My Notes from Edible Twin Ciites

I found this magazine at the Wedge. I will have to try to make more regular trips so that I can read it more often. It has a lot of interesting Twin Cities food related information.

Links I want to remember:

www.minnesotagrown.com

the little wine shoppe - located in the St. Anthony Park Neighborhood - sounds neat. I should plan a wine shop tour of the Twin Cities :) that would be so much fun!

Just Truffles - also in St. Paul

Forestedge Winery - Laporte, MN

BitterSweet (Gluten-Free Bakery) - I wonder if Nicole and Melissa knows about this...

Here are a list of blogs they recommended:
www.crabbgaltneyhonghowesreviews.blogspot.com
www.epicurious.com/gourmet/blogs/foodeditors/dara_moskowitz
www.twincitieseats.blogspot.com
www.mysisterskitchen.wordpress.com
www.easustainable.blogspot.com
www.50milediet.com
www.mnbeer.com
www.bloatedbelly.typepad.com
www.mspfoodies.com
www.foodblogscool.blogspot.com

Golden Fig - 790 Grand Avenue St. Paul (locally produced fine foods)
Do It Green - 2405 Hennepin Ave (resource center for sustainable living)

Morgan Creek Vineyards

Radio Station - AM 950
Saturdays
9am-10am Health Insight Show
12pm-1pm Dishing Up Nutrition
2pm-3pm The Weekend Wine Experience

Coffee and Tea Ltd (over 120 varieties of coffee and 160 fine teas)
Two Locations
2730 W. 43rd Street Mpls, MN or MOA by Sears

Suzette Restaurant - seems neat - owend by Asian Americans - interesting story about them in the magazine

Equilibrium

I attended my first Loft event in 2008. It was fun going back after a two-year break...but it made me sort of sad looking around and seeing so many familiar things...where the table was set that was selling t-shirts from a local artist...where the cashier took your money before entering the room...where the crowds of people stood...and yet so many things were different. Me being one of them.

Anyway.

This is the description that is posted on the Loft events page:

Saturday, April 26, 8 p.m.

EQULIBRIUM SPOKEN WORD SERIES

ISHLE PARK

Ishle Park is a Korean American woman who is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. She has performed her unique blend of poetry & song across the United States, Cuba, New Zealand, Singapore, and Korea. Her first book, The Temperature of This Water, is the winner of three literary awards including the PEN America Beyond Margins Award for Outstanding Writers of Color. Ishle has opened for artists such as KRS-One, Ben Harper, De La Soul, and Saul Williams. The New York Times wrote, "Ms. Park has an angelic face and the soul of a rock star."

$5/$3 Loft members and students

There were other artists there...so I'm not sure why they weren't mentioned on the events page.

I'll have to try to make it to more of these types of events...although I find that my mind can't stop spinning afterwards and then I feel so exhausted all weekend.

Twin Cities Yoga Studio Reviews

I am going to start compiling a list of all the yoga places in the Twin Cities that I've been to and what I think about them to assist other fellow yogis. It's going to be mainly in Minneapolis or St. Paul b/c I don't live driving all over the place. So far...of course...I am in love with Core Power Yoga...This summer, I'll do a better job with exploring other yoga studios to let everyone know.

So far, I've been to these CorePower locations:

St. Louis Park

Minneapolis
Great selection of yoga stuff here too. You can buy Lululemon (my current fav!), mats, bags etc.

Uptown

CorePower is great because the first week is free! So you can try as many classes you like...and don't worry - you'll get hooked. Yoga is a workout, but also relaxing and a great way to unwind.

Other yoga studios I've been to:

Yogastudio
Plymouth, MN

This place is good b/c you can try unlimited yoga for $20 a week! I thought the hot classes weren't quite hot enough. The room is pretty long, so you can get a space by the mirror if you like checking your form. I didn't like the fact that the restroom was right in the studio, so it was awkward if you wanted to use it in the middle of class!

University of Minnesota Rec Center
Minneapolis, MN

They have yoga classes here, but the space isn't the best. Classes are inexpensive - I think they're about $8 for non-students. Or you can buy a fitpass and go more often.

Lifetime Fitness Locations
Plymouth
New Hope

Breakfast Club - The Awesomest Breakfast Joints in the Twin Cities

Here are all the breakfast places we've been to so far. I'm not going to keep attendance!

So the breakfast challenge is that we have to find a place that is novel, unique and entertaining. No chain restaurants allowed. Has to be in the TC metro area (most likely Minneapolis and St. Paul - but we will venture out further if the novelty calls). And we can't pick Al's b/c nothing, nothing, nothing beats Al's.

http://www.suburbanworldtheater.com/
Here, we got to watch cartoons in the dark and eat breakfast. It was fun...except the food took a while. You can also get bloody marys...

http://www.dinkytowner.com/
We came here for greasy breakfast food. The only novelty is you get to walk down a flight of stairs before you eat breakfast.

http://www.chatterboxpub.net/
3/29 - Chatterbox was very cute, clean and good. The frittatas were awesome. I had the spinach artichoke one and it proved to be very delicious. Elvio and LDW also liked their breakfast burrito. They didn't have tabasco sauce at this breakfast joint. The novelty was that you can play board games and video games. We were even able to sit on a sofa!

http://www.victors1959cafe.com/
4/19 - This was good :) I heard afterwards that we were able to write on the walls, but we weren't offered markers...maybe because it was sort of busy. I had the Greek Scrambler and thought it was tasty...the feta cheese could have been slightly more melted...but the cafe con leche made up for it. This place isn't very big...so the group had to split up to two tables. We had new people show up to our group - Kelly and Rebecca so it was a very good morning. Cyrus says he's going to pick the next breakfast joint.

http://www.mariascafe.com/
4/26 - We came here for the corn pancakes and awesome Colombian coffee!! I had the veggie omelet which wasn't very Colombian but others had fried plantains and beans. We're entering finals so we will not be meeting as regularly for breakfast club :(

I'm back....

The saddest part about my blog is that I think about it every day. Just like all of the things I want to do but never seem to have the time for. Today, as I was staring at my computer screen, I sensed this unbelievably forlorn feeling. Will I ever get to do all the things I want to do?

I haven't:

-made it to restaurants that have already come and gone
-seen some of the plays that have long since been forgotten
-read some of the books from the list I've generated since the late 80's
-created the painting that has been floating in my head for the last four years
-practiced the song I've always wanted to master during a spontaneous karoake encounter

Big sigh.

And then today I thought of all the things I've always wanted to volunteer for but have never made time for.

I want to:

-get back into teaching Pilates for Southwest (not quite volunteering - but civically focused)
-mentor a child from Bolder Options (running of course!)
-get involved with the Big Brother Big Sister program
-teach a course for Women Venture
-give speeches regarding asylum seekers for Center for Victims of Torture
-volunteer for the Twin Cities Marathon (or any other road race in the Twin Cities area)
-participate in one of the Corepower Yoga community events
-start a wine club through the UMAA for graduate and professional students

And some other random life goals for the rest of the year:

-paint something for my room
-put together some cool collages
-run a 1/2 marathon before the end of the year
-go hiking before the end of the year (google search Twin Cities Hiking Routes)
-go cross country skiing this year
-go downhill skiing this year
-be able to do the crow pose before the end of the year
-make gold status on NWA (this is a joke)

AND reach all the other goals in my head that I think about constantly but can't say out loud.

BUT at least today, I finally blogged after such a long hiatus.

Winter Vacation in Cali

New Year's Photos. It's been a long time since I've posted, but here are the pictures from California. The highlights of my trip to Cali are:

1) Watching the sunset in Santa Barbara with Phil, Johanna and Eric
2) Spending my third NYE with my friend Mai
3) Spending Q time with Marian and Mai around L.A.
4) Seeing my paternal grandparents
5) Walking along the pier at Santa Monica and Huntington Beach
6) Taking pictures
7) Hiking up to the Hollywood sign with May, Lynda and Eric
8) Hiking at the Monrovia Trail with Eric, Phil, Shirley and Eva
9) Beard Papa's with Irene, Jimmy and Eric
10) Spending time with family and friends

And the trip to Hawaii was fun too. More pics for that later.

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4th Week of Law School

Nothing truly exciting happened last week. I was a bit more fascinated with the potential of having a career in wine law and have been googling and reading about Mendelson who teaches wine law at Boalt. He’s had a very interesting past – he worked at the Wine Institute both during and after law school. Before law school, he also worked in the wine industry. I find it so cool that he knows so much about wine law that he has expanded to land-use planning and even to employment labor since vineyards often employ so many migrant workers. I wonder what other prestigious certifications there are in the wine industry. I’ve often thought about a sommelier license. But I don’t think I’m that interested in the enology aspect. I don’t have the patience for it.

My favorite case of the week is from Torts. We discussed Adams v. Bullock for ages. But basically the story is that in 1919 there was a twelve-year-old kid swinging an 8 foot wire around this bridge area where there was un-insulated wire for the trolley company to run on. The kid’s eight foot wire came in contact with the trolley wire and he got fried. He didn’t die…and the case in the book didn’t say…but he was probably severely injured (which reminds me of Ashton Kutcher in Butterfly effect when all his limbs were exploded off). The court said it wasn’t the defendant’s fault because a trolley line wasn’t supposed to protect society from every extraordinary mishap that could happen (this is the concept we’re supposed to learn – standard of care). Their reasoning was that from the bridge no one can touch the wire…and on the ground anyone standing up couldn’t touch the wire. So…the circumstances in this situation were pretty extreme. Even though I could see how the trolley company shouldn’t be responsible, I felt really bad for the kid. Twelve-year-olds make mistakes all the time, it’s too bad that he had to pay for it the rest of his life. And I guess that is what this case is trying to teach us…that moral obligation is not necessarily legal obligation. I kept wondering about the situation surrounding this case. Was it a class issue? I mean, I could only picture the Charlie-Chaplin-like child roaming around the train tracks playing because his parents were homeless and the kid had nothing to play with. Would the situation have been different if this child was some kid from the judge’s peer group? I’d like to think that these “other” relationships do not matter. And I guess I should assume that the wire is not left from some construction the trolley company engaged in since the case didn’t say so. Otherwise it is the trolley company’s dang fault. Perhaps all judges are just…and it truly is the matter of law. I hate to be so cynical so early in law school. This case makes me wonder if I would “feel bad” for all plaintiffs that are in litigation for their injuries no matter how contributorily negligent they were. I told my dad about this case. He says that the kid’s parents should have warned him of doing these things. Where were the parents? This, though, makes me wonder…because my dad is judging the situation on what he would have warned Eric and me about when we were younger - and not all parents are responsible. It’s funny how one case makes me think for hours about life and all its oddities. LDW says I have a way of saying how everything in life “should” be a particular way. I’m being snobby lately – I feel like if everyone operated by a certain moral code then we wouldn’t all be in such a guessing game all the time (but I shouldn’t pass judgment so quickly, everyone’s upbringing is different – I have to keep reminding myself of this).

Also my favorite memory of the week is driving in the dark with Nicole (not the part where we got pulled over), but the part where we sang a bunch of songs to keep ourselves awake for the 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. drive. I think it is so amazing that we still know all the lyrics to “Part of Your World” from the Little Mermaid!!!

Erin’s wedding was this weekend. It’s funny how something that I’ve been thinking about for a year finally happened. All my friends are getting married! Pretty soon this “phase” of my life will end (once everyone is hitched). Soon, I really will have no one to go clubbing with…I need to find more adventurous spirits to share in my devious course of life. J