I love the morning after we fall back out of daylight savings time. I love waking naturally and knowing that while my body believes that it’s one time, the rest of the world knows it to be a whole hour earlier. This morning, for the first time in weeks, I woke up without the assistance of an alarm before 9 am. I looked at the clock, stretched out in bed and lay there, listening to NPR for about half an hour before finally extending my feet towards the floor.

Once dressed, I ate yogurt with chopped apple and cinnamon. Nicely fed, I headed out the door towards the Headhouse Farmers Market. It’s been nearly a month since I’ve been able to get down there and it was so nice to be back. I wandered around, buying chard from one stand, beets and eggs from another and two delicious asian pears from another. I stood around and chatted with Jennie for a while and took the really cool picture of a eggplant you see above.

Heading on, I got a cup of coffee to drink while walking and headed back towards my neighborhood. I stopped in at an open house a friend was having at his new business, learned about green roofs and had several delicious bits of food.

It’s always amazing to me how some of the simplest days can also be some of the best.

I have not moved since May of 2002, when I settled into my current apartment (which, if you’ve been following along for awhile will know has been in my family since 1966). During college I moved nearly every six months and always thought that I’d be the sort of person who’d live in several different places during her twenties. And yet, here I am heading for six years in one place with no plans to leave any time soon.

This is not to say that I wouldn’t like to live someplace else. During the summer I find myself longing for outdoor space. I frequently think about how much I’d like to have a cat, something that’s totally outlawed in my building. And sometimes running the gauntlet of multiple doors, security guards, elevators and the elderly just to get home feels totally exhausting.

But I’m also spoiled by my living situation. It’s a great location. If something breaks, it’s easy to get it fixed. It’s really comfortable. I’m always as warm in the winter and as cool in the summer as I want. And the apartment has a certain amount of power over me because it has been in my family for so long. The idea of not having it, of turning it over to strangers is hard to fathom.

I tagged along with Roz today as she looked at houses around South Philly which is part of why I’m pondering my living situation, although it’s an issue that never sifts too far down from the surface of my brain. It was really interesting to get a chance to see what’s available out there and has me tossing options around in my head.

I had an amazingly fun time tonight and I didn’t even have to leave the comfort of my apartment.  I played host to the first ever Philadelphia Food Blogger Potluck.  I’m not sure what the exact count was tonight, but I’d guess there were around 20 people here.  It was food bloggers, food vloggers and a few choice friends and significant others.

My table was piled high with an outstanding assortment of food, including meats, cheese, amazing cookies, apple cake, salads, curries, rice dishes, boiled peanuts and fun appetizers.  David outdid himself and brought something in the neighborhood of a dozen bottles of wine (and we nearly emptied all of them).  I made a VERY yummy concoction of potato, squash and cheese (I’ll be posting about it on Slashfood soon).

It was a resounding success.  Here’s to another terrific potluck sometime in January.  Now I’m off to finish cleaning the kitchen.

It might have been a little insane on my part, but I signed up to participate in National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo).  This means that I’m committing to myself and the rest of the world that I’ll be posting something on this here site everyday throughout the month of November.

That’s on top of my posts at Slashfood (I try for 4-5 a day), Green Daily (1-2 a day), Metroblogging Philadelphia (I’ve been faltering here), Farm to Philly (I try for 2-3 a month) and Faithful Philly Forum (I’m lucky if I post there twice a year at my current rate, thankfully other people write there as well).  Stories from Reading Terminal Market and the Book Project are both in a state of deep sleep.  And then there’s Fork You and my thesis.  You may call me insane now.  However I always find that the more I write, the more I discover I have to write about.

Here’s the latest thing I’ve learned about life.  You can only do so much (I realize that that statement is in direct opposition to my list of writing commitments above).  At about 2:30 this afternoon, I sat down at my computer, checked my email and discovered that I had missed a meeting I had said I would attend by more than two hours.  There was nothing I could do but apologize and move on.  I accept that in life things sometimes slip, washed away in the mental overflow that often accumulates.  I’m not saying it’s good to let this happen often, but occasionally it’s okay to accept a slip/oversight/accident and then move on.  That’s what I’m doing about today’s missed meeting and it feels so wonderful not to be beating myself up about it.

I think that this might the only Halloween in my entire life that I have acknowledged not at all.  I didn’t attend a single party (although I was invited to three last Saturday night).  I didn’t carve a pumpkin or don a costume or even see a single cute costumed child today.  All I thought of today was that it was the last day of October.  And this makes me sort of sad.

I used to LOVE Halloween.  We always had really great costumes in my family because we started thinking about them sometime in early September and always handmade them (my parents, mostly).  I was a butterfly twice over the years, always with spectacular homemade wings.   We would create large animal heads out of chicken wire, masking tape and tempura paint.

I think that next year I need to acknowledge the holiday a little better and get myself in the spirit of things.  Because this year just didn’t feel right.

This afternoon I was standing in Suburban Station, waiting for a train that would take me back out to Germantown and my mechanic’s garage, when a man approached me.  He was dressed in ragged clothes and one of his front teeth looked as if it was rotting away in his mouth.

He said to me, “Excuse me sister, but I was wondering if you could help me.”

Before his sentence was totally finished and before I listened to what he needed help with, I said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”  Now, normally I listen to people.  I let them talk to me before I make eye contact and try to honestly and sincerely turn them down.  For whatever reason today, I didn’t feel like going through the charade and so I said no without any preamble and without listening to his request.

And he got incensed.  He started ranting.  How did I know what he was going to ask me for, that he was just going to ask me for directions, not money, about how I just assumed something about him because he was black.

There were a bunch of people standing around watching as this man screamed at me, while I stood there against a column.  At one point I tried to clarify that I wasn’t turning him down and that it was more that I just didn’t want to be drawn into conversation, but he cut me off and said, “No, no, I don’t want to talk to you now.  I’ll ask somebody else.”

Chances are that he was going to ask me for money and this was his indignant act to trot out when someone didn’t let him work through his pitch.  It certainly felt like a solicitation for money.  And there was something imbalanced about him that he would scream at a stranger in a train station when she said she couldn’t help him.  But even knowing all that, it made me feel like a shitty, terrible, racist, elitist person for the next hour or so, until I was able to shake it off.

This morning I peeled myself out of bed, stumbled into the shower and headed off to take my car to my mechanic before noon. I tried to explain the problems I’ve been having, including the strange chugging and won’t turn off issue I ran into last week. He listened carefully, wrote my phone number down on the back of a used envelope and said, “I’ll find the problem, don’t worry.”

Leaving my car behind, I started walking down Germantown Ave. towards the Wayne Junction train station. As those of you from Philly may know, this is not the most savory section of town. However, I love it. I love the old brick buildings that are still covered in painted on advertising and that you can still see traces of how the neighborhood used to be when it was still young and safe and fresh. It was beautiful out this morning, sort of crisp but with warm shafts of sun breaking up the cool air. I scuffed down the street, enjoying the sound of the leaves crunching under my feet and the strips of cobble stones that still line the edges of the road.

While I walked those two blocks to the train station I had the feeling that time is porous and that there are places where little bits of the past leak through and join with the present. It seems to happen in Philadelphia a lot. Just one more reason to love this crazy city.

I spent Thursday evening and all of Friday writing, holed up in a little cabin out in Aston, PA, at a retreat center run by an order of Franciscan nuns.  I wrote recipes and stories and managed to chug out nearly thirty pages of text, which brings me within 9 pages of the necessary 75.  A year ago, when I was still just remembering what it was to be a student and before I felt comfortable calling myself a writer, I thought a five page essay was a monumental piece of work.  Now I hit five and keep on going, flabbergasted at the idea that I could contain everything I wanted to say in those few pages.  I know that growth and change is to be expected after a year of grad school in which I have studied writing, but when it happens with a pleasure-filled sense of expansion, I have a hard time quieting the voice inside me that questions whether I deserve it.

I spent a little time reflecting on the experience of going away with the intention of writing while I was there and there’s a piece of that after the jump.

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The community of food bloggers around Philly just keeps growing and getting better. There’s enough of us around these days that we’ve decided to have a meetup/potluck (how could we get together and not share some food?) on Friday, November 2nd (and I’m hosting!). If you consider yourself to be a food blogger/vlogger/podcaster/writer and you live in the area, we happily invite you to join us. If you want to attend, please give Taylor a shout at taylorhigh24 (at) hotmail (dot) com.

The latest episode of Fork You is live. We filmed the first half of this one way back in August, but the crazy, unseasonably warm weather that we’re having these days makes it seem like we filmed it just yesterday. We did film cooking of the swiss chard back then at Thad and Angie’s (the northern branch of Fork You studios), but for some reason the audio got all screwed up and so we had to toss it and start over.

If this doesn’t sate your cravings for seeing Scott and me make fools of ourselves on video, you are in luck, as we also posted the first of two Slashfood in the Kitchen episodes yesterday. We’re making two of these little videos for Weblogs, Inc. and it’s our first-ever experience at getting paid for making content. Pretty darn cool.