An interesting week.....

The weather here today is beautiful - though a bit windy. We've had some storms and rains going through this past week - fortunately nothing too serious.

My container garden work is going pretty well. I picked a couple of strawberries - very fragrant and sweet - but one was "pitted" a bit. It didn't look like bugs but something that happened when it was growing - too much sun or water? Hard to tell... The tomatoes are doing quite well and I'll have lots (too many?) before too long. :) A great problem to have! My basil and parsley need some drying.

One of my projects today is drying banana chips. The store in town had 29 cent a pound bananas so I'm taking quite a few pounds and drying them. Purchasing dried banana chips (good in trail mixes, etc. and as a dog treat) can run about $3/pound here and they have lots of preservatives and chemicals in them. I'm seriously hoping that I can economically dry cheaper bananas and make a healthier snack. I've already weighed my control banana group and I'll see what the net weight is when I'm done, factor in the electrical charge and see what the costs are involved. I know - it's a lot of work for what may be a futile attempt (if they don't turn out to be edible). :)

There's a farmers appreciation celebration in town today. We had a parade, ball games, fireworks last night, a dance (country band), and other things. I went to the parade (walked Daisy to it though she got scared by the people and the noise - we'll have to work on that) and got a quick meal at the park. We have a display for work at it so I had to work there for a couple of hours. It was kind of fun.

Last week at work was interesting. There's still talk of moving our office to another town. It's a real bummer. Travel time from here would be anywhere from 1-1 1/2 hours one way each day (depending on the location of the office). We have no official word so we're just trying to hold things together. In addition, a new employee for me has been hired. I'll now be supervising them from about 50 miles away (instead of posting them to the office where I work they are located in another office). They will be starting in early August and are trained so that's a bright spot at least. There is still some talk of placing a trainee (I'd be the trainer) in our current office. That's a mixed blessing - mostly a big challenge as we are staffed at under 50% of our workload now. We'll have to see how things go from there.

Well I'd better get going.
Best wishes and take care!