Boulder Food Rescue

As promised, a food-related post! I recently started volunteering for a group called the Boulder Food Rescue. The leadership of the organization maintains relationships with local grocery stores whereby volunteers on bicycles (like me) pick up produce that the store is no longer displaying and deliver it via bike trailer to group homes and senior living facilities. Part of the process is sorting the produce to pick out anything questionable, including bruised, overripe fruits and veggies - this is my cut!!! None of it has actually "gone bad" - the recipients of the food just prefer that the donation is aesthetically-pleasing. Today I scored organic avocados, zucchinis, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, arugula, jicama, grapes, peaches, apples, oranges, plantains, and guacamole! Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall...I whipped up a brunch that included an arugula/jicama/avocado salad and a zucchini, mushroom, tomato frittata (supplemented with eggs, garlic, and grape tomatoes from my personal stash). Later this afternoon, I'll probably blend some of the fruits into a smoothie. Going forward, I'll be volunteering on Wednesday afternoons for about an hour delivering food from Sprouts (a few blocks from my house) to the Family Learning Center. 

In other news, yesterday was a dream - my adviser and I attended a retreat of the Boulder Creek Critical Zone Observatory, the research group that I will be working with starting in May. The retreat took place at the CU Mountain Research Station between Nederland and Ward. We drank lots of coffee and listened to presentations detailing the CZO's ongoing earth science research. This experience was incredibly exciting personally and professionally, and will definitely inform and inspire much of my studies for the next year. Eventually, I'll be working on reactive transport modeling: coupling subsurface flow models with fracture and weathering models, as well as other factors such as nitrogen deposition. The work will look at the large-scale evolution of these processes and project how we can expect these critical zone environments to develop years into the future. 

The usual question I get when I explain these things is "wow that sounds really hard - won't that be a lot of work?" The following is my answer: Science and math come easily to me and that's part of why I studied physics and biology as an undergraduate. Math can definitely be a headache at times, but at the end of every day, I feel so good about the work I have completed and am excited for the next day's work. There is something uniquely-satisfying about directing one's brain to think in a certain way to solve a practical problem - the learning (and teaching) process is inherently pleasurable. In a more general sense (I'm about to smugly preach about life and contentment so tune out if you don't care), I've always thought that growth and depth are achieved through service and "suffering" - not in the sense of physical anguish, but meaningful work. Whenever my life is "ideal" by society's standards (well-paying, reliable job, material success etc.) I've always felt empty. Alternatively, when I am working towards a goal and actively using my skills to contribute to the community, I never experience that awful Sunday night feeling - "ugh I have to go to work tomorrow, I hope I can get through another week..." Furthermore, I've never been able to successfully "partition" my life. Many baby-boomers seem incredibly willing to work awful 9-5 jobs in exchange for "economic security," trading lots of their time so that they can be "happy" in their free time. I have always found much more contentment and success when my life is completely integrated - the boundary between work and play becomes much more undefined...That's enough for today - we'll see how I'm feeling later in the semester crunching out fluid mechanics on a Friday night in my basement office :)