Well it's almost officially summer here in Maine. Though we're currently in a cool and wet spell, it's been plenty hot. The gardens are looking less like patches of bare dirt as the various crops push toward the sky (along with the weeds).

Some beds have gotten a thorough weeding and mulching even!!! We'll see how things hold up through the summer; if things continue on we should have an awesome harvest and be able to put by substantial potatoes, onions, leeks, beets, carrots, and turnips for the winter.

In the orchard the fruit has set. Early apples are *heavy* and will need some thinning. While the pears and later varieties of apples had some heavy thunderstorms and wind while in bloom, so there was a lot of blossom loss and days the bees couldn't be out and about. On our stunted pear trees there are all of 3 little pears growing; hope they all make it The mystery tree has turned out to be some sort of cherry; will be interesting to see what kind as there aren't many sweet varieties that will thrive up here.

Though we'll have loads of apples again; soon will be time to get a grinder and press to make cider. I'm especially happy that our golden russets will have a good year again. Those puppies are sweet and crisp with a pleasant astrigent tang that makes for wonderful eating and even better cider. They also hold well and I've read that if stored properly they can last all the way through until May!!!

Anyhow, so the gardens and orchard are plugging away. On the beats side of things, I've finally after many years of waiting, gotten a DJ rig. Back when I first started thinking about spinning the route was either invest several thousand dollars in turntables and spin vinyl, or invest several thousand dollars in pro-level cd decks and spin cds. Since then there has been a groundswell evolution of consoles to interface with the massive storage capacity of hard drives and use a laptop and specialized software to do all the heavy lifting of buffering and calculating how sound files should be modified according to DJ input. Needless to say, the latter class of devices seriously undercuts spinning physical media; for a few hundred bucks, less than half the price of a single full-featured pro-level deck, I'm in the game.

That's the easy part, now it's on to learning my music collection at a whole new level, and learning just how far certain tracks can be sped up or slowed down without making them sound too bad...hopefully I'll post some mixes here once I get a clue what I'm doing