New Apartment, New Fruit Situation

I'm moving to an apartment in the city where my newspaper is located this weekend. I'll eliminate my 30-40 minute daily commute, the rent is reasonable, there's free wireless internet, I'll have a free pass to a local gym, and my view is fantastic. My commute is a five minute leisurely stroll to the office, and there's even a small theater that puts on plays on the corner that caught my eye.

These are all fantastic things to be excited about. I love the idea of being able to stroll to the library to look for books, and if the downtown is a bit..distressed, well it's the downtown that I cover, so it makes sense for me to be there.

But it made me stop and think about how my mind now works differently as a fruitarian than it did previously.

The Entry:

I started moving in some furniture today and my parents came along because my father's station wagon can hold a lot.

Opening the door, my mother went straight to the stove and microwave. "Oooo, these are nice," she said. "Do you have pots for this stove?"

My mother is quite aware that I haven't cooked anything for quite some time, so I'm not sure what she was thinking.

"Yep," I said, noncommittally, wondering to myself if there was a way to unplug the suckers to reduce phantom power draw. (Did I mention I was a tree hugger?)

Going further in I discovered my utility closet, and stepping inside I noticed how hot it was from the equipment.

"What a waste of space," my mom said. "Too bad they had to ruin this closet with all this stuff."

"This is a perfect!" I muttered.

This closet is exactly what I need to accelerate fruit ripening, I thought. Whoever put all this hot stuff in such closed confines was brilliant.

Then I started thinking about my lack of a basement.


Lackadaisical Musings

When you're a fruit eating monster like myself, you need to develop technique to stay well fed. Primitive man could hunt, and I.... can ripen.

You never want to be caught in a situation of having green, or even just yellow starchy bananas, or perhaps some peaches that are hard as rocks. I had a (relatively) warm ripening area in my old abode, but also a cold, walled off portion of the basement that I could use for my fruit.

My long term stuff like dates went in there, as did several "slow" ripening boxes of bananas. I could pull them out to the hot side when my hot side stash was getting low, but if I had gotten some good ripe fruit that needed to be eaten immediately, like some fantastic peaches, then I could leave them there and they would barely get riper.

Ripening is like ballet, or some sort of perverse battle between sweet sweet sugar (good) and overripe alchoholic goo (bad). But the sugar always goes to the dark side eventually. Sad really.

A banana that went to the dark side:



But I digress.

So I found myself in my new apartment with no cold storage area. I suppose there's the fridge, but I think it's going to be too cold for my needs.

Not sure what I'll do honestly, but I'll persevere, fruit eating monster that I am.

Happy smoothies, folks.