Not the most restful of vacation days.  Well, half-days.  Dropped the car off for service at 9:30, then popped in to work "just for a few minutes", to drop off the laptop rather than leave it sitting in the loaner car.  Took a while to read emails, then got pulled into a thing ( Read more... )

One goal of this vacation is to do some cooking, and to fill up the freezer in the process.  Today's food was intended to use up the yellow pear and green zebra tomatoes.  The yellowish tomatoes all tend to have a bit of a fruity taste, and I wanted that to be part of the end result ( Read more... )

I haven't listed much phenology lately; by now, most things have made their appearance for the year, and we're not yet at the point where things start going away for winter ( Read more... )

I have started a long-ish block of vacation (11 days including weekends).  Far and away the largest block of vacation this year.  First vacation longer than a long weekend where I'm primarily hanging around home in...many years...in fact the last block of vacation-at-home may well have been unemployment - and that is not the same at all ( Read more... )

I ran out and grabbed tomatoes tonight.  I should have waited until morning and DEETed first.  Black clouds of mosquitoes rose from the garden and coated me.  The dance I did to keep them from landing while I grabbed tomatoes....  I was not choosy; if it seemed ripe-ish, I grabbed it.  I think I ended up swallowing a couple of mosquitoes, and one ( Read more... )

Boss came by today to ask if I wanted to do a thing.  Complexity-wise, it's on a par with the thing I just finished - the thing that sort of ate my life for a while.  And it's fraught:  really, really visible if anything goes wrong ( Read more... )

I was talking with a coworker Friday afternoon.  Toward the end of the conversation he paused, then summed up with "your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.  Khalil Gibran - you should read  his work."

There are times when I really appreciate some of my coworkers.  He says he's always more depressed after he talks to ( Read more... )

New userpic:  tomatoes from the garden.  The reddish-green stripey ones are the violet jasper; the paler green-striped ones are green zebra, the two very pale cherry tomatoes are snowberries.  And so forth.  Couple of chiles for variety.

The beans aren't producing as fast as they were.  The last harvest was late, and that may be why.

So a bit of ( Read more... )

Despite the silly name, I recommend Kemp's Fro-zing frozen yogurt.  However, I suspect the product won't last.  It has actual flavor, possibly more than the average shopper is looking for.  The berry-vanilla flavor is not as tart as the first one I tried (just plain vanilla?), so I could be wrong ( Read more... )

The thing about trying to notice trends is that it's pretty impossible to tell whether they're actual trends or just stuff that was always there and you're just now noticing.  Humans are wired to see patterns, even when they don't exist.

Google Trends only tells you...well, whatever Google trends is going to tell you, and I don't know enough about ( Read more... )