I logged into Facebook this morning to find that I have no friends, all of my previous posts and photos are gone, and my profile is blank.

I’ll be adding my friends back over the next couple of days.

I’ll be assigned to one of the DAT teams soon and I’m looking forward to the upcoming, aggressive training schedule that’s being finalized this week, including several disaster tabletop exercises.

We also had an opportunity to tour the national disaster preparedness warehouse, a new 200,000+ square foot, climate controlled warehouse for supplies needed during regional and national disasters. Most impressive!

Because it’s important to prepare for possible disasters and other emergencies, the Red Cross offers several emergency preparedness checklists. If you’re not ready, please download the checklist and plan to spend an hour so so this weekend to get prepared.

http://www.redcross.org/www-files/Documents/pdf/Preparedness/checklists/Be_Red_Cross_Ready.pdf

Photos are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tfenderson/sets/72157621878013283/

Plum tomatoes from our six plants had completely taken over our refrigerator and as the only person in the house that eats them fresh, I couldn’t seem to make a dent in their numbers.

I pulled out a fantastic recipe we’d used several years before from Biba Caggiano’s Modern Italian Cooking. It’s modified slightly to include some fresh garlic from our garden and a few other minor additions.

Three hours and a steamy kitchen later, we have sauce. Ten pints of “Teagan and Ayn’s Totally Tomato Sauce” to be exact. All natural, fresh from the garden, and one full pound of tomatoes per jar.

I found that The WSJ offers new, compelling, and relevant information to me, standing in stark contrast to that other daily paper I receive. What’s more, their web site, while not advertising free, does place a firm focus on the value of a reader’s experience on the site and instead of littering the screen with ads. Hat tip to the designers at wsj.com. Nice work.

Ever since taking ANTH 102: Intro to Biological Anthropology with Dr. Karen Rosenberg at the University of Delaware, I’ve had a thing for this woman named Lucy.

I’ll never forget seeing her for the first time on that slide projector in the anthro lab. Her delicate jaw, those sexy ribs, and a tight little pelvis allowing for bipedalism—oh man! Who cares if she’s 2.3 million years old. I think she’s totally hot.

While her trip from Ethiopia to the US has been the source of significant discussion within the anthropological community and I lean towards agreeing with both Owen Lovejoy and Richard Leakey in that she shouldn’t travel, I simply wanted to see her.

In 2007, I tried to arrange a trip to fly to Houston to see her at the Houston Museum of Natural Science but couldn’t justify the costs at the time. After that, I became reserved to the fact that I’d never see her in my lifetime.

Imagine my surprise tonight when I opened an envelope containing a paid trip to NYC to see her.

(Thank you Anitra, Lauren, Nancy, Teagan, and Ayn!!)

Named after the town of Howardsville, VA, Howardpalooza, is an experience everyone should take in at least once in their lifetime.

You can see photos from our trip on Flickr

Along with the tomatoes, we’ve harvested about 1lb of pinto beans, more jalapenos than I can count, and the corn should come in next week. I think a hearty Mexican dinner, with fresh food from my yard, is in my future.