and while we were there, a small rainbow formed at the top of the falls due to the perfect homogenization of ultraviolet light and airborne dihydrogen monoxide. I was able to catch a few nice photos of the resultant and couldn’t have been happier with the day.

A Sense Of Community

It's not very often that a student here at ESF gets to venture off campus and into the real-life communities of Syracuse without a vehicular mode of transportation. This makes interaction with fellow residents of the city of Syracuse practically impossible. Most people I know can't even picture Syracuse as a friendly or welcoming neighborhood given all the news coverage they see about drugs, violence, and poverty and almost nothing positive. Today, however, was different for my friend Anthony and I. We were given the opportunity to volunteer within the community for ESF's Saturday Of Service at a small community garden known as the West Newell Street Community Garden. I was excited to finally get out and play in the dirt for the first time this year and it was just the outlet I needed to break away from the routine.

While we were there, we met some very nice people including the two ladies who oversee the garden, Mable (not Marble) and Jonnell, a Syracuse community geographer and an integral part of Syracuse Grows. There was also a landscape architecture graduate from ESF who has been working there for a while, named Jessie. She seemed to really enjoy helping out there and being able to apply her knowledge and skills as an LA. She helped the coordinators plan for a more native-to-Syracuse garden that would utilize some indigenous management techniques that she probably learned at ESF. It was nice to see a community garden that was under such good care and was operated in such an organized manner. Within the garden, there were raised beds that would soon be home to various vegetable and flowering plants. In the front of the garden were beds for flowering plants, behind those were beds for strawberries and other vegetable plants, to the side of those was a small plot for healing herbs like yarrow and heal-all, and the rest was for anything else they would decide to grow this spring and summer.

My initial task was to rake up all the leaves, with Anthony, that were toward the back of the garden in order to prepare it for a prescribed burning to control weeds (in a natural and more indigenous way!) and ultimately for tilling and planting. Soon after I began, Mabel could see that this was a one man job and had me instead move onto clearing all the Virginia creeper off the back fence. Virginia creeper is one of those plants that causes you to go insane, sustain all sorts of injuries (including nearly dropping a pair of garden sheers onto your face while attempting to cut it free from tree branches), and basically pushes you to the point of giving up on the plot of land in has taken over. Luckily, with some determination and a sharp pair of garden sheers, I was able to clear the fence and surrounding area of the problem weed.

After that was all done, I continued on to cut down some box elder trees that were a bit in the way, picked up trash that had hopped the fence from the parking lot/dump site of the Syracuse street sweeping company next-door, and tore up yet more Virginia creeper before calling it a day. Despite my ongoing rant about how much of a nuisance Virginia creeper is, I didn't mind doing the work one bit. The reasons being that I felt like I was putting forth an effort toward a worthy common cause that would benefit many other people besides myself, I felt it was a wonderful way to spend an otherwise boring and unproductive Saturday, and it's just something I've always done and don't mind doing again and again. Helping out a community is definitely what drove me the most though. It gave me a feeling of accomplishment and significance, knowing that I was able to meet new people and was given the opportunity to work with a community on a project that benefits a commonwealth. So, your job for this spring and summer is to follow suit and make yourself feel good by helping out others and volunteering in your community. Happy Earth Week!

Dorm Room Gardening

One of the best things a college student can do to improve concentration, study habits, and social atmosphere is to furnish their room with an assortment of plants that would do well with minimal to moderate sun. During my freshman year of college, that's exactly what myself and many of my floor mates ended up doing in order to create a better atmosphere on our floor. Being students at an environmental science and forestry college with eight greenhouses on top of one of our buildings, it was a very easy to fill our floor lounge with plants to a point where it began looking like a greenhouse itself. That lounge contained bamboo, succulents, and other large plants that apparently thrive indoors. Visitors often compared it to a flourishing jungle, although it was far from that. It was a very pleasant place to be and study in though. Every other floor lounge in the residence hall was barren and lifeless compared to ours.

During the late portion of the spring semester, I started a bunch of my own vegetable seeds that I would transplant to my garden back home once summer vacation started. I must've had over fifty peat moss and terra-cotta pots full of soil that would soon become home to an array of nascent plants sitting on my window sill. I had peppers, bamboo, tomatoes, soybeans, basil, and the two jade plants and the coffee plant that I still have today. I cannot begin to describe how much more comfortable my room was, not only to me, but to everyone that visited my room. They were conversation starters from the beginning. People would come in to see how they were doing and, since my room was also a nursery for other peoples' plants, they would often tend to and water them. It was one of the best ways to encourage social interaction, especially at an environmental school. My dorm windowsill garden allowed my room to maintain an atmosphere that encourage learning, sharing, and friendships. We had dozens of study parties, social gatherings, and knowledgeable discussions in my room frequently and I think the plants helped to harbor such activities.

Before I left for school for my freshman year, a neighbor of mine back home told me I'd probably have a miserable time because of troubles adjusting to a new location, higher level classes, huge assignments, and a new social atmosphere. Thanks to my openness, my friendliness, and my desire to meet and interact with new people, that wasn't the case. My plants helped me create bonds with my floor mates based on a common interest. Creating a dorm windowsill garden was one of the best things I think I've ever done. This year (my last year in dorm housing!), I have started yet another dorm windowsill garden containing poppy flowers, my jade plants, and my coffee plant and for the next 22 days (until I leave for home on May 6th) you can see how it's doing on my Folia page. Of course, after that those plants will just be moved to my "Backyard Garden" where you can continue to check up on them, if you're interested.

Arbitrary Thoughts On A Daily Basis

Yesterday I went about my usual Thursday activities with many random thoughts on my mind. I made a mental note about just two of those myriad thoughts. One was to do some online research about the mechanics of a sneeze, also known as a sternutation. A sternutation is defined as a semi-autonomous, convulsive expulsion of air from the lungs. In my quest for information, I came across an article from WebMD's Sexual Health Center that discussed the occurrence of sneezes in a few people worldwide that happened as a result of sexual thoughts they had. Seriously, there are people who sneeze when they think dirty thoughts. If you're interested in reading further, look here.

I didn't realize how complex the whole process of sneezing really was until this point. Besides thinking dirty thoughts, I read about many other stimuli that may trigger sneezes such as foreign particles passing the nasal hairs and reaching the nasal mucosa, sudden exposure to light (the result of which is formally known as the photic sneeze reflux), and the fullness of the stomach following a large meal.

Another interesting bit that I thought I should share is the fact that it is physically impossible for an individual to sneeze while sleeping. This is simply because the body is in a state wherein motor neurons are not stimulated and reflex signals are not relayed to the brain due to REM atonia. Task one accomplished!

The other task was to research the aromatic compounds that are present in soil and give it that pleasant aroma. Being a vague topic, I was not able to find any information about it upon initial research, but just as I began writing about it, I looked one last time and came across an article that explains it in quite a detailed fashion.

According to an article, written by Whitney Eng, that appeared in The Brown Herald Tribune on Oct. 2, 2007, Professor of Chemistry David Cane, Jiaoyang Jiang GS, and Xiaofei He PhD'07 have discovered the enzyme that creates the chemical compound responsible for the sweet aroma of soil and the earthy taste in drinking water. 

That organic compound is commonly known as geosmin. Geosmin is a Greek word that literally translates to "earth smell". It is also responsible for the earthy taste in beets and the strong earthy aroma that occurs in the air when rain falls in an area after a dry spell of weather. Geosmin is produced by bacteria in soil and by blue-green algae in water. Task two, accomplished! So there you have it, two very unrelated topics that represent a portion of the thoughts streaming through my head on a daily basis.

Also, while I'm on the topic of interesting organic compounds in nature, I came across this very interesting NPR article the other day by Robert Krulwich that discusses the processes that ants have developed to let their counterparts know when an ant has died and what chemical is responsible for alerting the other ants in a colony. He also discusses one scientists ingenious and somewhat comical methodology for determining the chemical signal that declares an ant has deceased. You can find the article here.

Salutations!

Greetings to all those who may find themselves reading this post, and hopefully future posts on my newly established blog, Humus & Peat-a. Now, you may be saying to yourself, "Well that's a ridiculous name! He spelled hummus wrong and who is this Peat A. fellow?!" So, in an effort to clear up any misunderstandings about the title of my blog, it is the result of the long and arduous task of finding a clever name that reflects both my interests and my personality.

Let's break it down like this: I like food. I like all kinds of food and foods of various cultures. I especially like Middle Eastern food (hummus and pita included). I also am quite fond of humus (that lovely smelling earthy stuff you find on the ground) and bogs, for they contain sphagnum peat moss (the stuff that makes up the squishy ground upon which you walk in a bog). So I've established three important aspects about my blog's name. It represents my love of healthy, cultured food, my interests in the environment as a wetland restoration ecologist, and my enjoyment of ridiculously silly word play.

I must not fail to mention that these topics are not all you'll read about in this blog either. Topics I will most likely discuss include, but are not limited to: coffee, food, music, computers, technology and design, photography, stop motion videography, gardening, bicycling, camping, hiking, canoeing, kayaking, indigenous culture/land management, nature, household chemical alternatives, frugal living, DIY projects, science, politics, and my friends. So, I look forward to posting many more blog entries that you, the reader, may find somewhat interesting and maybe, at times, a little inspiring.