DAMN IT JUST SEND ME SOME FLOWERS

Started a new job yesterday, and rather than making my partner work to pick up hints I have said explicitly a few times that I want him to send me flowers at work, because

1) Yay flowers!
2) Displays dominance over other women at work because it demonstrates I have a caring partner
3) Did I mention pretty flowers?
4) Let's the dudes at work know I'm in a relationship so that means we can all just focus on being colleagues

FFS I even sent a link to a site that does local same day delivery for no extra charge, and pointed out the three bouquet styles I like best. So easy.

But he has yet to send me any.

And as I'm filling out the W-4, learning that I have to pay an extra $10k in taxes, because we eloped a week ago and apparently that's what happens when two high earners file jointly and it's making me want to rant because THE COST OF FLOWERS IS INSIGNIFICANT TO MY TAX BURDEN SO SEND ME THE DAMN FLOWERS.

(and yes technically it's "our" tax burden and yes the money spent on a bouquet would only add to our shared house expenses but I don't care; I'm generally anti flower but there's a time and a place and this is the time and the place)

And if he sends them late in the week, a significant portion of their prime blooming time will be during the weekend which is just wasteful so ugh.

</rant>

Throughout the years I have completed many projects successfully. Some projects really stood out and were awesome to do. This is not about these projects. It is however about one of my very first projects for my first real software development client many years ago, somewhere around the year 2000.

I was working for some years at TNO, a well known Dutch organization, and the lady at the reception asked me if I could help her husband out because he was strugling to get some web app developed. So I said sure, I can talk to him and see what I can do.

So I went to their house and talked to her husband. They were living in a huge villa and turns out her husband owns an international flower export business for which he needed some web app for. So we had a nice talk and he showed me some software designs he got from a couple of different big companies. He asked me my opinion about these designs. I remember answering something like that it looks very fancy but for me it didn't make much sense.

He replied that it didn't make sense for him as well and was disappointed that these companies didn't seem to understand him properly. It took about 3 months to get these designs which he thought were useless. So, I asked him to explain me what he was looking for.

Actually a pretty simple thing. He was using paper forms to have his clients order the flowers they need. Think of them as Excelsheets with 3 columns with a list of flower names and besides each column a column for the amount required. He would go to the flower auction at 4 in the morning to collect all these filled in forms, manually aggregate them on new forms, and then go to buy the flowers ordered.

This man had many clients and truck drivers. Some of them only worked or ordered at specific days. It was also important that one could easily indicate which flowers were really important to get.

Then comes this 20 year old guy (me) who delivered a working prototype in 24 hours. You can imagine how happy this man was. He said: if you built this for me I will pay you 10K. In the meanwhile for fun you can borrow one of my sports cars if you want.

I took the deal, drove a big fat sports car for about 1.5 months, I delivered and the man payed me as promised.

The web app I developed is today still being used every day. I don't think there is any other project out there, at least not that I'm aware of, that I have worked on and is still being used today in its form as it was originally developed.

Bought flowers and right now they're right next to the laptop. The laptop is looking so pretty!

My desk is also looking scenic and shit, that if flowers were cheaper I'd make a flower crown for every robot I work with. Lol.

How much zucchini is too much zucchini?

I know I have WAY too much...

I knew at least when 1st considering D20 zucchini breads.

then when i began to wonder if the remaining batter would work with my death star waffle iron...ill know tomorrow!

....ran out of typical pans, incl foil ones(normal and mini for easy gifting)

- gave 1 away (similar sized as in pic)

- approx. 2 lg zucchini bread loaves in fridge (gave away 2, ate a ½)

- cut up\froze enough onions\peppers\pak choi to a min. acceptable zucchini : everything else stir fry ratio... x20 servings

- similarly, green onions, pak choi, marinated sesame fried tofu bits, zucchini and miso (quick miso soup) x16

- thinly sliced enough to layer it into ~20 lg servings of lasagna.

... zucchini in pic is slightly larger than the one that made the many aforementioned and pictured loaves of zucchini bread

apparently, in a week tops, I'm gonna have at least another 3 more THAT size needing to be picked

anyone in the continental US want some zucchini bread? or, if in michigan, zucchinis?

i didnt even plant much... actually only about ½ of other years.

i am also having some serious overflows coming of (at least) grapes and watermelons.

grapes...
when i bought this place, this odd, square, surrounded by cement walkways, area, with an increasingly problematic tree (risking cable\electric lines, foundation, etc) and so dense with weeds that I learned, dandelions have a giant, bush-like form, with heights beyond 8ft tall.

i grew up hanging out in the nearby woods, noticing that weeds lost the fight vs raspberry\blackberry plants. being handicapped\lazy\experimental, w\ev, i figured id just kill it all then fill it with random berries... knew nothing about grapes so just got 4+ random types... apparently they are all fancy\expensive grapes... and reeeeeaally produce. i already had to pick ~10lbs.

watermelons-
idr if i planted normal ones and little ones or just little ones... idk how to tell without cutting them open or maybe just watching a long time to see if they stopped growing?
anyone with advice (or seeking watermelons) is welcome.

assuming (hoping) they are mini ones there's at least 2dz that are at least ping pong ball size.... and around 100 little yellow flowers still.

i totally get that my frustrating problem with produce here would be beyond welcomed by most people... but seriously... wtf do i do with a few dozen to over a hundred (hopefully mini) watermelons, so many zucchini that, despite personal daily consumption and at least a half dozen friends that love zucchini bread and\or my secretly healthy lasagna(my friends tend to be guys), but have their limits capping out, plus mine, at less than ½ whats rapidly being produced and, apparently, thousands of dollars worth of hundreds of pounds of fancy grapes???

there's an interesting old lady across the street who'll take at least what her and husband can possibly consume,.. even makes grape jam, but thats still only a few dz lbs tops.

it seems wrong to kill the plants (or even to remove a large amount of blossoms and feed them all to JSON (lil tortoise)... pretty sure he's already getting tired of them just from the few that fell off in the wind or something.

i wish i knew some farmers that do farmers market things... but that kinda seems super suspicious... 'hey mr farmer... want a large supply of expensive grapes, watermelon and zucchini, for free? you can sell them to random people, or just give them away. i dont want money or anything...' idk... seems like the beginning of one of those movies that either has evil alien plants assimilating all land mammals, or where there's some crazed medical researcher convinced that there's a massive, underrated threat without enough attention for vaccination production funds-- so they are gonna release some deadly virus supposedly to save the world.

ive been cooking too long.

ideas pl0x?