Monday, February 28, 2011

What's in your 20 minute radius?

When I lived in Arlington, MA, I would commute via Red Line to the end of the line at Alewife. Alewife had terrible imageability and signage, and visitors constantly got confused as to which exits to take from the platform and the station. In four years of commuting I think I recall three complete signage overhauls. One included a handy map of the area with concentric circles estimating how far you could get in a 10 or 15 or 20 minute walk from the station. The shopping center was within the 10 minute radius. Our house was on the edge of the 15 minute circle.

What's in your personal 20 minute radius? If you stepped out of your front door, how many people could you get to in 20 minutes of walking, biking, or driving? How many businesses? Is there a library in your circle? A supermarket? A farmers market? A museum? Parks? Do your friends live in your 20 minute radius? Your closest friends? People you could drop the baby off with in an emergency?

20 minutes is about as long as I feel I can be in transit and still feel like my destination is "close by". In my current city locale, that means about 10 blocks by foot, 20 by bike, and anywhere from a two to five miles by car depending on traffic, time of day, the direction I'm going, the availability of parking. Transit time isn't just what Google Maps says it will take to get to my destination. Add a minute to get into the car and pull out of the driveway (a minute not needed if just walking away). Add a minute or two to find parking, or, sometimes, five or ten minutes if there's no street parking and downtown is locked up and you need to wander up to the very top of the municipal garage to find a spot, then walk back down the five flights and back a block to get to your destination. At moments like that, my 20 minute zone has a big hole in it covering downtown Santa Monica that just happens to include a whole lot of destinations I'd like to go to.

I think there are 1-200,000 people living in my 20 minute radius, but only four donut shops and one ice cream place I'm interested in going to. I live in a dense part of a big big city and even without getting on the highway (which since it takes 15 minutes from front door to on ramp isn't too helpful in expanding my 20 minute radius) there is a lot of life around me.

My 20 minute radius shrinks a little when I have the baby with me, just for the added time of prepping a stroller or getting her in and out of the car. Generously that takes up two minutes, leaving 18 for actually getting anywhere. My radius shrinks during rush hour and grows on Sundays when roads are clear and parking abundant. Any car trip adds a few minutes of adjusting and parking, leaving at most 15 minutes of driving, instead of 18 minutes of walking. If I biked more, I would be faster at getting my bike out of the shed and wouldn't need to hunt down the key to my bike lock, and my biking radius would grow a little bit.

Walkscore.com will grade your home and neighborhood for walkability, measuring how many cultural and commercial resources are available to a pedestrian. Which is great, when I'm a pedestrian, but doesn't account for the resources I can access by car in the same amount of time. For the sum total of my 20 minute radius, the best I can do is estimate, live here, track how long it gets to the places I want to go.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: lentil soup
dinner: Eli Breakfast Sandwiches and lentils on noodles

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Duplo Labyrinth

Today's sparklefun activity at least as much for daddies as for the official audience in the 18-24 month zone: building a Duplo Labyrinth.

Taking inspiration from the classic Labyrinth game of rolling a ball through a maze of barriers and holes by tilting the board, most recently made semi-famous again by the eponymous iPhone app, Duplo Labyrinth replaces a fixed board created by corporate minions and mass produced out of cheap softwoods with good old ABS. Duplo Labyrinth uses a 20x20 baseplate and standard blocks to create a playing field surrounded by a rim with carefully placed gaps. A lovely wooden ball plucked from a nearby European hammer-the-nail-workbench-type toy replaces the marble in the original game. Carefully holding the board level and tilting from side to side, which is easier for those of us with arms longer than 16", keeps the ball rolling around the obstacles, away from the gaps, and on to the colorful goal zone. Added creativity erupts with on the fly barrier rearrangement. Hilarity ensues when the little one starts rolling the ball off the edge of the board just so, such that it consistently goes under the couch.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: waffles
lunch: waffle PB&J
dinner: fish tacos with homemade tortillas and also experimental potato flake-based not-a-tortillas

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Your tax dollars at work

Between Santa Monica and UCLA sits the massive campus of the West Los Angeles Veterans Center. There's a hospital, housing, recreational facilities, and quite a few buildings I didn't quite understand the purpose of. The buildings are numbered, and go up into the hundreds. The main entrance is from Wilshire Blvd., which cuts through the middle of the campus as its speeds towards the 405. Follow the meandering road north into the hills and at the very northern edge, nearly a mile away, up against the beginning of a canyon, sits the Brentwood Theatre.

Today's event: a special hearing held by the chairs of the US House and Senate transportation committees. Barbara Boxer played host. Miriam was most most definitely the only toddler in the room of a couple hundred players. She was the only minor, for that matter. I was one of the few without a suit jacket, though I did think to dress up and had a collared shirt on.

We checked in outside with the young senate staffer, got the once over by one of the six LA County sheriffs standing around under a tent just outside the entrance, and walked in to the hearings, already an hour into the proceedings by the time we got there. On stage in front of a half full comfortable auditorium of perhaps 400 seats, sat around 20 people in two rows, the first row behind panel discussion tables, the second kind of lurking in the shadows behind them.

Hoping to find an empty area where Miriam could run up and down the aisles for the few minutes before she started making distracting levels of noise and we would go to the next stop on the morning's itinerary, Aidan's Place, the fantastic playground in Westwood, we went up to the top row. This afforded a lovely view down into the half dozen Blackberries lit up and in use of the other people with a predilection for sitting in the back of the room. So it was a little hard to make out who was who. Luckily, politicians use one another's names all the time when speaking and tend to gesture broadly.

I missed hearing Mayor Villaraigosa, who I would like to learn more about. He got himself quoted in the LA Times article about the hearing. Speakers seemed like a who's who of transportation planners, like the head of the Metro, of a Southern California planning commission, Orange County's Transportation Department head, etc. Out of twenty or so people on stage, three women, one black person, two hispanic people. Lots of white men. The level of discourse would be about average for an NPR talk show, minus the call-ins. Each speaker got around five minutes, and maybe they were going to take questions after all ten had spoken.

After two and a half speeches, Miriam realized we weren't in a park, reading a book, or playing with Legos, and signaled that it was time to go. So we left.

Who were all those people in suits silently watching the proceedings? Elected officials and their staff? Construction magnates hoping to bid on future infrastructure projects? Unemployed and curious citizens with a free day and a good feel for fashion?

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Kate's yogurt cake and a banana
lunch: the end of the tofu yaki soba
dinner: cheesy potato

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Captain Zircon's ultimate sacrifice, Part I


Captain Zircon and the Sands of Time

Captain Zircon is hard, harder than steel, harder than stone, one of the hardest substances on earth.

Captain Zircon cannot be damaged by acid, except for the strongest and most dangerous acid of all: hydrofluoric acid.

Captain Zircon is dense, denser than water, denser than mere mortals, denser than most substances above or below the earth.

Captain Zircon is transparent, impervious to energy rays, heat rays, death rays, and other radiation weapons. 

Captain Zircon is immune to magnetic attacks.

Captain Zircon is millions of years old. He was created in the fiery blast of a volcano, thrown out by the explosion into the atmosphere, where, with uncounted trillions of fellow zircons, he floated down to earth, as they covered the earth with a fine dusty ash. When he was created, a radioactive clock was embedded in his crystalline body, which will continue to tick for billions of years. Captain Zircon fell into a gentle sea, settled to the sea floor, and was soon buried where he lay by sand and sediment washing over him from a nearby river mouth. There he lay, frozen in place, for millions of years. Through uplift and climate change, tectonic shifts and intense pressures, he and his fellow zircons and their thin layer of ash became one with the rock. Until one day, not long ago, an intrepid geologist discovered Captain Zircon locked within a rock in a remote canyon in southern Utah, and released him from his prison. And the legend of Captain Zircon was brought to the light of day.

The geologist, Marion Ellery Samson Bijou, had been looking for Captain Zircon, though she wasn't sure she was going to find him. An inquisitive and meticulous scholar from a young age, Mes-Ba, as she was known to her friends and fans, had always enjoyed the outdoors. On this particular expedition, she found herself 15 miles from the nearest road, a drawing of her beloved and a dog eared copy of Walden as her only company, camped under an overhang in a dry canyon. She had heard coyotes a few days before, but hadn't seen any. Sagebrush and pine dotted her landscape of ochers below and unworldly deep blue above. 

Mes-Ba was on the hunt. Like many of her fellow geologists, she had an overwhelming desire to put the past in order, to know what came first, when things happened, and what the future might hold. As she chipped out samples from the rock walls near her camp, she was hunting for the radioactive clock in Captain Zircon's heart, for only Zircon could tell her how old the layers of the canyon's rocks were. Put down layer by layer, year by year, century by century, epoch by epoch, most of the bits of rock and sand and fossil that were pressed to become the rocks of Mes-Ba's canyon were impossible to match to a particular moment in time. But not Zircon. Zircon was different. Zircon had within him the ticking radioactive clock of Uranium slowly, so so slowly, decaying into Lead.

As she scanned and chipped and filtered, she looked for the telltale line of black and grey that signaled an enormous volcanic eruption deep in the past. And she found it! Pencil thin, but running along the canyon in both directions, this little tenuous smudge of grey surrounded above and below by reds and yellows and browns, with the occasional shell or fossil fragment. Every layer of sandstone below that line was older than it. Every layer above was younger. 

Just how much older or younger none could say, but at just that point, in that ash, lay Captain Zircon, frozen in time, his clock ticking away as it had been from the day of his origin, when his crystalline form and coalesced and solidified in the aftermath of that unfathomable blast.

Mes-Ba chipped out a chunk of rock encompassing Captain Zircon, and a few hundred fellow zircons, and held it to her heart, thanking the earth for its gifts and relieved that her long journey had not been in vain. Then she carefully wrapped and labelled Captain Zircon's rock and continued her studies of the canyon and surrounding landscape.

A few weeks later, back at her lab, Mes-Ba had another run in with Captain Zircon. Though they shared a love of the earth and of understanding its processes and history, ultimately their relationship would destroy one of them. But first, Mes-Ba needed to break Captain Zircon out of the bonds of rock that held him. First with a hammer, she chipped away at the layers of sandstone and discarded those pieces she was certain did not contain any of the zircons she so vigorously sought. This left a few dozen gumball sized pieces. These went into the jaw crusher, a metal monstrosity feared by all rocks but not by zircons, who could not be crushed by its clamping plates of steel. The rocks containing Captain Zircon and his fellow zircons now were little more than pea sand, but still each grain contained many minerals stuck together, surrounding each zircon. The pea sand was ground yet finer, to a fine dusty sand in which each tiny fragment was a unique piece of a single mineral, and at last Captain Zircon was free of the bonds that had held him in place for these millions of years since his birth.

Mes-Ba was overjoyed to have freed her friend but knew much work lay ahead of her. For now, instead of a few rocks, she had millions of fine grains to search through to find him. While she could recognize any zircon on sight, there were only a few hundred zircons in the millions of mineral particles in front of her. 

Sunday, February 20, 2011

I've been to a few people's homes around the Westside in the past six months, and I saw many many apartments before renting one upon moving to Santa Monica last summer, and can now comment on a particular type of apartment occupied by young professionals without trust funds.

The building is two stories tall, long and skinny, with similar buildings on either side. There may be four, six, eight, or ten apartments, all one or two bedrooms. The building is divided into entryways, each entryway accessing two apartments per floor. Entryways never have doors, let alone secured doors and buzzers. Construction is stucco on chicken wire on wood frames or concrete. The pathway along the side of the building to access the rear entryways is usually poured concrete, sometimes asphalt, and is lined with some sort of skinny greenery, a wall, and then the next building, which is nearly identical to the present one.

The apartments usually have wood floors or fake wood floors of some sort of laminate made up to look like wood, floating over plywood or concrete. The front door enters into a combined living room-dining room, with a galley kitchen hidden behind a wall. The continuation of the kitchen area suggests a dining area, though this is usually too small for a table and chairs for more than two people. Sometimes there is a balcony.

Tucked to the side is a bathroom and bedroom, or two bedrooms, usually separated by the bathroom. The whole unit is roughly a square, split down the middle into the living-dining-kitchen half and the bedroom-closets-bathroom half. Sometimes one of the bedrooms has a private bath within.

The walls are decorated with framed not-art, personal photos and prints and objects collected from international travel not intended as art, like mexican sugar skulls or a kite from Shanghai. Dust collects in the corners. Everyone has at least one bookshelf in the living room. There is a couch, sometimes two, a chair, a small dining room table, sometimes a big TV sometimes no TV never a small TV, a desk and computer corner, and a slight awkwardness when entering for the lack of transition space between the public outside to the private inside. Open the door, or have it unlocked and opened for you, and you are directly into the cosy interior, and can collapse directly onto the couch from where you stand, if you feel comfortable enough with your hosts to do so.

Yesterday's run destination: main branch library

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts and coffee
lunch: tuna wrap at (not recommended) Naturally, in Pacific Palisades
dinner: tofu yakisoba

Saturday, February 19, 2011

After the Fall's Forever Medicine Kit (tm)

For the survivalist who has everything, a new gift: the gift of life. You can make your own bow and arrows to hunt feed yourself and yours. You've installed a passive solar heating system and invested heavily in insulation to keep your cabin warm through those cold Colorado winters.  You even set in a supply of seeds for all the crops you'll need and a few you don't quite know how to cook. Because after the fall, it's going to be a long, lonely time and there's no one going to be there to lend a hand.

You have the top of the line survival medicine kit, you've read through all the manuals, you're ready to set a bone or perform CPR. But your medicine chest, deep and rich though it might be today, one day is going to run out. And a little cut starts to look pretty serious when the last tube of antibiotics just ran out. Which is why you need After the Fall's new Forever Medicine Kit (tm).

Kit includes:
Penicillium fungi spores
Bacilus subtilis, granulated colonies
Willow seedlings (Don't be alarmed that it looks like a stick! This is a 100% guaranteed viable seedling in a dormant state)
And much more! A total of 21 different spores, seeds, and seedlings.

128 page instruction booklet gives detailed directions on how to produce and purify lifesaving drugs using the same raw materials currently employed by the industrial pharmaceutical industry. Make your own aspirin, penicillin, and bacitracin, just to name a few. Booklet printed on TYVEK for maximum durability.

With the Forever Medicine Kit and proper management of your biological medicinal stock, you will be able to produce key drugs, proven by 100+ years of scientific medical research to be effective on a wide range of ailments, injuries, and diseases, within the comforts of your own homestead. This Kit provides the seed material and the straight-forward instructions you need to make the drugs you'll need.

NOTE: these drugs are to be used only in EMERGENCY SURVIVAL situations. After the Fall takes no responsibility for the proper preparation and ultimate effects of any of the drugs produced by these seed materials and instructions. Proper preparation assumes the availability of commonly found materials and equipment, like sterile bottles, wood or charcoal, bread, rice, or similar feedstock, and healthy soils. Not all seeds and trees will grow in all climates.

Yesterday menu:
breakfast: donut
lunch: cheese and crackers
dinner: black bean soup ala Atticus, greens salad with lemon honey miso dressing, crusty bread and olive oil with zahtar

Friday, February 18, 2011

Clean up time is fun time

Clean up, clean up
Everybody clean up
Clean up, clean up
Clean up now

More mornings than not Becca has left for work before I have showered, which when it first happened was a cause of great alarm. What will I do with the highly mobile and curious baby while trapped by soap and water? Can she safely be entertained in the bathroom? Or maybe she's still asleep and I'll leave the door open to listen for her waking up and just be quick about it.

Turned out to be a non-issue, as uberbaby ended up cheerfully playing with her bath toys on the bathroom floor and found it hilarious to flap the shower curtain back and forth. These days, it is just part of the morning pattern. She gets to bring in a toy or book, she points out where I should put my clothes and the spot on the counter for my glasses, we play peek-a-boo with the shower curtain, she lines up her bath toys on the edge of the tub, and it all works out.

Yesterday her toy was Travel Boggle, recently reassembled after a few dice wandered under living room furniture. She stacked the dice. Put them on the board, and took them out. Threw them. At least, so I presume from what I heard, I didn't look, I trust her to play peacefully and safely at this point. When I was almost done with my shower, I shouted out that it was time to clean up, and a minute later as I emerged 13 blocks were back in place and she was grabbing, with great hilarity and satisfaction, for the remaining three.

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: french toast
lunch: pasta and chili
dinner: mapo tofu and snap peas

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Cheesy potato

As a young teenager I would come home and collect the mail from its box at the top of the driveway. I got to open the junk mail. One day, there was a promotional mailer from a spice company, McCormick, or the like, with a short stack of recipe cards, diecut for entry in a rolodex, shiny and colorful. One was for a quick side dish: microwaved cheesy potatoes. Cut a raw potato in thick slices, but not all the way through, using a wooden spoon handle on either side of the potato as baffles to keep the knife from going all the way through. Microwave. Add small slices of cheese between each slice and sprinkle with more cheese and oregano. Microwave, briefly.

Somehow this dish, quick and simple, filling to the point pinch hitting for a complete meal, became a standard of my personal cuisine. I make it a few times a month, often for a weekend lunch. These days, I don't pre-slice the potatoes, which I think leads to a better texture, and sometimes just open up and flatten out the potatoes without slicing at all. These are minor details. Mostly, melted cheese is yummy.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: maple miniwheats
lunch: leftover chili, again
dinner: pasta and red sauce with chorizo, greens salad

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Health care is more than medical insurance, right?

Once upon a time, four years ago or so, I went to a heartfelt but less than rigorous lay-led church service on insurance. Andrew Fischer spoke on how the function of insurance, to sustain people and families after a crisis-level loss of property, health, or life, used to be provided by churches, as the most substantial local institution of care, and how providing this care to members in turn strengthened churches and communities. Then around 200 years ago, private, regional, market economy insurance started to be provided for the tragedies of domestic life, evolving out of the insurance developed around a growing mercantile system of trade. Andrew focused on what was lost in that transition, trusting that the story of what was gained, in spreading risk, clear contractual relationships, portability, etc. had been adequately told in the popular business press.

By moving the function of insurance out of the local community, he said, the personal relationship of care among neighbors was weakened. By relying on businesses instead of parishioners to help us after the loss of a job, the death of a spouse, or the destruction of a home by fire, flood, or crime, we marginalized the church, pushed it out of the necessary core of a family's existence. By ending the practice of helping our neighbors in their times of need with our own time, energy, and money, we created a vacuum of care that left many people spiritually hollow, without outlet to help others through personal connection, atomized among neighbors who rarely become friends.

It was interesting, not exactly convincing, thought provoking, and nostalgic. The idea of tracking and measuring the losses involved in shifting key societal needs from the world of social capital to the world of financial capital matches other trends in my idea environment, that about the price of pollution and climate change, of hidden costs in the rich world's industrial food system, of separating health care from medical care.

With the spiraling costs of health insurance regularly in the news, I wonder about how to capture the benefits of community-centered care without losing the fantastic gains of industrial scientific medicine.

I occasionally avoid medical care, not that I or my immediate family have needed substantial medical interventions in the past few years (barring my partner's pregnancy and the birth of our child, which required in the end only minimal medical intervention), not because it is expensive to me but because I understand it to be expensive to the medical system. The science fiction reading part of my mind thinks about how to create for myself a minimal medical cost life. Certainly regular exercise is involved. Probably identifying the riskiest behaviors in my daily patterns, like driving. A low calorie diet, but one that brings me joy. Finding happiness and low stress habits among my friends and family. Hoping to luck out genetically to avoid having big, expensive diseases, like cancer, alzheimer's, or diabetes. Accepting home hospice care by loving friends and family, even at the cost of potential years of life.

I think of a health care system, one that includes medical insurance and access to the fruits of excellent medical care but goes beyond it to support me in leading a healthy life. I want integrated care that encourages and enforces lifestyle choices that help me be healthier, happier, and less dependent on medical intervention, that cares about me in good times and bad, and that I can care for in return. A church community, at least the mythically friendly and supportive one that Andrew sketched, sounds like a good candidate to host such a system. Caring for the whole person, knowing the people around me and letting them know me and my life, a community that relates to my spiritual, intellectual, familial, social, and personal dimensions and recognizes that they are wrapped up in one another. I believe such a holistic care system, though it has very definite flaws, could be enormously more efficient in health per dollar of medical care than the crisis mitigation business model we seem to have now.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: leftover chili with lime and cilantro
dinner: shrimp fried rice

Friday, February 4, 2011

Parenting Tips from Hell

I just read Room, by Emma Donoghue, in a flurry and a rush. It is beautiful and painful and very much in the company of the works Donoghue cites as inspiration, stories of parents in impossible situations, like The Road (McCarthy) and Life is Beautiful (Benigni). Thinking on those works, here are some parenting tips if you find yourself in hell with a small child, perhaps the hell of a concentration camp, or wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape, or imprisoned in a basement or shed for years on end:

structure your day
every object is precious, keep track of them
everything has multiple uses
hell is fun! for kids who don't know better
teach them everything you know, all the time
even one book is a great source of words, games
it's ok to cry sometimes, just don't let it overwhelm you
eat the best diet you can, multivitamins are your friends
other people may seem to want to help, but you can only trust the two of you
the world outside your bubble is both more terrible and more friendly than you imagine it
even the most hellish parts can be made into a game
after your child has outgrown the fiction that they aren't in hell that you construct for them, he'll pretend to believe it because he sees it helps you cope
fresh fruit can be the most colorful wonderful thing in the world
the best games don't need anything but two people talking to each other
everything you do to prepare them for the day you'll be gone is never enough

Today's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast and rooibos
lunch: can of chick peas
dinner: ribeye and red wine reduction, broiled asparagus, onion tart, spouted lentil salad

Thursday, February 3, 2011

At the Moth

Across 5th Street from the main Post Office sits one of the semi-anonymous clubs of Santa Monica, Zanzibar. It is more up front about its presence than most, with a large sign on the corner and a small marquee listing upcoming acts. Not like that place on Santa Monica Blvd that doesn't have a name, but some nights has a bouncer and a line outside. But without that sign, Zanzibar looks like just another of Santa Monica's many warehouse/light industrial one story boxes.

Last night, there was a line down the front of the club and around the corner. I parked in front of the library two blocks away and joined the line, by myself in a line mostly of pairs of people. Behind me were two white girls talking about a wedding one of them was going to, her bridesmaid dress and its expensive alterations, the oddity of the bridal shower a few months ago. In an excellent gesture towards friendliness on what for around here was an exceedingly cool evening that made me wish I had grabbed a jacket over my sweater, the management had stationed a volunteer to hang out at the end of the line handing out slips of paper for anyone who wanted to to write a one sentence story of the craziest "after hours" adventure they had been in.

The line moved in fits and starts as groups passed the doorman, paid their entrance, and were released in to find a place to stand. I ordered a beer and found a spot near the bar, the night's festivities just getting started on stage. The room is full, perhaps near its fire department mandated maximum of 212 persons, seats around, standing behind, a crowd at and around the bar. It's buzzing but not loud, friendly but focused on stage.

The MC, perhaps an aspiring comedian? in any case quite comfortable with the mic and the crowd, vulgar and funny, as she described the night's rules. Put your name in the hat if you want to tell a story. Three teams of judges, volunteers from the audience who signed up earlier. Five minutes, then you get a signal on the ocarina (the ocarina of time?) to wrap it up. Six minutes, a louder signal. Seven minutes, they play it in your ear and your score goes down down down. Five storytellers, intermission to grab a beer, five more, pick a winner to go to the GrandSlam next month, go home. It is a Wednesday night, after all.

And stories. True stories, stories of adventures after hours, at pool parties and in strange apartments, hitchhiking through Tennessee and a man with tattoos not remembering how to breath fire. Five maybe regular people, all but one professionally smooth on stage, practiced, putting in jokes and little details and turns of phrase, not quite to the point of poignancy and rarely capturing a mood and fully setting and fleshing out the scene from their recollections of wild days gone past, but fun, enthusiastic, captivating.

It is nearly nine when I leave, walk back to my car through the still open library to pick up a book and stop by the reception for the Swiss Consulate-sponsored coffee table book of photos of glaciers for a chocolate or two, collect myself, drive home the twenty blocks through familiar streets.

Yesterday's run destination: Washington Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast crunch and coffee
lunch: chicken and potatoes
dinner: bean quesadillas