Ok, so I keep saying that I am going to post more, and then I post less.  Sorry, life happens.

So what have I been doing with my life for the past two months since I last posted?

Working, gardening, housework, building computers, rebuilding battery packs...

Work.  Everything is going good.  We have been doing many things to help build sales.  Crawfish lately has been very good.  I made a smoked sausage to go with it, and it has been really popular, about 15 pounds of it a week to go with a couple of hundred pounds of crawfish.  Put new steaks on the menu, which of course I take care of...  Work on my own place continues, different setbacks and new challenges, all is good there.

I have a garden now.  There are no plants in it yet, and it is only half full of dirt, but by the end of this weekend it will be finished, and planted.  I will have yellow wax beans, lettuce, rainbow chard, pickling cucumbers and three different types of heirloom tomatoes planted.  The herbs I planted last fall are growing like mad, except for the two different basils that all died in the freeze in November or December. I think I am just going to get a couple of dill plants to replace them with.  The hibiscus that my incredibly awesome girlfriend got me is doing good.  I put it in the ground last month, and it bloomed last weekend.

Plans for remodeling the kitchen are proceeding.  I think I will put in a side by side oven and I am really thinking of a fridge only and a freezer only pair that I *THINK* I can make look built in, along with a dishwasher that will be built in.  I need to get someone out to look at the wall I want to take down to make sure it is not load bearing, and if it is, what I have to do to take it out anyways.  Then I will have a spot for a 36 inch induction cooktop and a "bar" type seating in front of that.  I found the countertops I want at Ikea, and they are inexpensive, so the kitchen remodel may start sooner than I though.

The battery for my cordless drill and circular saw was on it's last legs.  The actual drill and saw are old, but still very good tools.  I priced a new pack and it was EXPENSIVE!  I ended up buying new cells and taking the old ones out and soldering up a new pack.  For less than half the price of a new pack, I rebuilt the old one and it works probably better than new as the new cells are higher capacity than the old ones.  I just need to take the dead ones into Best Buy or Lowe's and recycle them.  I need to find another dead pack on eBay or Craigslist to rebuild as well.

Yes, I did say I built a computer.  First time in quite a long while.  Really I did not totally build it.  I wanted to build a media server to feed my new AppleTV 3 that replaced an original AppleTV.  I had an old computer that had been in storage for 3 years before I moved.  Unfortunately it was dead, and would not boot, or even make sounds when powered on.  A friend at work had a couple of computers that were his wife's from before they got married last year, and neither worked, but she had pictures and documents on them and wanted to see if I could recover them.  I took parts from both to make one working computer that she was able to recover her stuff.  The other one is now my media server.  I put some new ram in it, and the hard drives I had as USB externals connected to my Mac, and now I have a nifty new server with 6.5 terabytes of storage.  Pretty darn cool.  Geeky, but cool...

Yes, my really awesome girlfriend is going to give me grief for saying that, but I will just cook her dinner and she will forget about it.  Well probably not...