Squeamish Ossifrage

The goats have been pushing through the old fence, so I worked hard over the last little bit to put up a strong chain link fence in the place of the old one. I got sun burned while I put up the new fence, but it looks pretty good (the fence, not the sunburn).

Alison has been working on decluttering the entire house because she has been reading Organized Simplicity, which is her (Alison's) mom's  philosophy of life in book form. It says "Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" (apparently one of the definitions of beautiful is also awesome if you are a guy, so an old beat up blackjack taken from a thug in New Jersey is apparently beautiful). Alison comments that it is amazing how much stuff that we have that doesn't fit this criteria.

The girls have been 'helping' us to clean up. They mostly think that it is great fun.

This Sunday I said that we needed to get the girls dressed for church, and Andrea dressed for church all by herself. Her dress was on backwards, but what are you going to do? We left her in it backwards all day long.

I found way more edible mushrooms in out yard. (3 field mushrooms and tons of scotch bonnets.) When I finally decided to mow the lawn I found another entire fairy ring of the largest scotch bonnets that I have ever seen. They are drying right now. I have now eaten a sample of all of the edible varieties in our yard, and am still not dead.

I have also decided that I am going to try to at least prevent the yellow stainers (the poisonous ones) from spreading by stomping on all of them. My preliminary reports about their numbers count them at over NINE THOUSAAAAAND!

There's no way that can be right.

I am planning on chopping down a dead tree on Wednesday. Hopefully I can get some people to help me. If not, then it will be a much harder job.

This week at work I also gave a presentation on neural networks in Haskell. This probably concludes my work in Haskell for the time being. It was fun to learn, and it has gotten me to think in a more functional manner, but I still like the benefits of imperative programming. I have been thinking about coding up a new Mandelbrot set program, however. (Functional programming is the perfect answer to pre and post processing.)

My dancing robots program has been slowly moving forward. I have completed making some changes to the print and play document, and I am considering submitting a new version to the Prototype Penpal Program (which has been an invaluable aid in my recent play-testing efforts as so many of my friends have little kids now and don't want to play games very much anymore).