If you live in Texas, you KNOW that Blue Bell Ice Cream is the absolutely the best stuff on the face of the earth. Really. B&J and Haagen Daaz just can’t hold a candle to it.

I grabbed this container at Wally-World yesterday, mostly because I was intrigued by the lavender color, but also because of that little yellow flag screaming “New!” Took it home, opened it for a test bite, and thought I’d been transported straight to Heaven Brenham. This is good. Very, very good. Vanilla Ice cream, Blackberry swirl and little pieces of shortbread pretending to be pie crust. Oh yum. Double yum.

I popped over to the Blue Bell website, where I found out that this is not actually a “new” flavor; it was introduced in the summer of 2007. This isn’t unusual for Blue Bell – they create a new summer flavor every year, but it doesn’t always make it out of Brenham. All the locals eat it up before it can be distributed. Case in point, we visited the creamery a few summers ago and sampled the Pecos Cantalope and Italian Wedding Cake flavors, both worth wrestling your spouse for the last spoonful. It took another year for the Wedding Cake flavor to show up in stores in north Texas; we still have to drive to Brenham to get the cantalope flavor.

However, I digress. This is the first time I’ve actually seen the Southern Blackberry Cobbler in our local Wally World, so it’s new to me. The container is now hidden in the chest freezer, underneath bags of lima beans and black eyed peas and a few packages of fish.

I’m not sharing it with anyone.

I have been working on a computerized water model for the City of Weatherford since last August. It is by far the most difficult simulation I have ever tried to build, with a gajillion miles of pipe, five elevated tanks, three ground tanks, a clearwell and a semi-manual operating system.

Oh. My. Goodness. Today is the day. The water model is finished. Really and completely finished. It has been almost finished since early spring, but not quite completely right. The deadline for the EPA has been flying in my face, and I’ve been DREAMING about this darned model and puzzling over it in my sleep! Last night I woke up with one last idea on how to get it to balance without pressure problems, and I had the foresight to write it down. Got to work today, make some changes in the logical controls and BAM!!! It works! It really works! I now have a computer simulation of the water system, and it is calibrated to the point that the computer model matches the city’s collected system data!!!