June's Lone Entry

By this time last year, I had written 18 blog entries for the year, with the single entry for June being a book review of "The Magic of Reality" by Richard Dawkins.  I'm behind my mark this year, only having submitted 12 so far.  I would apologize for this, but my hope is that the quality of the content this year has improved.  If it hasn't, feel free to make suggestions in the comments section.  I'm happy to take requests on blog entries.  Then again, if you're already upset by the quality of my posts, I'm not sure you'll like anything I have to say about a topic that might be near and dear to you.  Wow, what a Catch-22 you're in!

With the above said, I don't have any reasonable excuses as to why I haven't written more entries.  I could say that I've been busy, but I don't think I've been any busier than I was at this time last year.  I will say that we've picked up a couple of activities since last we spoke (or I typed and you read).  First of all, we've taken up gardening (box and tomato) and bread-making.  You may recall my earlier blog entry about tomatoes.  That entry was inspired by the fact that Tanya is growing four different kinds of tomatoes in the garden, in addition to rosemary, basil, mint, and stuff in the box.  Overall, the experiments have been fruitful (or leaf-ful, in the case of lettuce).

Bread-making is worthy of a post in and of itself, so I won't comment on it further here other than to say: if you're not making bread for yourself, you should be.  It's delicious, and better for you than almost anything you can buy in a store.  :-)

The second activity is swimming.  Beginning June 1, we started swimming on Monday and Wednesday evenings with North Texas Masters Swimming, coached by Dave Young.  It's only been a month, but I really can't say enough good things about this organization.  First of all, Dave is incredibly knowledgeable about all things swimming.  He's fantastic with instruction, going so far as to record individual laps on his iPad and playing them back to us during the workout for immediate feedback.  He's also funny, which helps when you're struggling with all of the mechanics and techniques.  Secondly, the facility is great and pretty close to our house.  Third, the group itself is friendly and approachable, with lots of different people at different levels offering words of encouragement and advice.  When it gets to be Monday and Wednesday afternoon after work, I'm typically dreading going.  Tanya always talks me into it, and I'm always glad I go.

Beyond that, it's been a pretty normal start to the summer.  The boys are here, and this year we're actually organized about summer activities that will (hopefully) lead to a more productive time than last summer.  We've listed modest goals for them to achieve by the end of the summer, gone through the process of enumerating what it will take to achieve those goals (at a high level), and actually written it all down.  We further spent some time planning how much stuff needs to be done each week to achieve the goals as well as thought about rough dependencies and contingencies.  I've gone so far as to put up tiny scrum boards for them.

As you can see, Garrett is researching colleges and learning touch typing (which apparently he missed in years 1-3 of high school).  Gabriel is going through scripting courses at codecademy.  Garrett will have tasks in flight from multiple goals per week, while Gabriel will be working through one at a time.

I'm actually pretty interested to see how the boys like this approach, since it's very similar to what I do at work every day.  And for those of you that were wondering -- yes, I considered using a Trello board, but no, I do not sing at the daily stand-up with the boys.  I'm not sure they could take that level of energy that early in the morning (10 a.m. CT).

So that's what's going on so far this summer.  Aside from all this, I'm getting back into the game development that I'd meant to do at least a year ago.  I'm working on the Dark Tower board game in clojure/clojurescript.  It's coming along nicely so far, but not far enough to comment on yet.  Stay tuned for that!

Tomatoes

I wish I could adequately express in words how much I loathe the tomato.  Unfortunately, I have neither the vocabulary nor the space to properly convey how hideous and abhorrent these mistakes of nature actually are.  However, for posterity’s sake, I will endeavor to point out their largest sins against existence.

Let’s start with their classification.  Are tomatoes a vegetable or a fruit?  As it turns out (scientifically speaking, at least), they are definitely a fruit.  That is to say, a smart person knows that a tomato is a fruit.  However, a wise person knows better than to put a tomato in a fruit salad.  If you have to be both smart and wise in order to properly place the thing, it implies that the thing is not worth placing.

Moving on to growth: tomatoes, as it turns out, are ridiculously needy and hard to take care of as a plant.  Headlines include but are not limited to:

• They are amazingly susceptible to a range of pests (aphids, flea beetles, tomato hornworm, whiteflies) and diseases (blossom-end rot, late blight, mosaic virus).
• If you’re starting a plant from seeds, it has to be grown indoors for 6-8 weeks before the last frost of the season before it can be moved outside.  Good luck predicting the future!
• They need at least 6-8 hours of good sunlight every day, but in our southern climate, they benefit from light afternoon shade.  It's a good thing we've got that automated patio shade!
• The soil they’re planted in should be slightly acidic, well-drained but able to hold moisture evenly, and rich in organic matter.  Get out your litmus testing kit!  I'm glad I learned all that chemistry in college just so I can take care of a stupid plant that I hate!
• If they grow too fast, their delicate skin will crack, rendering them even worse than terrible.  So, you should do a good job taking care of them, including messing with the soil and even watering and just enough but not too much sunlight, but don't do TOO good a job because then they'll just explode on you.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture.

Now we get to the heart of the matter: consumption.  The uncooked tomato is deceptively appealing, visually.  You can’t help but wonder if you could take a big bite out of one, similar to the way you would an apple (a vastly superior fruit).  Doing so will likely disturb you for the rest of your life, causing you no end of terrifying dreams and subsequent psychiatric bills.  Hey, at least you won't have to deal with those spider nightmares anymore.  Unless, of course, they morph into spiders with tomato abdomens!  Fangs dripping poisonous tomato juice!  GAH!  Where's my phone?!  I need an emergency counseling session!

The textural consumption experience is not unlike eating a grape (another vastly superior fruit).  The skin of both is thin, with meat that has a pleasant firmness without requiring much work from either molar or canine teeth.  That’s where the similarity ends, however, and you must deal with the fact that between the meaty parts of a tomato exist a slimy larval state that the tomato passes off as “juice and seeds.”  Seriously, if you think earthworms are disgusting because they’re slimy, you should refrain from inspecting the inside of a tomato.  It’s *just like worm guts*.  More on earthworms and tomatoes later.

The taste of an uncooked tomato is indescribable.  It’s as if Nature said “Hey, I’m done with the avocado and earthworms, but I’ve got some leftover guts and stuff.  What should I do those?  I know!  I’ll create a fruichtable just to mess with people!  Let’s see how many of them actually try to eat the thing!”  That’s right — you heard it here first: the tomato is that happened with Mother Nature mated an earthworm and an avocado.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing redeeming about the tomato.  I happen to quite like ketchup/catsup, tomato sauces with pasta and pizza, and throwing rotten tomatoes at bad comedians.  Beyond those uses, however, I’m not sure why you would bother with this travesty of growth.  

Do yourself a favor, hard-working farmer: plant tomatoes if you so desire, but don’t treat them any better than your other plants.  In fact, neglect them a little.  Perhaps we can natural-select them into a heartier and better-tasting fruit.  Otherwise, make better use of the space you would normally put a tomato plant in, and plant a DQ-Blizzard bush.