The following quote is attributed to Beth Moore, a writer and teacher of Christian spirituality

"Life shouldn't be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather, to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly shouting, 'Wow! What a ride! Thank You, Lord!' "

I'm feeling it this morning...

"People who drink too much coffee could start seeing ghosts or hearing strange voices, UK research has suggested.

People who drank more than seven cups of instant coffee a day were three times more likely to hallucinate than those who took just one, a study found. "

I do not drink seven cups of instant coffee a day. I do however see things in my latte foam.

I have had devastating hard drive failures in the past. That makes me very sensitive to keeping back-ups of my data. I was hoping that Mozy.com would be a wonderful option for keeping my data offsite in the cloud somewhere. Unfortunately it didn't work well. After several iterations with support I decided that they couldn't get their Mac client to work right. Plus the hassle that I got from my IT department who was telling me I was using too much bandwidth just made it all a pain.

From a technical standpoint, JungleDisk is much better. It is looks like an infinitely large disk on your computer. It accomplishes this by backing files to Amazon's cloud storage. Unfortunately Amazon limits file sizes to 5GB. So until that is fixed I can't use Jungle Disk for offsite cloud back up either.

For everyone that walks up to me and asks "Did you read my email?", the answer is no.

Well even though the sunrise isn't getting earlier yet, (See the previous entry on sunrises for a discussion of why) the days *are* getting longer and the sunrise is moving north again. Out my window it happens to reach it's furthest south point on the little hill shown. Then it starts to march North again, till it is almost not visible from my patio. Spring is coming!

The kids harvested some of our carrots last night. These were the "winners" our monster carrots. Since it doesn't often freeze around here, the carrots can stay in the ground longer than usual. Needless to say they taste great.

Last night I made the second cheese. This was again a simple soft cheese like chevre, but this time it *was* made with goat milk. Not only that, but I found a local dairy to get the milk from! Summer Hill Dairy in Chino. Now I just have to raise a crop of cardoon and I am well on my way to authentic local cheese production. I've decided that when I actually get the cheese figured out I'm going to call it "Antigone" for various inside joke reasons.

I'm happy to report success with my first cheese. Shown on the left is a delicious "lemon cheese". It is the easiest of all cheeses to make. I coated it with fresh herbs from our garden. It is like a chevre cheese, but made with cow's milk instead of goat milk.

My goal is to make a wheel of parmesan. But that is going to take a while to work up to it. In the meantime, my next target is a wheel of cheddar. I will pursue that during Spring Break. Hurray!