Another bucket list item: I want to learn to scuba dive some day. My dad's family all scuba dived when I was a kid...I remember sitting on the boat off of Key West and wishing for the day when I could go underwater with them....Instead I looked at the remnants of the sea captured in aquariums (the moray eel was cool!) and souvenier shops (brought home a dried horseshoe crab) and listened to the stories of what they saw down there.

Now my son and I are reading this nature book about fish, lizards, and reptiles (I got it from the library for ceramic-fish ideas)...and looking at the pictures of the mantas (love mantas!!!), eels, and other fish makes me wish I could see them in their element instead of on paper or mounted on people's walls (the ceramic fish are sort of a parody of that).
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And....I cooked what I am pretty sure was a Long Island Cheese squash, hacked it into about 8 pieces, and baked it in the oven. It smelled great. We each took out a piece, put butter and salt and pepper on it...and then Nathan said it tasted like fish. I said he was silly and sat down to eat mine. It tasted....like fish. So weird. Other than tasting like fish, it was watery and tasteless. We didn't finish our pieces. ALL of it will go to my friend's chickens and goats. Long Island Cheese is Cucurbita moschata....generally a good winter squash group to eat from. I won't be growing this variety!

Not a quitter (in case you folks hadn't noticed that already, lmao!), I next cut up the Galeux d'Eysines winter squash, which is Cucurbita maxima, my favorite group of squash. They tend to be good storage types with flesh like a sweet potato. Well, the ones I grew, and particularly the variety I was working with did....this one is edible, but it certainly isn't noteworthy beyond its appearance. I'm not sure I want to grow it, either. Do they get too much irrigation so that they turn out all watery? No wonder people dump sugar (in various forms) all over squash before they bake it!

Clearly, the world needs better tasting winter squash. It's really too bad that I lost the seed strain I was working on. :-(