Summer ‘Lunch at the Library’

For the third year in a row, Sonoma County Library (SCL) will host free meals for youth this summer, every weekday at six library locations.

Olive pitter, a gourmand's essential product

I'm unabashed in my enjoyment of olives -- I'd gladly eat them every day -- and recent adventures have led to intact olives served in restaurants and "olive bars." As a serious connoisseur, I wanted to cleanly and easily remove the olive pit.

My quest for optimized olive-enjoyment led to the Squeeze2Pit olive and cherry pitting tool. It arrived attractively packaged in a lavish presentation box with foam-padding interior.

The classy presentation earned high marks, and the tool itself is more than worth the investment.

Upon first trying it, I found the pitter very easy to use. The grip handles offer good leverage for effectively removing the pit with very little exertion. The pit ejects cleanly with little-to-no skin and pulp, and I'm left with a freshly-pitted olive that I can then enjoy.

Thin Bins, collapsible food containers that fit in a pocket

Compact storage is important when you a) travel by bicycle or on-foot and b) want to bring your own take-out containers to combat wasteful restaurant practices of too-large, disposable boxes.

Too much box for these left-overs

Seriously?

Among wasteful and ridiculous practices associated with dining out: was it really necessary for three tiny slices of pizza to be packed in such an enormous box? This is why we’ve placed an order for reusable, collapsible, easy-to-carry containers. No more depending-in-vain upon restaurant wait-staff to responsibly select our containers (which are still, ultimately, disposable).

Can’t we just enjoy water?

Source of image: Pexels, under Creative Commons Zero Universal (CC0 1.0) license

On Friday afternoon, walking around Medford, Ore., we stopped in at a local eatery. From experience, we knew that if we didn’t speak up immediately, water glasses would be deposited on our table, and those glasses would be clogged with ice. So we quickly told our server, “We’d like water with no ice.”

Unwanted chocolate carries burden of punishment

Public domain image by George Hodan

At Personal Branding Blog, Maria Elena Duron cautions against gifts that hurt the giver’s personal brand, by “shouting” to the recipient that the giver doesn’t know him or her.

Diagnostic ‘labels’: Don’t be so quick to discard

From blogger Gail Forsyth-Vail writing at Beacon Broadside, I learned about an argument by Enrico Gnaulati, for removing children’s diagnostic “labels.” By briefly sharing my background, I hope to explain why this idea makes me uncomfortable.

When I grew up, I was painfully aware that I was not like other people. It was continually made evident by classmates who taunted and rejected me.

From kindergarten onward, I was a school-wide outcast.

​Adults condemned me as a picky eater, because I could not tolerate certain foods. On one occasion, a babysitter tried to force-feed me chocolate cake. My mother actually had to tell this person that I didn’t have to eat cake if I didn’t want it (because a clamped-shut mouth and pulling away in revulsion were not accepted as communication). My mother found me, face smeared with the cake that the sitter tried to force on me.