Jake is playing this year for the middle school football team that is afilated with the high school team. This means they run the same type of plays, use the same style of calls, etc.. Here he is on picture day.
There are a lot more pictures of the team in the Gallery.
Although it is now starting to get cool, we are still enjoying veg from the garden. The zucchini are still producing and there are still carrots and potatoes left. The fall lettuce are still too small to eat, except as thinnings, and the broccoli and cucumber are also still weeks away.
Next weekend I will put the cold frame out, and plant few more rows of lettuce under there – although I won’t need to bother covering it for a while, unless we get some serious cold weather earlier than usual.
Alex is making a strong recovery since his surgery ( he has a plate with 7 or 8 screws holding the various parts of his collar bone in place). He has a portable ultra sound machine that he has to use twice a day for 20 minutes to stimulate bone growth. Sounds kind of weird, but it is covered by insurance so it must have some kind of track record.
Things have been very busy, but I have finally got some time to write some stuff for this blog. The bad news is that I have this time while waiting in the reception area of Holy Cross Hospital. Behind me Alex is being preped for shoulder surgery to bolt his broken collar bone back into one piece.
A week ago he was playing pick up football when he flipped end over end after hitting someone who was kneeling on the ground. Jeremy, his roommat called us from the ambulance that was taking him to hospital. He saw a specialist on Tuesday, and the strong recommendion was for surgery. His clavical was actually broken in two places, with a small piece between.
Hopefully in a couple of hours he will be in better shape. He will be coming home with us for the weekend, but should be back at school on Monday.
On more conventional news, my fall garden is in good shape. Cauliflower, broccoli, and kohl rabi were planted as seedlings, and lettuce and rocket sown directly. The weather has turned gradually colder, but no frost as of yet.
Inside I have been playing around on the computer trying to get a weather simulation/model up and running. This is a real model, run nationally by “proper” weather folks. I expect it will be super slow on my own system, probably taking longer than real time – i.e. the model will take longer to run than the actual weather ! But it will still be kind of cool – and provide a reason to buy a faster system.
The model is the WRF
model has been developed by various agencies and all the code is freely available. Getting it all to compile correctly has been a challenge, but so far I am making progress. I have the pre-processor running, the actual forecast engine has been run once, and now I am working on the post processor stuff – to actually be able to get to see what has been calculated.