The parsley in my little indoor garden is finally starting to get firmly established and come into its own. It's big enough to harvest now, though we have enough frozen in ice cubes to avoid that for a little while longer.



The basil I planted at the same time is nowhere near as happy. My goal now is to keep the 2 remaining plants alive long enough to place them outdoors in the spring, since they don't seem to be getting enough light in my basement.



The potatoes in the background are in the same state... I am just letting them sit in the hopes that they will live long enough to be container-planted outdoors.

Today I planted another batch of yellow onions that had been in storage but started to sprout:



The ones that were planted longest ago have formed clusters of green onions like the bunches you buy in the store, only with 4-5 onions apiece and of course, yellow instead of white. I have only been cutting off the greens rather than harvesting the onions themselves for cooking, so far.



Here is some celery I rooted from the center of a storebought one. It is doing great since being planted last week. I have another one on the counter upstairs:



Once it starts to grow roots it will open up and spread its leaves. I have also been experimenting with rooting a lot of other stuff, like Bok Choi, carrots and onions.



I have 2 rooted Bok Choi leaves like this, that have been doing great since they were planted in dirt last week but I have no idea if they will go on to sprout a whole new plant or not. Only time will tell. I had a Bok Choi heart rooted before I went in for surgery, but was not able to plant it in time, and when I got back it had rotted. Alas!



Here is just the base of a Bok Choi stem that did grow roots. It will be interesting to see if small plants grow from it.

In the background are another experiment: rooted ends of commercial green onions. I am hoping they will grow into onions again. If they do, I will feel a lot more confident about letting my Spouse harvest the whole green onions that came from my big yellows, since I'll be able to get some back again.

I also managed to root just the stubby end of a yellow onion, and planted that in the hopes of getting onions from that too. It's an experiment! [evil grin]



Here's a rooted garlic. This was the innermost small cloves with a couple roots on the bottom. When placed in a shallow dish of water they started right up.



In other notes, my onion storage system is nearly depleted -- only 4 left between using them in the kitchen and planting sprouted ones. Next year I want to store onions again but I plan to do something a little different. First of all I need them to be randomly removable without destroying the storage medium or having to remove a bunch of others to get at a particular one. Also, I need to put them somewhere I can goose the temperature down lower. I might build a little hut of 2x4's and visqueen with a little vent to the outdoors I can control with a thermostat.

And, according to the Weekend Gardener GrowGuide I can sow the following crops indoors for my outdoor spring garden:

chinese cabbage
collards
broccoli
cabbage
cauliflower
leeks
head lettuce
onion seed
parsley

The seeds have started to appear at the grocery store too so I will do that at some point this week. Whee! I will be able to put to use some of the lessons I learned with my first seed-planting adventure. LOL

When I got back in town after my operation the garden was looking a bit rough. Luckily I didn't lose everything. The carrots were probably the most vulnerable to underwatering since they were so small yet, but some survived:



The parsley is looking pretty good... I'd only be able to harvest tiny pieces off yet but if a need arises I will.



The onions had gone gonzo! All of them grew green stuff like mad. Since I had been keeping the greens about 6" tall there was lots to harvest.





Here's the first half of the harvest.



To preserve them I first chopped them into small pieces.



A spoon works well for filling the ice cube trays. After they're full of onions, water is added to top them off and the tray is frozen. When finished the green ice cubes can be placed in a container (I use a labeled, dated ziploc bag) in the freezer for future use. They can be thawed and drained for use in salads, or thrown as-is into soups and such as a flavoring. I have used this for parsley as well. I am told it also works for chives, and garlic flowerstems.

Once these ones are frozen I'll do the 2nd half of the harvest - there were a lot of onion greens!

In other gardening news, right before my operation I had purchased a Shiitake Mushroom Log:



In theory this should produce home-grown mushrooms for several years while sitting in a corner of a regular room. We had bought a mushroom kit in the past but that one required very special care and also to be in complete darkness, where we could not enjoy looking at it at all.

The log needs to be 'shocked' by soaking it in icewater for 24-48 hours before placing it upright in a saucer or some such. I did that before my operation then left it sitting. But by the time I had gotten back, it had not sprouted mushrooms yet. The Instructions explained that it often does not grow the first month after being shipped, and that I should soak it again after 2 weeks. So today when I was emptying out ice cubes to make my green ones, I put them in the log bucket to make it colder. The idea is to make the mushrooms think a winter has passed.



Here's the log soaking in an oblong bucket. It's possible to buy it with its own soaking tray but I went for the cheap approach. I'll put it in the garage overnight as it is OK for the water and log to get frozen. I hope it sprouts this time :D

Today I cut the rest of the meat off the free-range chicken I roasted the other day, and boiled up the carcass for chx broth. I had also bought some fresh beef shank at the grocery store this week. I put in frozen black eyed peas (the store actually called them some other kind of peas but I can see what they are!) and mixed veggies. It turned out excellent! 



I tossed out the spent chicken carcass afterward but the beef was good enough to chop up and put in the soup. After it cools I'll put some in the fridge and freeze about half of it in serving sized bags for later. Mitsuyo got the beef bones. She was quite appreciative.

Today I took one of the last steps of wrapping up the CSA veggies for this year which was to process all the bags of herbs that had dried in the refrigerator. There was Marjoram, Basil, Summer Savory and three different flavors of Thyme.



Basically this involved grinding up the dried herbs individually with a mortar and pestle and putting them in jars. While I was at it, I also sorted out our herbs and spices which had been stuffed into numerous small cardboard boxes for about 7 years now. Needless to say the lack of organization had allowed us to accumulate a few extras of various things, and even a couple empty bottles stashed here and there.



Here's the new arrangement. I made a stepped storage shelf by cutting the corner edges off the cardboard boxes and taping them into the shelf in formation. If it works out well I'll rebuild it someday in wood.

Today was my first day of shoveling snow. It wasn't really enough to justify tackling the huge crusty dinosaur of a snowblower we bought this summer for my first time, as only about an inch and a half fell. So instead I shoveled and then came back in and took a nice 4 hour nap. So much for getting much done today.

I did preserve this pair of squashes that came in that last CSA load. Although they are different in shape I think they were actually 2 of the same kind.



When I cut them open they had the same inside. The narrow necked one looked like the narrow end had been damaged in some way. That end was kind of dried out and seeds had not developed.



I decided to cut those ends off since I didn't like the looks of them and the dried part was too tough to scoop out with the seeds.



The cut ones seemed to bake up just fine despite not being completely sealed in by skin. 1 hour later at 325° F they were done. Together all the squashes produced about 2 and a half cups of "squish" which I divided into three small ziplocs for freezing. I tasted some and they were a bit buttery or peanutty tasting, not incredibly sweet. They'd be good in soup I think!

The skins are soft when they're still hot after baking, so after scraping the flesh out I chopped them finely and put them in the fridge for worm food. They'll eat the innards too, but I am going to keep the seeds out and roast those tomorrow. Seeds that get into the worm bin tend to grow frantically in the rich compost, and push up the lid causing it to dry out inside. I had apples, squash, pumpkins and even tomatoes go nuts in there before I learned better. LOL

This week was the last week of vegetables from the Chequamegon CSA. I spend some time today blanching and freezing a lot of carrots and also leek and potato soup.



I stored the soup in gallon ziploc bags for freezing. This is the second batch I'd made and the first batch had plenty of smaller bags for personal use so these are intended for when my Spouse has returned (in only a month and a half!) and we need more at once. The soup is not quite as yellow as this picture looks, but it's fairly yellow. This is due to the ingredients including whole leeks (greens included), yellow potatoes, extra virgin olive oil and carrot water. Yellow R Us!

The recipe is quite good and I got it off a 2007 post in Michelle Lynne Goodfellow's blog. I have found that by far the best way to find good freezer recipes is to Google "freezer recipe" and whatever ingredients you need to use! That is how I found the freezer salza recipe that, when made with organic CSA vegetables, makes our eyes cross with rapture. Drooooool.

Today I picked up the last of my orders for this year from Pasture Perfect Poultry which is a local organic free range chicken farm cooperative. The way it works is, you pre-order and pay part of the cost of each bird (stew or roasting chickens, and turkeys) up front, and then schedule when you want to pick your orders up for the rest of the summer. Then when the time comes they email you letting you know which of the three chicken farms you'll pick up your birds at, paying with a check to cover the remaining cost of the meat depending on how much they ended up weighing.



I had ordered chickens the rest of the summer and then this last order was 2 fresh turkeys. Together they weighed about 30 lbs! I froze one whole and butchered the other one so I could pull out legs, breast, etc. as needed. I will save the whole turkey for my birthday in March, when I want to have a huge party inviting all my relatives for a sort of reunion at the new house.

I made this picture really small in case anybody gets grossed out by meat... feel free to click it and see the bags and tupperwares full of turkey close up if you like!

A lot of onions came from the Chequamegon CSA this summer. I usually keep onions on top of of the microwave but they were arriving faster than I could use them... big, luscious yellow ones.



Pretty soon they had spilled to the counters and were getting in the way of other projects like finishing the kitchen ceiling. Sunlight streaming in the kitchen window started a small section of them sprouting enthusiastically. With 2 more "fall shares" due to arrive this month no doubt including a lot more onions, it was time to deal. I did some research and found out that hanging them up in the basement is the best way to store them.



Freshly grown onions need to sit on the counter for a few weeks so the skins can cure first before storage. That part I inadvertently did right!

If you grow them yourself you can leave the greens on, let those dry while the onions are curing, then braid them together to form bunches of onions for hanging. If the onions have no greens, they can be hung up in nets or panty hose. I hadn't been saving nets so I opted for the latter.



To store in panty hose the onions are stuffed down the legs one by one and the hose tied off between them to keep them from touching one another. I used twists because I figured I'd never get the hose untied if I knotted it.



Here are the onions hung up for storage. That's a lot of quiche! It's right at the foot of the stairs so it doubles as some welcome decoration for an otherwise pretty industrial wall.



That's Daisy lying on the stairs supervising.



Next year I will have to either obtain onions with green still attached, or arrange to own nets for storage. The hose work but they do look awfully silly.

On the same counter I also had a lot of jars of avocado seeds wrapped in wet cloths and waiting to germinate. This can sometimes take many months. I opened them all and went through them throwing away some that had gone bad, washing and repackaging the ones that weren't ready, and did pull one out that was ready for planting.



The reddish pot to the right contains the latest addition to the avocado grove.

How can they be bad when they taste so, so good?

My first project for today was preserving a couple of bunches of parsley I had in parsley ice cubes. I actually thought one of these was cilantro when it first came out of the box but after tasting it I realized it was very mild parsley instead. I mixed the two types together so that the mild would cut the more extreme tasting curly stuff.



After chopping up the parsley I spooned as much as would fit into each ice cube tray compartment, then topped it off with water:



After several hours in the freezer they had frozen solid. Amazingly they came right out of the tray without a bit of trouble.. either they shrank, or parsley is slightly greasy!



I got 2 bags of 5 cubes each. One for upstairs, one for the chest freezer. The individual cubes can be pulled out on an as-needed basis for adding to recipes etc.



Once loose of the tray these things reminded me uncannily of the water-soaked alfalfa "hay cubes" we fed our horse Lucky. Lucky had no teeth left and his food had to be soaked first. The hay cubes were bright green just like this too!

I also planted most of the indoor herb garden today. When I uncovered the soaking seeds in the small bowls I discovered the rosemary seeds had very evenly spaced themselves out in the bowl, how odd!



When I pulled one out for a closer look I discovered they had each grown a gel envelope that was invivisible underwater but solid and slightly sticky out of water. Here's a closeup of one of the seeds complete with clear goo:



Another funny thing was that the Thyme was so gung go it had already sprouted! Sorry about the fuzzy picture but these were so tiny I was having a tough time getting the camera to notice them to focus on them.



For my plantings I used these compostable pressed fiber pots (made out of sterilized processed cow dung fiber if you believe the documentary I saw the other day). They are resting in shallow tin foil trays from the grocery store. In addition to being insanely cheap this setup is mostly recyclable as well. Go me!



Here's what they looked like filled. The way I learned to sprout seedlings is to water them heavily at first, then cover them up and not water again until they are tall enough to push against the saran wrap. I might have to make the exception with rosemary though as the packet says not to ever allow rosemary's soil to dry out.



OK! You got me, saran wrap is not recyclable. Until I have glass topped little green house boxes or something it'll have to do though. The cardboard tabs to the sides have the content listed of what is in each row.



Here they are on the light table. Despite the fact that it takes dark pictures everywhere else, this camera is easily capable of overpowering the grow light. Although it is on and the brightest source of light in the room, you can't even tell in this picture. The bright blue item with casters to the right is my fabulous rolling radial arm saw stand that matches the rest of the blue basement furniture. The rolling tools all live in a line along the back wall now joined by the grow table too. Yes, a nice grow table is on the "to do list" for additional blue furniture.



Now that the light table is set up again the avocado grove is temporarily displaced to on top of the workbench. There is a fluorescent light there too so they should be OK for a few days.

So, that was what I was up to today!

Today I beat my head repeatedly against the wall trying to get PHP running with FastCGI on the new webserver. Now I have a sore head and am not much nearer to being done. I hope that tomorrow morning I will be all mentally refreshed and suddenly have a brilliant breakthrough :D

Today's vict... er... subjects for food preparation were carrots. First I washed them. One of them was not quite like the others. It required special handling to get all the dirt out of all of its erm, crevices.



They all looked the same in the bowl though!



If I remember correctly this is my Spouse's favorite mixing bowl. It used to be bright happy-face yellow on the outside. I am told that over the years the yellow wore off until the bowl was completely white outside as well as in. I never saw it with any yellow at all.

The recipe I had for preserving the carrots called for cutting them into ¼" slices and blanching them in boiling water for 3 minutes then plunging into cold water before freezing immediately. I ended up with 2 tupperware cups and 2 ziploc bags of carrots. Yum!



Wow, I wish that woodgrain looked that realistic in person. Note to self: need new kitchen countertops.

Since it is now cold enough that I have to bring the plants in for the winter, it's about the same time I'd be planting herbs for the winter even if I was growing some outdoors in the summer. So in order to get in synch right from the start, I am going to plant some indoor herbs now. For seeds I have Parsley, Cilantro (whose seeds are Coriander but probably won't flower indoors), Thyme, Sage, Basil, Oregano, and Rosemary. Some of them require the seeds to be soaked for 24 hours before planting, so I got those started today. I had to put saucers over their little bowls of water so the cats wouldn't mess with them overnight.




(Note large yellow imposter lurking at top of image. That one needs to make its way down to the basement with all its fellows.)

I also have catnip, which I decided not to plant until I find one of the metal mesh covered terrarium tanks in the storage locker. Otherwise the cats would wreak havoc on my plant table. I remember a friend of mine had catnip growing outside and cats would come from all over the neighborhood to roll on the poor squashed stubble of it.

It's almost cold enough to run the wood boiler now. I could have started it tonight. I probably would have if it had been this cold by 4-5PM. Brr! I started thinking about bed around 8 and had to keep myself up by sheer exasperation. LOL

This happened a couple days ago and I recorded it for posterity: how I handled preserving the big squash and pumpkin I got from the Chequamegon CSA this week. In the picture below, the squash is the larger and oranger of the two. You can't see it in this picture but it had another stem coming out of the underside also. The pumpkin was a carving pumpkin, not a sugar pumpkin alas! The latter taste so good.



First I cut them in half and removed all the seeds and strings:



Then I placed the hollowed out halves face-down on cookie sheets:





And baked them for 1+ hour each at 325°F. If the squash had been even a little bigger both halves would not have fit on the cookie sheet at once! Here's what it looks like when they are done. The pumpkin (shown) had gold flesh, and the squash's was sweet-potato-orange. It actually tasted quite a bit like sweet potato too come to think of it.



Once cooked the flesh is soft enough to be simply scooped out with a spoon. I packed them into zip-locs of 1 cup apiece for freezing. Alas this picture was taken belatedly after I'd already placed them in the freezer for a bit, so they steamed up. Sorry about that. You can still see the hints of orange and gold in the different kind of bags though. There were only 3 of pumpkin, and more like 10 of squash.



As a note I must have been fairly flustered when I unloaded the veggies from the box on Tuesday night because I only noticed a couple days later that one of the large yellow "onions" was a large yellow... imposter!

Hello!

Yesterday I tried the manly art (hehe) of Fishing for the first time. Although I didn't catch anything it was quite fun. I knew that the sport fish were likely to be up large deep rivers or at river mouths at this time of year, but I decided not to stress out too much about success/failure my first time and go somewhere easy just to test out my skillz. So I headed down to the marina here in town and asked the fellow working there where he recommended I try and he suggested the end of the harbor wall where it was easy to fish both inside and outside the wall. He said a few people had caught fish there in the past couple weeks so it wasn't completely insane, but I still knew it wasn't the ideal setting.

I spent a couple hours practicing casting into and against the wind, with and without different size weights, and learning what the spinner and spoon do in the water. I could clearly see what was baitfish-like about each one, if used properly but it will definitely take practice to do it well at a distance (IOW when I can't see what I am doing). I got the gut level feeling that I did not have the right color/pattern of either type for the conditions. Now I have something specific to shop for, that will be a lot more fun than standing there like a dope and finally resorting to getting an "assortment".

I did actually get one bite that I was not able to bring in. It felt very light and looked smallish (about a foot and a half long and dull gray). I only caught a glimpse of it as it broke the surface and flapped as fast as a sparrow's wing in the instant before it got loose and vanished. The whole thing happened so fast I am still not sure what I did wrong. I don't think it was hooked very hard. Maybe I should have done something to make the hook go in farther before I tried reeling it in. The other possibility since it was such a small fish is, maybe it had just bit down on the body of the spoon, then let go when it put up a fight. LOL

My goal was to catch 1 fish before winter as a proof-of-concept, so we'll see if I get another chance before it gets too cold to be fun.

While I was in the port area I saw a really cool looking, but tiny 2-masted schooner come in to refuel its inboard. It had no sails up and was being manned by a single old guy who looked like he really knew what he was doing. Its name was the Pirate's Witch but I was not able to find out more about it on the web. It looked like one of those deals where someone got a modern yacht custom built as a mini schooner. Neato!

On the server front, all actual email operations have been turned over to WTF and OMG, and the old system has no email responsibilities anymore. I forwarded all left over email that people hadn't picked up to the new server so that's done. I still have about a day left of adding capabilities to the new servers, and then tomorrow I will start work on the new webservers. Since it is going to be a while before I get to Minneapolis and I want the network there shut down ASAP, I have decided to reassign the 2 Compaq Proliants I have here as the new webservers. My Proliant administration CDs arrived in the mail (gotta love eBay!) so I can get to work on that tomorrow. Later when the old dead system's machines come back here, 2 of those can be the replacement OMG and WTF.

The new webservers will have differing capabilities. One will be PhP enabled and the other will be fast CGI. Each will have a mix of available languages in addition to Perl and C. Java, Python, maybe Tcl. But they probably won't both have all the choices. I hope the Java environment is more stable now than it was when I first ran one back in 1998.

The Chequamegon CSA share I picked up yesterday was quite the bonus crop. We had not received one the week before so this was kind of a double one as well as being the last summer share of the year. There were a huge pumpkin and a huge squash which were loose. Then inside the box there were green peppers, medium-hot peppers, jalapeños, tomatoes, a big bag of apples and pears, fresh big yellow onions with the dirt still on(!), cilantro and parsley, eggplants, a few handfuls of herbs, a head of leaf lettuce, about 10 medium size beets with the greens on, a bag of carrots, etc. etc.

I am going to be busy preserving this week haha.

This morning I worked on the ongoing project of preserving the bounty from the Chequamegon CSA. In this case I was freezing pre-cooked corn (having removed it from the cob) and carrots, as well as loose raspberries. I also did some research and decided placing all the paper bags of potatoes in the coldest part of the basement, still in the bags, was going to be the best bet for those. Unfortunately no part of our basement is really going to be under 55 all winter. In the future we may need to set aside a corner of it for root cellaring and make sure it doesn't get too much heat over there.

I found evidence in the basement of this sad little guy who did not make it after the wood loading of yesterday. Aw! :(  I realize slugs are the enemies of gardeners, but what a horrible way to die... all alone on an endless concrete desert with only your own footprint(s) as witness.



For the bulk of the day I worked on server stuff. It was actually kind of frustrating. My efforts were centered on a pair of very nice old Pentium 1 machines that were going to be "wtf" and "omg", the primary and secondary mail and DNS servers for the network here at the house, and I only found out very late in the process that it was not going to be possible to use P1's. The latest 2.6.x Linux kernels will not install on a P1 which I had already known, so I had gone back to a 2.4.x kernel from a couple Slackware releases back, then was manually updating all of the apps. I had done my research in advance to make sure all the latest versions of the apps were compatible with a 2.4 kernel and none of them claimed they weren't. Unfortunately though, it turns out openssh requires glibc 2.4 or better, and that requires a 2.6 kernel. Gack!

The only pair of regular production PII machines I had lying around were, to put it bluntly, dogs. Passed over a dozen times for other projects, they were both gutted of parts. One had an ill-advised unique drive rail system that had clearly never caught on in the industry and that I had never found a way to mount drives to that did not involve duct tape and cardboard. In my experience nothing good ever comes from wasting days trying to gimp along a machine like that, which had in fact happened before with that very box, so I was leery to go there.



The other was a Dell Dimension that was never terribly reliable even as a brand new Windows machine. I didn't really wanna go there either.



That meant my options were to go out and buy more production machines (which would stop me for the day, since there's no place nearer than Duluth/Superior to do that, and nowhere on a Sunday) or use the pair of old Compaq Proliant rackmount servers I had on hand. I really hadn't wanted to waste those on the tiniest jobs of the system, but it appears I will need to redefine those as the tiniest usable machines I own, and start looking into buying better stuff long term on eBay. The good news is, there are some really nice machines out there for cheap. I am particularly a fan of the older (circa 1998-2002) Dell Precision Workstations. They make kickass Linux boxes! The former Big Pig (now renamed "orly" in the theme of kfap.net servers being named for online-speak words) is one of those.



Well. I started tearing into the Compaq Proliants around 8 at night, so I knew I would not be able to do a lot before the day was over. These were really nice machines about 10 years ago. I buy mine on eBay but to get them at a very cheap price, about $100 apiece, they have to be kind of messed up. I had got these right before our house sold in Colorado, so I had to basically open the box, look inside, then tape the box back up at the time. This is the first opportunity I've had to really investigate my finds properly.

Most of the issues so far have been related to misconfiguration and old firmware, which could be solved by obtaining software tools for free off the HP website. I really like the HP site and Compaq Proliant is excellently and firmly supported despite being an old product now. I'll just take the issues one at a time until I have completely gotten the BIOS and firmware straight and all hardware appears to be working. Then there is a lot of rigamarole needed to get a Linux system onto one of these but I have done that part before so I am not too worried there.

See, isn't this exciting stuff? :-p

Here's a cute picture of Daisy and Zinger snuggling on the couch, where I would go to watch TV while stuff was compiling/rebooting/etc:



As I was going to bed I noticed that it was raining... I knew that would happen. The wood pile was still covered though. Ha ha! I win!

I went to the farm and picked up 3 fresh chickens. I brought the big cooler with a bag of ice in it, because these are large girls. Not like the grocery store whole chickens, which increasingly resemble game hens. When I got back I cut up 2 of them so now I have lots of individual leg/thighs and breasts in bags, 2 carcasses in tupperwares, the hearts and livers in their own small tupperware, a bag of wings, and another whole chicken. This should keep me well supplied with good stuff for the next 6 weeks. We have a big final order of the year to pick up in November, which will include a couple of turkeys!

Since we have this big chest freezer now I realized we'd need more freezer tupperware and bags and such so I got these handy items. They are supposedly disposable but my Spouse (who became a fan of them long before I did) got some years ago in Colorado and they're still in regular weekly use. They're insanely cheap too. I got a huge pile of ones like this for about $10 total.



The firewood people called and said they would not be able to bring the rest of the wood by until tomorrow. I am sure the backyard grass is breathing a sigh of relief at the temporary reprieve....



36 hours had passed so I got to test the aluminum strip. The caulking had dried all nice and clear:



I poured a bucket of water down one end and aside from a splash caused by my own clumsiness, the initial results were excellent:



The cat in the picture is Daisy, another of our three. She was eager to help out as long as it didn't involve touching any actual water.



The end of the strip is not glued down as there is a hill leading down to the drain at the low end. Once I am done testing I will probably cut the end off and re-fasten it in short articulated sections to keep the water channeled as it goes downhill too. This next photo illustrates the hill a little better:



The next step after the strip is completely done is to attack the cracks in the walls with waterproof cement repair goop. Oh I am so looking forward to that. 

I got Adobe Creative Suite installed on "Big Friend" (my replacement desktop machine) so I can put pictures in my LJ entries again. Be sure to go back and re-read the last few posts if you hadn't already because I did go and put in all the pictures that were supposed to go in them. Big Friend has all the slots for different memory cards right in the front of the computer which is very luxurious!

For dinner I actually had salmon with my veggies rather than chicken. I bought a small piece of fish at the store to get myself stoked to try fishing sometime in the next few days. Scary!