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I’ve heard from many people that meat from animals raised in pastures (free-range, grass-eating, no hormone injections, etc) purchased straight from the farmer is not only much cheaper than supermarket meat, but also tastes much better too. In Minneapolis, we did take advantage of CSA programs (which I highly recommend, for the same reasons), but we were never able to get pastured meat, primarily because we never had the freezer space.
You see, when you buy meat from the farmer, it’s only really economical for them to sell it to you in large quantities – for example, 1/8 cow (one of the smallest units of beef) is about 55 pounds. Some places only sell units as small as 1/4 or 1/2 cows. So you really need a dedicated freezer to house all the meat once you buy it.
Now that we’re moving to a real house in Virginia Beach, we have room for a chest freezer, which means 1/4 cow won’t be hard to store. So I went to eatwild.com (highly recommended) to find the closest pasture, only to find a huge list without any easy way to figure out where in the state they were actually located and what they had. Thus, I spent half an hour producing the following…
BEHOLD! A Google custom map displaying all locations to buy pastured meat in Virginia!
By the look of it, the best places for us in Virginia Beach will be Holly Grove Farm (beef and raw milk) and Full Quiver Farm (chicken, turkey, eggs, beef and pork). Lovers Retreat Farm (beef, goat cheese, duck eggs, goose eggs, guinea eggs) is a little further, but I bet will be worth it. There are a few places that have lamb as well, but it looks like they’ll be a longer drive…
Not us, but sometimes it feels like it... image courtesy somedaynurse.wordpress.com
We’re now only about a week out from our last day in Minneapolis before moving to Virginia Beach. We’ve been packing for about four days, trying to figure out what we’re taking with us and what we’re not. Of the things that we aren’t, we sold 72 books at used book stores and are in the process of getting rid of about 50 items on Craigslist, only about 4 of which have been sold so far. We considered a yard sale, but we don’t really have enough inventory to justify it, on top of the fact that we’re in an apartment building, which makes the whole thing logistically tricky.
Of the things that we are taking, we’ve got 7 small boxes, 7 medium boxes, and 3 large boxes now full of things from our living room, which includes two desktop computers. I’ve also disassembled 5 bookcases (so far), as it’s less expensive to have movers take several planks of wood than an assembled bookcase. Plus IKEA bookcases tend to disintegrate if you try to move them whole.
In further preparation, we took our cat, Neko, to the vet in order to get his teeth cleaned. He has several chipped teeth, and more surprising to us, several missing teeth. Evidently his pre-shelter life was a little worse than we thought. We’ve also been trying to connect with a vet on the phone in order to talk about some anti-anxiety medication for him.
Oh yes. You read that correctly. We’re going to drug our cat. You see, he’s a little anxious, probably due to that aforementioned pre-shelter life. Any time he’s in the car, he curls up into a corner of his carrier, stops purring, and moans very loadly every couple of minutes. So the thought of him in a 22-hour, 1361-mile drive to Virginia with him moaning for all 22 of those hours seemed a little more than we could take.
We’re splitting the drive over 3 days, which means we have to find cat-friendly hotels in three cities: Bloomington, IL, Charleston, WV, and Virginia Beach. You may wonder why we have to find a hotel in Virginia Beach – well, there’s no power in our new house at the moment, and Dominion Power refuses to turn it on unless the circuit breaker inside the house is off. Of course, we could have them send a tech out anyway. But if the tech discovers that the breaker is on, then he won’t turn on the power anyway, and also won’t call or notify us in any way that he couldn’t do so. Then, we’d show up, find the breaker was on, and have to reschedule the tech, which for some reason takes 2 days. So instead of sending him out there anyway and risking an extra day without power, we’re taking the safer route, and scheduling him for the day after we should arrive in town. And yes, I anticipate great customer service from this company.
Anyway, this will be quite a drive. Here’s the route. It’s technically about an hour faster through Chicago, but the thought of delays in Chicago traffic were quite unpleasant, we we’re swinging south instead. Here’s the list of the moderate-sized and the interesting cities that we’ll pass through:
- Minneapolis, MN (start)
- St. Paul, MN
- Eau Claire, WI (brief stop)
- Madison, WI
- Rockford, IL
- Bloomington, IL (overnight)
- Urbana-Champaign, IL
- Indianapolis, IN
- Dayton, OH
- Chillicothe, OH
- Charleston, WV (overnight, crossing the Smokys in the morning)
- Charlottesville, VA
- Richmond, VA
- Williamsburg, VA
- Virginia Beach, VA (arrival!)
This article and this post at the Wall Street Journal led me to a peculiar conclusion: apparently, the best way to lose a chance at getting hired is to want a job really, really badly. Apparently, recruiters can smell desperation, and desperation doesn’t smell pleasant. That initially seemed counter-intuitive to me; wouldn’t the employees that want the job the most be most motivated to succeed?
Evidently, that’s not the feeling of most recruiters. Instead, “alluding to financial hardship” and distributing bound copies of past projects are surefire ways not to get a job. But why?
Well, when you “smell desperate,” it tells the recruiter that you’re going to handle extra-work pressures poorly – in other words, you’re likely to experience family-work conflict. This kind of problem (not to be confused with work-family conflict) occurs when your home life spills over to and interferes with your work life. After all, it’s not the company’s problem that you’re having financial strife; they’re just looking for the person that best fits the job.
My wife suggested what seems like the best explanation I can come up with: many other applicants aren’t desperate. Imagine yourself in the recruiter’s shoes: Applicants A and B have credentials that are roughly the same, but Applicant A mentions that he really needs the job to pay the bills next month while Applicant B doesn’t. Applicant B is thus an unknown in regards to his family life, but at least didn’t bring it up during a job interview. Applicant A clearly has problems in his family life and is more than willing to share them with the recruiter – and from the recruiter’s perspective, is likely to share it with future coworkers as well. If Applicant B is willing to waste the recruiter’s time with irrelevant information (as cold as that may seem), then he’s probably going to waste coworkers’ and his own time as well if he were hired. So which applicant would you choose?
The final message here for applicants is the same old advice that so few seem to actually follow. Be confident and research the organization and position that you are applying for thoroughly. The interview is a window into who you will be as an employee. Don’t muck up the view.