Since I wrote a few weeks ago that my folks had extra locally-grown, outdoor-raised hogs scheduled for butchering, we’ve sold a couple of them, but there are still a couple available.  They’re going to Kabricks’ this Thursday, March 5, so if you’re interested, please let me know by Tuesday at the latest.

They’re a bit bigger than the example I used in that piece, probably about 300 pounds or so.  That means a half-hog will give you about 90-100 pounds of meat, for a total cost of $150-200, depending on how much processing you want done.  We get the bacon and ham cured and half the sausage made into patties, and ours generally comes to about $1.70/pound.

There’s no need to pay anything in advance; just contact me with your name and phone number at aaron@baugher.biz or 217-440-0795.

Wow, I don’t blog for three days, and my traffic climbs each day!  I’m not sure it’s a good sign if your blog is at its most popular when you’re not writing.

Anyway, the big project that’s been keeping me from daily blogging is almost complete; I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.  It should go live Monday and need a few fixes that are bound to come up right at first, and then I’ll be able to breath again by the end of the week.  First thing I’m going to do is sleep two days straight.  Then I’ll be able get back to things I’ve been neglecting, like this blog.

I forgot to write about the St. Rose chili dinner last Sunday.  It went really well from what I heard; we nearly ran out of food this time.  It’s too bad all the late Masses in town seem to get out about the same time; we get a big crowd right about 12:15 and then it dies down pretty quickly.  Maybe a discount for early birds?  Hmm, have to suggest that.  I didn’t win the raffle again.  I’ve got some other church stuff floating around in my head to write about some time, but I’ll save that for another time.

I haven’t been paying much attention to Twitter lately either.  I was about ready to just drop it (again), when I ran across this post which says what so many people say about Twitter:

At first I ignored Twitter as just another vanilla social media app. Then I looked into it and just didn’t get it. Finally I signed up and started playing around, but was less than impressed (I followed all the wrong people and felt like I was opting-in to be SPAMmed). But then 2 weeks ago I had an eye-opening experience and came face-to-face with the full value of Twitter, and then just last week I met with Jack Dorsey and became a fullblown Twitter convert.

It seems like that’s always how it works:  Net-savvy person looks at Twitter, thinks it looks kind of silly.  He tries it out, decides he was right the first time: it’s silly.  Then something clicks and suddenly he’s got a thousand followers and thinks it’s the best thing since someone put bacon on a cheeseburger.

So, I’m sticking with it for now, although I haven’t had the time to play with it much.  I did look at a couple of those tools that help you to find people with the same interests or who are in your area, and followed some new people.  Some of them followed me back, and some new ones did too, so I’ve got about 40-50 each way now.  Thing is, it seems like every time you follow a few people, it sends an alert out to all the Internet Marketing people: the ones whose sole activity on Twitter seems to be getting to 10,000 followers and telling everyone else how.  There’s a real pyramid scheme feel to it, in a way.  I suppose those guys will move along when I don’t follow them back right away, and I’ll be left with the ones who might actually be interested in what I say.

It seems like all these internet marketing methods come back to one thing: The List.  No matter what technology and methods you’re using to do it, the goal is to develop a List of people who trust your opinion.  It’s like any real-life sales in that sense, which is probably why I don’t really care for it: next to being a clown, I can’t imagine many things I’d less like to be than a salesman.  But a good salesman’s List is worth gold after a while.  Online, it seems to be the same way.  If you’re a blogger, your List is the people who subscribe to your blog.  If you’re a Twitterer, it’s your followers.  If you collect email addresses in exchange for a free report or something, that’s the List.  On social networking sites, it might be your friends.  There’s really nothing new here except the tools.

But however your List is created, its value doesn’t just come from its length, but also from how much those people trust you.  If I follow 100 people every day on Twitter, it appears that at least half of them will follow me back automatically, so after a month I’ll have 1500 followers.  But will any of these people who have no idea who I am care what I have to say?  If I post a link and say, “Buy this cool product,” no more of them are likely to do so than if I’d sent it to 1500 random people.  I still have to spend time writing content, linking to cool stuff, and developing a personality, before any of them are going to take my opinions seriously.  So even though it might be a tool for growing a long List in a hurry, it still takes plenty of grunt work before the quality is there.

Something to work on in the future, I guess.  In the meantime, there are sites to work on and garden seeds to order.

Rating:

I found a place that I hoped would be obscure, over on one side, in the back, and went to it without genuflecting, and knelt down.  As I knelt, the first thing I noticed was a young girl, very pretty too, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, kneeling straight up and praying quite seriously.  I was very much impressed to see that someone who was young and beautiful could with such simplicity make prayer the real and serious and principal reason for going to church.  She was clearly kneeling that way because she meant it, not in order to show off, and she was praying with an absorption which, though not the deep recollection of a saint, was serious enough to show that she was not thinking at all about the other people who were there.

What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one.

photo from flickr.com

That’s Thomas Merton writing about the first time he went to Mass at about the age of 20.  It reminded me quite a bit of my first Latin Mass.  He wasn’t Catholic at that point, and I wasn’t a very good one, but I too remember sitting in the last pew and being impressed by the silence, the seriousness, and the reverence that people showed.

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I’m almost finished with the big project I’m working on, and then I’ll be able to get back to blogging at least daily.  In the meantime, there’s a new Latin Lesson in place: #10, on the principal parts of verbs, more uses of the ablative case,and interrogative particles.

Don’t forget the Chili Supper at St. Rose this Sunday!  It sounds like I’ll be manning the cash box again, so say hi on your way through.

We’ve got a big batch of chicken broth going today.  Next time we make it, I’ll take a bunch of pictures and write up how we do it.  The secret is the feet.

Good thing we didn’t start planting the garden during that warm spell earlier this month.  Things are frozen pretty solid out there right now.  My feet aren’t any too warm right here under my desk; I need to get Pepper to come in and sit on them.

Here’s something fun someone passed around on Twitter today, in lieu of actual creativity on my part: 8 Awesome Cars They Won’t Let You Buy.

Cards

I’m really falling down on my blogging duties lately—darn work anyway.  Why can’t I have 10,000 visitors a day, so I could just spend the day writing and playing bridge?  Ah well, someday. Read more »

I’m short on blogging time right now, because I’m finishing an overdue work project.  I have to take a break from it once in a while to let my brain cool, though, so I managed to squeeze out a short Latin Lesson, #9, for this week.

Just when I think I’ve really gotten a handle on the carbs for good, they sneak up and whack me a good one.  We went to my dad’s VFW soup dinner today, and it was the carb festival that public meals like that usually are.  I would have been okay, though, if I’d stopped at one small bowl of ham and bean soup—probably 20 carbs, ten more than I should have at one sitting, but manageable if I had no carbs for supper.  But then I was sitting there with my empty bowl watching people eat crackers and desserts, and decided to have another bowl of soup, twice as full as the first one.

After a nice coma-nap when we got home, I woke up feeling like my head was stuffed full of cotton—about a bushel of it.  So dumb.  Especially since I hit a new low on the scale this morning after holding steady for several weeks.   Based on a study Dr. Eades was talking about recently, I’ve been trying to increase the meat (or eggs) in my diet from the 6 ounces per meal recommended by Protein Power for a guy my size, to 10 ounces or so per meal.  That’s a lot of meat, even for a dedicated carnivore like me, but it got my weight loss moving again.  So why sabotage progress?  Just being human, I guess.

Time to go fold the Propers for tomorrow’s Mass, and get some sleep!

Wow, traffic was so low yesterday, I guess either everyone took a day off from reading blogs, or my stimulus screed bored everyone as much as all the other stories about it bore me.  Maybe I’ll keep part two to myself, and keep things lighter for a while.  (Except to mention that the CBO now estimates the total cost of the stimulus package at 3.27 trillion over the ten years the plan sets out.  No, I don’t know how spending ten years from now is supposed to “stimulate” the economy right now; but again, this is about spoils, not economics.)

Photo from flickr.com

This weather sure has been nice.  It’s hard to resist getting the garden beds ready and starting to plant a few things, but we’ll surely get another hard freeze before spring really gets here.  Better stick to going through seed catalogs and making up wish lists for now.

For lunch I’m having something I whip up now and then when I want something quick and simple.  There’s not really a recipe because it’s different every time, but basically I put some cooked meat (in this case, leftover chicken removed from the bone after making stock) in a pan with some chopped vegetables (hot pepper rings this time, but sometimes onions, mushrooms, celery, whatever sounds good).  Brown that to your preference, then add some cream cheese and seasoning and heat on low until it’s all melted together.  Sometimes I sprinkle some Parmesan or cheddar on top at the end.  It’s not fancy, but it’s very low in carbs as long as the vegetables are, and it’s easy.

I’ve been studying up on e-books, and how to generate an income with them.  I’d never considered them before, because I tend to get stuck in the rut of thinking that if I wouldn’t pay for something, no one else would either.  I wouldn’t shell out $10-20 for information I could hunt down for free on various web sites, so why would anyone else, right?  Well, apparently many people disagree with me, because I recently listened to a podcast interview with a guy who has more than 90 e-books that are all selling and turning a decent profit for him.  Go figure.  It looks like a nice side income, at least, if I could come up with a few.

Now I just have to figure out what to write about.  I don’t think too many people would pay for an e-book of my opinions about the Latin Mass, or political screeds, or rambling stories about walking my dog.  It seems how-to books are the ones that sell.  Hmm, so what do I know how to do?  Lots of things, I’d like to think, but how many could I create an e-book about?  (And a dozen or so separate articles to market the thing.)  That’s tougher.  This is going to require some brainstorming, but a few ideas are bubbling to the top already.  I won’t have time to work on them for a while anyway.

Well, time to go choose between pork steaks or chicken soup for supper.

I try not to pay too much attention to the news, because, to be honest, most of it doesn’t have anything to do with me.  Severe weather reports, boil orders, local stuff like that, sure; but national and world news usually isn’t relevant enough to my life to get worked up over.

Still, occasionally something gets so much press that it’s hard to avoid hearing about it and forming an opinion, and this “stimulus” package silliness falls into that category.  When President Bush overspent by 1.5 trillion dollars over eight years, everyone rightly recognized that as wasteful spending “on the backs of our grandchildren” and so on.  But now President Obama promises to out-borrow and out-spend Bush in a much shorter time period, and people actually think this is a good idea?

Photo from Flickr.com

When did we start believing the idea that we could make ourselves prosperous by spending lots of money—especially money we have to borrow?  And as someone said, if borrowing and spending a trillion dollars is a good idea, why not two trillion?  Why not ten gazillion?  Why not just stimulate us all into great wealth?

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Well, not really.  But global warming has been blamed for almost everything else.  (I keep forgetting we’re supposed to call it “climate change” now, so we don’t have to buy new bumper stickers if the temperature falls for a few years.)

I thought I’d pass along this funny page where someone with too much free time has compiled a long list of things caused by global warming, with links to the articles making the claim.  I’m sure they probably all made perfect sense to the people writing the individual articles, but when you see them piled up in one place, it’s hard not to snicker.  Just a few items that jumped out at me: Read more »

Photo from Flickr.com

St. Rose will be having a chili supper on Feb. 22, from 11:00am to 4:00pm.  There will also be maid-rite sandwiches, homemade chicken noodle soup, bags of homemade noodles for sale, a 50/50 raffle, and a raffle for 56 pounds of meat from the Butcher Block.

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