Caaashew......oops, didn't mean to sneeze....

Works going well. I feel more confident about what I'm doing everyday. I started a new project today and made a lot more progress than I thought I would. Should be able to finish it up by Friday. Big'j has been working on this intermediary program that is supposed to provide a consistent UI for our customers and allow us to develop plugins to convert certain types of data. He's been tweaking it for a few months now, and I'm hoping to get to use it soon (if for no other reason than to give him some uninvested feadback for it). As of now though, for each project I have to start from psuedo-scratch so things take a little longer than I would like.

I say psuedo-scratch because I'm being mildly smart with my development. I'm trying to keep my projects as modular as I can while short development time is still priority. So far it seems to be working in my favor as I now have a UI template that is pretty much set to go from the start and a few output templates that I can just kinda drop in my new projects. These two particular pieces allowed me to bring together a product that is about 60% complete, in about 4 hours. Compared to my first project which took about 12 hours to get to the same spot.

The holiday weekend was great. Had the chance to hangout with a few peeps, have a few beers (responsibly of course), had two excellent meals (the Blu Bistro and Robin cooked delicious steaks), had the chance to play through Blazing Angels on Daryl's XBox 360 (I enjoyed it, but I don't think I'd be able to play through it again), picked up my inherited firearms, and had a safe return drive to B'ham. Tuesday I was supposed to go hang with Big'J's family but I was restricted to a limited deployment area centralized to the biological waste evacuation facility so I missed it. He said he had a great time (though it was extremely hot) and he looked tired as all get out today at work.

Took my walk Tuesday at around 4ish, which was a mistake. It's amazing how the ambient heat can drain a person (especially a person with a high mass). I was so tired after my walk that I pretty much just passed out straight on the floor (which was not comfortable). Today I went at a more reasonable time and cut an entire minute off my last week 1/2 mile average. Made it down to 10:47 (estimate a 2.78 mph speed) per 1/2 mile, which I'm pretty happy about. Hope to keep that same time (or close to it) the rest of the week.

I experimented with some spaghetti sauce last night.

• 1 jar Mushroom and Pepper sauce
• 1 lb ground turkey (browned with some mild seasoning)
• 1 tablespoon thyme (double if fresh)
• 1 tablespoon parsley (double if fresh)
• 1 cup Cashews
• Souther Flavor spice to taste
• 1/2 box noodels

Don't know what exactly possessed me to throw cashews in the sauce...maybe because I was snacking on some while cooking. It turned out pretty good, the nutty flavor sat well with the turkey and sauce, imo.

I also picked up some materials to make chili. Don't think I'm going to throw cashews in it though. I'm just going to try for a plain-jane chili since I've never made it before. Sort of create a base line for further experimentation. I harbor NO hopes of ever taking on Gene and his Slap Your Momma chili team, though.