To remove pesticides from your produce, rinse it and then soak it in a bowl (or clean sink) with a couple of teaspoons (3-4 tbsp in a sink) before rinsing again and allowing it to dry. You can also use vinegar, but baking soda is recommended. 

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One, it’s clear that I need to improve my mixing bowl collection or find a new order of operations because we don’t have enough soaking bowls on grocery day. 

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Back in Austin after a glorious few weeks back in Portland, seeing our friend-family and catching up late into sunny summer nights. I’m trusting that the universe will send us back when the time is right. Anytime Zeus! 

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Since returning, I have embraced a renewed focus on our general health and well-being. Even in Portland, a month of eating on the road seems enough to put you back into home-cooked meals. We are eating lots of proteins, I’m drinking matcha over coffee, leaning into whole-fat dairy for milk and yogurt, and connecting with our local farmers market’s empanada stand. It may not be the bountiful berry harvest from Portland, but like many things in this move, the lesson is that there’s charm if you look for it. 

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The not-so-secret secret, though, is that this focus on health also begets the other things that are in super-drive right now: spiking on some day-job goals to start Q3 off on a strong foot and putting the finishing touches on an early return of Margo, my marketing SaaS platform that I started building in March 2020, in lieu of raising my sourdough pet. 

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So many parts about how I brought Margo to market in 2020 were based on a flawed growth model. I prioritized so many of the wrong things, maybe not for venture-funded businesses, but as a bootstrapped software solution. It’s not hard to see why we didn’t get more traction and to celebrate the traction we found, despite ourselves. This seems to be the universal perspective when looking back at our lives, but what’s fun about a start-up project (and often more true in life than we think) is that we can start again. Grace for what was (we did the best we could) and enough gumption to try the diving board again (as I timidly walk back to the end of the pool).

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Finding this balance between the healthy routines of daily life and the boulders of work life remains at odds. Still, I am working to reframe the ‘have to’s’ with ‘get to’s,’ and remember that the seesaw does not need to always be at half mast, but naturally fluctuates side to side. However, this metaphor loses steam when we start to include things like working out, friends, lovers, and of course, side projects. Occasionally the merry-go-round feels dangerously close to veering off the rails.

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Though sometimes stumbling through the messy beginning feels daunting, the simple reality is that being a single parent navigating a new chronic health issue with two kids while working a demanding job (forget anything else) is at odds with how my nervous system wants my life to be. So throw in a healthy dose of nihilism, and we’re just in the game of making it to the end of every day and getting up the next morning. Daunting be damned, we’re doing it anyway. Hence, we come back to the fruit-washing meditation: 15 minutes to stare out the kitchen window in the quiet of the morning, optimizing, of course, for fresh blueberries. 

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