Cafeteria Lunches

One of the perks of my summer job is that I have a free pass for the lunch served in a cafeteria on campus, along with other employees and attendees of various summer camps for kids that are occurring on campus. (At lunch earlier these week, there was an impromptu and thankfully brief Cheerleading Competition that was quite impressively loud; the band kids today were somewhat tamer.)

This is definitely one of the those good news/bad news situations, since they have a lot of health-compromise but yummy-looking items available, including about 6 different kinds of dessert and thick-crust pizza with a variety of excellent toppings. They also have burgers, hot dogs, and fries at one station, and another station with a different "hot dinner" type thing each day. Today it was chicken parmesan, cheese lasagna, a rice pilaf, a hot roll, green beans, and who knows what else (these are things I saw on my co-workers' trays).

I am successfully avoiding the pizza using a contrived strategy that I developed visiting Tam this summer - I am cultivating in myself the belief that the only restaurant pizza that I like is Old Chicago pizza, which is not coincidentally unavailable anywhere near Austin, and am thus not eating other pizza. (Austin's Mangia Pizza, for example - entirely over-rated! This is a true statement that can be construed to support my idealized preference for Old Chicago.) I continue to make pizza at home, though, and enjoy it utterly.

But the upside is that the salad bar is pretty decent. They have green salad with various toppings, including a lot of different vegetables, cheese, and tofu. They have fruit salad (which I have not tried, but appears citrus-free), cottage cheese, a green bean salad, excellent marinated vegetables (different each day), fruit yogurt (today looked like blueberry), and a bunch of other stuff I haven't noticed enough to remember.

They also have good fresh-brewed iced tea and fruit like apples, bananas, and oranges always available. They even have a good selection of cereal and more than one kind of milk, if a person is into that kind of thing.

Today I brought from home half a turkey sandwich and some fresh blueberries Robert bought me at the farmers market. I supplemented this with tea and a trip to the salad bar resulting in the following lunch:

Half a turkey sandwich
Marinated cherry tomatoes, onion, broccoli, and cucumber
A green salad with cherry tomato, cauliflower, ranch dressing, and sesame seeds
A small bowl of cottage cheese with fresh blueberries (dessert)
Iced tea (two small glasses, about 10 oz once correcting for ice - I don't want to get too used to a lot of caffeine every day)

My hope is that I will continue to bring a protein from home that can be eaten cold (next week, I want oven-baked chicken tenders, for instance, as one option) and add on stuff from the salad bar. I will likely get sick of this at some point, but I am liking it so far.

Of course, if I decide I really want to bring my own meal from home to heat up, that's totally workable because across the hall from our workroom (more about this momentarily), there is a huge break room with a full-sized fridge, a microwave, and a toaster oven. So far, I am making a point to join my co-workers for lunch to be sociable, but it will be fine to stay back and heat up my own stuff in the break room when I am in the mood for that.

The room is pretty much great (and huge). We have a set of tables with Macs facing the windows, a worktable in the middle where we are currently working our problems, and a chalkboard (which got used a lot today, especially when two of my co-workers and I were starting to write review problems for one of the chapters). We listen to a Pandora radio station in the afternoon that we seeded with a favorite band of each of the four students and I have been thrilled with what we're hearing. We started with TMBG, the Beatles, a band that is not Iron & Wine but that I put in the same category of music and is a KSAL band but I can't remember which one specifically, and an unknown choice of the grad student that has not caused anything bad to show up. The first song we heard this week was "Ana Ng" and the last one I remember this afternoon was "The Distance" by Cake (which is crazily catchy, in my opinion).

We are working from 8:00 or 8:30 to 3:30 each day, so it isn't too bad. But I admit that my brain was rather tired by the end of today. It's a lot of math, and it's getting trickier.