2008 Travel Map
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May
13
the big trip of 2008
Posted by jacq | Filed Under campground, green, mountain bike, rv, travel | 1 Comment
All of our friends know that we make a big deal out of the month of October because of our birthdays. Mine on October 16th, Jeremy’s on the 17th and his dad’s on the 18th. 2008 is a special year because we are celebrating Jeremy’s 30th birthday and his dad’s 60th. We will be going on a big trip around the US for two months, starting September. The trip starts from San Antonio, to Phoenix, Las Vegas, Moab (Utah), Fruita (Colorado), Columbus (Ohio), Davis (West Virginia), Bryson City and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The plan is to spend couple weeks at Las Vegas, Moab and Columbus. About 3-4 days on all the other locations. We are going to visit 5 of the top 10 mountain biking trails around the country.
So, last week, we have started our three-month training. Have been biking almost everyday, and trying to eat right, lose weight and gain strength. I am excited not only because we will be traveling in our RV, but we are working to get fit and do all the outdoor activities we love. We are also going to do something we have never done before. Hang Gliding at Outer Banks! Ooooh, I can just feel my head spinning when I think about gliding in the air~ I am going to challenge myself yet again with the fear of height. Rock climbing was quite challenging for me… This time, it will probably be even harder with Hang Gliding, but I want to see what I can do!
May
1
belated earth week entry~
Posted by jacq | Filed Under campground, environment, green, lifestyle, mountain bike, rollerblading, rv, travel | 1 Comment
Hope everyone had a good time during the week that we celebrate mother earth!
Jeremy and I went and spent the week in Austin during earth week. It was a happy accident. We really just needed a mini vacation to camp in our RV, mountain bike at Rocky Hill Ranch, roller blade at Veloway and eat some good food in Austin.
We ended up finding out there is a screening of The 11th Hour at the Alamo South Lamar (one of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in Austin) on Earth Day. This screening was set up by the people at Austin Green Art and sponsored in-part by the Levelfield.
Tickets were $10, or you could purchase a $25 VIP ticket which ensures you have one of the best seats. The VIP seating was another thing that was specially requested by the Austin Green Art. Can you guess which one we ended up getting? After the bad experience in other movie theaters, we definitely want to ensure that we get the best seat and hope that other VIPs were respectful to other viewers and maybe we could watch the show in peace. Well, we were pleased, it was a pretty cool experience. Everyone watched without fuzzing with their cell phone, we were able to order drinks and food during the movie, the waiters were pretty quite and tried their best not to disturb the audience.
So we watched The 11th Hour on Earth Day, I also found out that there are farmer’s market in Austin, YEAR ROUND! And there is one on Wednesdays! So we did that and I was happy to have purchased some leafy greens and tomato for salad, carrots, loaf of bread and some Baklava for Jeremy.
We did not have salad dressing, so I hunted for some organic store in Austin to get some more supplies… What a pleasant surprise to find that there are so many organic grocery stored in Austin! I wanted to check out the Wheatsville Food Coop, so we went. Oh, was I a happy girl! They have lots of local produce and products. They even tell you how far the supplier is from the store! Options for you to bring our own container to purchase food in the bulk section. I love it! We got some eggs from H and J Ranch Eggs, which is only about 7 miles from the store. And a really good and light Strawberry Cheese Spread from Full Quiver Farms (about 199 miles form the store) for the loaf of bread we bought at the farmer’s market.
Jeremy got himself some freshly ground coffee for his morning coffee, and I got a couple types of Assam loose tea leaves to try.
As we were checking out, I saw there were these cute little pouches around the store. They are called the ChicoBags. They were on sale for $3.95 ($5 online)! So I grabbed two, used them right away for the items we bought and got $0.50 discount for using my own container/bag~ Now I have these two cute little bags clipped to my purse so I will never forget to “bring-my-own-bags” again.
They are light weight and easy to carry, but you might not want to carry a watermelon in one, the bag was not designed to handle that kind of weight. I would advise using a canvas bag instead. We got one from HEB and keep it in our scooter when we go out…
The last item I want to add is our RV campground. We camped at a nice place called the Highway 71 RV Park. For one week with free Wifi, Electric, Sewer, Water, and 71 channels of cable on a pull through site… we paid $140 for it. I think it is a pretty good deal!
The camp host lives in her camper right next to the office and was pleasant and helpful. They have a nice large pool, but we never did use it. They have a few nice large shower/bathrooms that seemed to be always kept clean. Laundry facility is nice too. $1.25 for washer and $1 for dryer.
The only down side is their water. Jeremy said that it tasted like well water… I guess that is something I have to keep in mind in the future. We really didn’t like the taste of it
It was a fun week! I love living in the RV… Can’t wait for our next trip!
Apr
6
the story of stuff with annie leonard
Posted by jacq | Filed Under environment, green, lifestyle | Leave a Comment
The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard is a wonderful website that my good friend Yoshiko has shared with me this weekend. Please do check out the video. It breaks lots of great information down into a quick 20-minute video that is easy to understand. This not only makes me want to pursue my “compact” living more, but also make me to want start researching more ways to consume less.
You can watch the video on their homepage. Or download it from their Downloads page. I urge you to spread the word and share it with friends and family. We can do this together before it is too late. Stop mindlessly consuming goods that are disposable, or does not have a long shelf life. And learn to really recycle. The Story of Stuff website also has a page dedicated on 10 things you can do to help with the problem.
The teaser below shows you a little bit of what is covered. Enjoy.
Mar
30
strawberry picking at Marburger Orchard
Posted by jacq | Filed Under farm, lifestyle, travel | 3 Comments
This morning, as I was browsing to see if there is any local farm’s market around San Antonio that is open, found the Marburger Orchard. It is located right outside of Fredericksburg off of Highway 87.
Marburger Orchard offers Strawberries, Peaches, Blackberries and some vegetables for public picking. The price for picking strawberries is $2.25/lb, plus a one-time charge of $0.50 for the re-useable picking box. The owner told us that they have return customers who have kept and reused the picking boxes for the last three years. Each box can hold about 6-7 lbs. worth of produce. That is more than enough to enjoy for yourself and plenty to share with family and friends.
They told us there was a huge turn out yesterday and over 800 lbs worth of strawberries were picked. They are expecting to have about 200-300 lbs of ripen strawberries ready for picking today. So always call ahead to check and see if there are enough for picking before you go and check if they might close early.
The owner had samples of strawberries that were the “properly ripen” ones to show us how to carefully look for the good strawberries to pick and learn not to pick the ones that are not completely ripen. You basically want to turn the strawberry to see if there are any white/light areas, if there is, then it is not completely ripen. Shoot for the deep red color ones, and leave the others time to ripen for future picking. Do not pick the unripe ones since they do not continue to ripe after bring picked, even though they might become redder in color. They also said DON’T wash the berries until you are ready to use them. Washing makes the berries more prone to spoiling. I found a pretty good source for making jam. So I might report back if I ended up making my own strawberry jam!
After the quick picking-lesson, I am ready to pick some delicious strawberries! Jeremy had his photo gear ready to snap some beautiful orchard photos for our stock photo site. There are lots of peach trees in bloom and a little patch of wild flower with lots of butterflies around. I am just smiling from ear-to-ear trying not to skip my way to the strawberry field. 
Another point that the owner (sorry, I never did catch his name) shared was that a lot of farmers hesitate to open their orchards for public picking because some people abuse the orchards. Since it is you-buy-what-you-picked, a lot of people will pick a lot and then sort out what they really wanted to keep and throw the other (ugly, unripe) ones on the orchard floor. When people do not stick to the proper ways of picking, they not only take away the chances for others to pick, but also destroy the plants themselves. Which is a big lose for the farmers. This is a great family event, and I see lots of kids out picking with their parents, this is a good chance for the parents to educate their children. Do not cross the plants rows and stump on the plants and plastics that protect the soil. I would greatly urge people to be considerate and keep these wonderful orchards open to public picking by learning the right techniques and also educate your children to be respectful to the plants.
I had a blast, it was a good exercise kneeing down and standing up to pick among the beautiful strawberry plants. I worked up quite a sweat, but the light sprinkle of mist/rain from the sky kept me cool. A sunny day would have been beautiful too, but I would have needed a good hat to keep me cool.
I have filled the picking box full of strawberries after one hour of going through a few rows. It is weighing time… I picked 7.57 lbs of strawberries! Definitely need to give some to Jason’s family, and some to our clients.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Like their website said, most mapping programs are not yet 100% accurate in pinpointing their location. I have created my own Google My Maps to locate the entrance exactly where it is, so you know where to go. Google Map took us further down someone’s driveway that does not have a lot of room for turn around, so please refer to my map below for directions instead of what is listed on the regular Google Map. You can even see some of the peach tree fields on this map~
Mar
25
wordpress modification of IIS
Posted by jeremy | Filed Under Web Programming | Leave a Comment
So the wife asked me to look at her blog and see if I can fix a problem after she installed some plugin called akismet. The problem was that the paging on this page was broke, because the link didn’t actually have the php file, it had the base uri /blog/wp-admin/ and the query string piece ?apage=2 but no file. So a mouse over showed http://domain/blog/wp-admin/?apage=2
After digging a lot, I realized it had nothing to do with the plugin, and it was related to the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] not working right in IIS. More testing outside wordpress showed that $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] was completely empty. But in wordpress it seemed to just lack the actual file.
So tracking it down, word press has a functions.php file in the wp-includes that has a add_query_arg() function.
So I made this modification at the beginning of it…
if ( is_array(func_get_arg(0)) ) {
if ( @func_num_args() < 2 || false === @func_get_arg(1) ){
$sourceurl = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] . substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'?'));
$uri = $sourceurl;
}else{
$uri = @func_get_arg(1);
}
} else {
if ( @func_num_args() < 3 || false === @func_get_arg(2) ){
$sourceurl = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] . substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'?'));
$uri = $sourceurl;
}else{
$uri = @func_get_arg(2);
}
}
It seems to work now, so hopefully someone else may find it useful also.
