I Miss Okinawa Clouds

One of the things I miss about Okinawa are the clouds. There were just some spectacular views of clouds. So when I saw something close on Sunday I grabbed two pics.

  

Perhaps on our college tour trip next week we'll get to see some more.

This Week's Garden Pics

This weeks garden pics. The fifth and sixth pictures in the slideshow below should be our Bak Choi and Mizuna(perilla) harvest. We have a ton of mizuna.

The corn continues to do fairly well, as does the jalepeno and other peppers. The sun flowers are doing really well if you ask me.

I cleared out most of the mizuna and bak choi and will be planting soy beans, peas, some more lettuce including romaine, iceburg, cabbage, and endive. Adding some more herbs, dill and rosemary in particular. It'll be interesting to see if I can get the rosemary going since I read somewhere that it's hard to grow from seed.

The tomatoes continue to impress.....lots of tomato sauce meals coming up here soon. Yum.

Side Trip for Ice Cream

After visiting Lake Erie, Arisa and I took a side trip on the way home to get some Ice Cream. We stopped by Foster's Homemade Ice Cream on Chardon Road in Willoughby, Ohio.

We got one cone each of butter pecan and maple nut. Really, really good ice cream. Foster's has parking right in front and some picnic tables of which we took fool advantage. We were there right when it was a bright and sunny day.

If you're interested in trying this place out, which I highly recommend, check out the map below

View Foster's Homemade Ice Cream in a larger map

I must say it was a nice time just the two of us.

Visit to Lake Erie

Today, Arisa and I headed out on some errands, one of which was to head over to Rick Case Hyundai to ask a few questions and get another key for the car. So we took a little side trip to see Lake Erie. Other than seeing it from around the Great Lakes Science Center, or driving along the Shoreway, Arisa has never been to Lake Erie. And it's been many, many years for me.

I must say, it's a damn large puddle. Of course, we lived a 5-10 minute walk from the beach in Okinawa (East China Sea), it's been a while since we got this close to a large body of water. I miss the sound of waves.

7/19 This weeks garden pics

Okay, here's the weekly pics of the garden. Focus on the sunflowers, pumpkin and jalapeño.

The pumpkin has been flowering non-stop. We may get a pumpkin or two out of it. Looking forward to trying the jalapeño.

I think last week's title was mistaken. Ah well, not worth changing at this point.

July 12 Garden Pics

I took some pics of the garden today. It's coming along very nicely. I noticed today that of the six garlic cloves I planted, the 6th and final one is actually coming it. 100% success rate on the garlic.

After I took the pictures I went out and harvested some beans, lettuce, mizuna, and bak choi. Quite a bit of it in fact:

I also grabbed some of the seed pods for the Mizuna. Going to see if we can get some seeds for next year(not that I really need them as we still have a lot left over), as well as mixing it with regular mustard seeds to make mustard.

I wonder what's for lunch...ramen with bak choi!? Sounds good to me!

IE7 and Google Spreadsheet Form

Ah, so I was planning on posting a form related to JANO, and happened to be using my laptop from work(kids are using mine right now). The JANO board meetings are open to any member of JANO, but we do need to get some kind of head count since we hold the board meetings at Shuhei in Beachwood.

By happenstance, I am using google docs spreadsheet to create the rsvp form. In IE7. I make the changes and go to take a look at the form and all there is are question marks where text should be. I whip open the same url in Firefox and it renders perfectly. No wonder we've had no rsvps before; they can't read the damn form (the majority of access is via IE). I only have two thoughts:

1. Come on people, use Firefox
2. Why does Microsoft have such a hard problem making a good browser

Unfortunately this time around it's not the browser I don't think. At a minimum, Safari on Windows has the exact same issue as IE7. FWIW, on Linux using FF, Chrome, Konqi, Opera, and Flock all work perfectly. Could it be something about the windows platform? Just maybe?

Nah, couldn't be.

Anyhoo, Google really needs to make these forms html valid. While I will give them it's awful close, there are errors. And they provide you with no way to "tweak" the form, i.e, specify the character set or language. And the place < br> everywhere, particularly places that per the spec are not allowed to be. Granted the idea is that you can easily create a form on the web where the responses are automatically saved in a spreadsheet. If the form become unreadable though, regardless of how easy it is to create it's useless. And all I would need would be able to pick a character set or language for the form and the browsers would render it perfectly, regardless of the operating system and/or browser.

Additionally, it would be really nice if you could create links in the text. I can imagine that may be a security thing though.

So this time around I can only blame another google beta quality service. Not that I'm really complaining since it's all free anyway.

ミントティーとモジータ

昨年、家の前に花の庭にはミントだらけでしたが、今年はありさが凄く頑張って綺麗な花が沢山咲いています。　前にも写真をアップしています。今朝、 Pigs Fly!で「ミントの活用法(募集) 」という投稿を読みました。活用方法を募集していますので、わが家で何を使っているかを簡単に説明します。