What has happened?

May 1st: Water Softener inlet plumbing breaks spraying water in utility room causing water damage. Repair people are called and they tear up the floor.

May 7th - 14th: NC trip to visit over Mother's Day weekend. Saw Kristen's parents, sister and family; my folks, brother and fiance; my old college buddies; and Clay Suddreth a friend of mine for 15 years. While on vacation the repair people tore up the rest of the floor leaving bare concrete.

May 17th - 19th: Put in new laminate floors. The 18th was a 24 hour workday starting with running, church, flooring until midnight and then plumbing until 6:00a on the 19th. Floor looks great.

May 27th: Theology on Tap

So our evening was winding to a close. As Kristen was brushing her teeth and I was browsing the internet, she was fumbling with something. She says "Am I reading this right?", and I say "Reading what?" That's when I turn and the something she was fumbling with was a pregnancy test. We have some dialogue, and I come to get a closer look as I'm taken aback. The test clearly indicated pregnancy. I'm a bit overwhelmed at the thought of the fourth Abbey, but realize that we can handle the new one and it is such a blessing. We embrace and then she says:

"Happy April Fool's Day".

After the move back in February, I haven't found the time to setup a webcam on the peppers... Please hold.

The plants have recently shown an affinity for gravity. The leaves are drooping, although they have sufficient water. After examining the base of the stems, I noticed a white buildup. I thought it was fungal but it feels more like a calcium buildup. I'm going to go back to feeding the plants filtered water, but I'm afraid it might be too late for the plant that is bearing fruit.

If anyone knows about fungal buildup, or if calcium can clog plant, or even better how to resolve the situation, that would be of great help!

Here's a more complete look at the current life of Batch 3:

I'm actively working on a video of the first Naga Jolokia, but of course it will take time.

I walked in to the office this morning to find Jim in a surprisingly good mood. One of the flowers that he pollinated appears to be producing fruit. Now it seems it is just a matter of time before we've grown one of the world's hottest peppers.

We've got quite a few blossoms now, but seem to be suffering blossom drop. There's really not enough pollen to use a q-tip for fertilization, so I decided to pluck one of the blossoms for direct pollination. Hopefully one of the flowers will take.

The first bud has bloomed with blue stamen. This is definitely a Naga Jolokia.

Jim has purchased the new pots for the next round of Naga Jolokias. The pepper farm is bigger!

Oh and our pepper guardian has returned.

The first Naga Jolokia is continuing to show good progress. There are quite a few buds getting ready to bloom. Probably within a week we should seem some blooms.

We're getting more and more convinced that this is a Naga Jolokia. The flowers should be fairly definitive... not to mention the fruit.

On the Nth day of Sprint M my company gave to me:

12 failing testsuites
11 bugs to fix
10 different platforms
9 scrummers scrumming
8 devs a' devving
7 QAs testing
6 cups of coffee
5 hour builds
4 perforce timeouts
3 syntax errors
2 bleeding ulcers
and a task that could be done by monkeys.

Get back to work.

We caught these from the beginning:

We've been monitoring the "first" Naga Jolokia, and we're a bit startled. The plant looks nearly identical to the sweet peppers we've been growing. We're beginning to wonder if it is a Jolokia at all, or if it is in fact a misplaced Sweet Pepper seed... If anyone knows what the leaves and plant structure of a Naga Jolokia is /supposed/ to look like, please send me an email.

The good news is that we've got two starts that we are nearly 100% certain they are naga Jolokia seeds... After only being in the soil a week, these two came up over the weekend much to my surprise. We changed quite a few variables to get these starts, so I'm not sure what caused them to germinate so quickly. I should have a post-germination video soon. The video should allow us to compare the behaviors of the two plants. Most noticeable in these starts is the length of the initial sprout. The hope here is that the depth the seeds were planted played the role in the sprout length.

Again if anyone has any info on what a Naga Jolokia /should/ look like, it would be much obliged.

Edit 12/17/07 2:06pm:
Josh Fuhs, a co-worker, points me here. We may have a Naga Jolokia after all?

Jim and I wanted to prepare for the Naga Jolokia by eating something less spicy. So we tried orange habaneros. These are rated between 100,000 and 300,000 units on the Scoville unit of heat scale. In comparison, Naga Jolokia's are roughly 1,000,000. The orange habaneros are the 5K to the marathon that will be the Naga Jolokia. I've never run a marathon, but Jim has. He notes that the marathon (40K) is a lot harder than a 5K. We now look at our little plant in a much different light. There have been at least two surprises after eating the pepper. The first 45-60 seconds of chewing were easy. Then the heat built and built and built. Even 2 cups of milk didn't seem to quench the incredible burn. The next surprise was the abdominal agony. My stomach hurt, like pitch fork in the gut kind of pain, for at least an hour. It has finally begun to subside... ouch.

See the full gallery here

Aaron Lint and I decided we should dress up for Halloween. Best costume idea... ever.

After only getting 1 of 9 Naga Jolokias germinating, I've decided to start a second batch going this morning. They are being started in the same manner as the sweet peppers which had a better germination rate.

I've purchased a new light that appears to be working well. It's a 2 foot shop light that has 2 17W bulbs in it. Meijer had them on clearance for $4 so it was hard to pass up. We'll see if these lights help out.

Significant growth over the weekend:

Here's a picture of some developing fruit

Hand-pollination:


Watching the development of fruit:


Up close and personal: