A Day at the Farmer's Market

So Emily and I have decided to support our local economy and good eating habits by going to the Farmer's Market any Saturday that we can make it. This is our second trip thanks to the afore-blogged-about no smoking letter writer and his wife who first introduced us to our local market. This time we also brought along another med school friend and he is just as excited about the place as we are. We got some grass-fed only beef that was amazing in a stew that Emily made on Sunday. Next trip = grass fed steaks. We also bought some roasted pepper flavored goat cheese which is delicious. The vegetables are cheap and better than anything we can find in the grocery stores around here - so really, we love the place.

Emily and her extremely bored but cute baby friend, Emerson. Don't tell him that he was ever referred to as "cute" when he is older.

The whole group checking out some of the goods.

This is just one half of one of the three huge venues for meat, veggies, plants, etc. at the market. Matt is making a cameo appearance in the photo - on his way to getting suckered in to buying some beans that you are supposed to cook with "fatback". Gotta love Southern cooking. And, for the record, Matt refused to even entertain the idea of cooking them in fatback.

This is a fighting Praying Mantis we tried to rescue from the road. She wasn't too happy. We could tell that it was a "she" because of the close resemblance to Emily when she has to ask me more than once to unload the dishwasher.

We might just buy it...

Smoking Ban at the Hospital

As many of you all know, Emily and I live in the only city that has two cigarette brands named after it (at least the only one I know of). Winston-Salem. So it is pretty difficult to get the smoking bans passed here that many people enjoy in other parts of the country. Anyway, the hospital where I go to school finally enacted a no-smoking policy in July. You could never smoke inside the hospital but there were actually little rooms built outside the hospital just for smokers. Now those are gone. You are no longer allowed to smoke anywhere on hospital property - even if you are in your car. In theory. Since the ban, now all the smoking hospital employees (yeah, I know - how does that happen?) go out to the sidewalk to smoke, making what I describe as a "smoking gauntlet" for people leaving certain areas of the hospital. Continuing the story... A friend of mine (another med student) finally took some initiative and wrote a letter to the dean of the medical school expressing the need to execute the new ban on smoking. So he sent it to me and another friend to make sure it sounded okay. It did sound great, but I told him that I had the perfect solution to the problem. Put Mormon missionaries out in front of the affected areas. That way, people will either leave to avoid them or they would convert - either way, smoking around the medical school would be eradicated. I even took some pictures of the situation before and after the missionaries took over enforcing the ban:

WASUF!

So we were a little disappointed after Wake Forest started the 2007 football season 0-2 to two ranked teams, but we were happy to know that ASU was having a flawless start. Well, since those first two losses, the Demon Deacons have decided to return to their ACC Champion ways of last year and have won the last 4 games, including a win last night over #21 Florida State. ASU has also continued its football dominance and is looking to be 7-0 after tomorrow's game against Washington. So our two favorite schools are a combined 10-2 (soon to be 11-2) halfway through the season. What makes us even happier is that we are not suffering through college football season like BYU or UofA fans, who are combined 5-6 (soon to be 5-8).