My performance review went well... I'm not really at liberty to discuss how well (for obvious reasons), but if you're really that curious, I'm sure you can ask me about it in a more private setting. Tons of other stuff going on at work. I committed us to a one month timetable to have a database and GUI up for the personnel management project. Should be an interesting few weeks coming up...
I noticed while doing some maintenance of the site that I had started a Hawaii themed skin, but never finished it, so I finished it and enabled it. This is likely the last of the skins in the old format. One of my summer projects outside of work is a total CSS redesign of this site. Also some small incremental updates to the underlying PHP stuff are likely too.
We had our first vegetables from the garden tonight, twenty or so green beans and a couple of green onions. They were very tasty. Speaking of the garden, we have at least three dozen roma tomatoes of good size (just waiting on them to ripen now), a few zucchini, and a couple of yellow squash that should all be ready relatively soon. The bell peppers are finally coming along now that it has stopped raining everyday. In the hot pepper section, I was excited to see one small habanero (about the size of a quarter right now) finally growing (habaneros, along with being notoriously spicy, are notoriously hard to grow in the upper midwest), there are six or seven jalapenos getting very close to done, and last but not least, the anaheim chiles have also started to pick up steam. The sweet corn is past my waist, but not tall enough to have tassels.
I know what you're thinking: Why so many chiles? Homemade salsa of course! Early in the spring, I saw a Good Eats about making your own salsa (or maybe more accurately, how to cook with chiles). So, two or three times, I gathered all of the ingredients from the store, and made a batch. It was a huge success and pretty popular with our friends too. I figured that using even more fresh ingredients may yield even better results. The salsa that results from the recipe is probably more correctly classified as a pico de gallo, but whatever it is, its really, really good. Plus, once you learn how to process chiles, you can really make alot of other interesting things. A few roasted chiles combined with honey and olive oil makes a really great sauce for burgers.
I will try to post some pictures of the garden in the next few days.