First off, Angel posted some pictures and info about our new chickens, so go check that out.  They’ve all survived so far, although she said one went over the wall this morning and was running around the garage.  Apparently they managed to knock their water over, and one used it as a step to jump out of the box.  Wily beasts, they are.  I made their box twice as big this morning.  They weren’t really crowded yet, but they’re growing fast, so they’ll need the extra space soon.

Almost all the Little Marvel peas are up now, but I don’t see any of the Sugar Ann (snap peas) yet.  I hope they’re just a little slower, and that they weren’t killed off by the cold and wet last week.  Some turnips are coming up in the other bed, so apparently the birds didn’t get all those seeds after all.

There’s a garage sale in the hall at St. Rose this Saturday, April 4.  I don’t know much about garage sales, but I have a feeling it’ll be pretty big.  We’re planning to take some stuff over, as soon as we find time to get it sorted out and loaded up.

The book sale at the library is this weekend too.  I get pretty excited when those come up, because I usually bring home a box or two of books.  At 50 cents/inch, and half-price on Sunday, I figure any book I’m even remotely likely to read is worth that much.  Last fall I didn’t find as many as usual, maybe because I’d been to the spring sale and gotten everything I was interested in.  I don’t suppose I’ll ever go away from it empty-handed, though.

I had a great match at pool last night—4-0 over another 4-handicap like myself.  I don’t know what happened, but after a couple weak shots in the first game, I ran the table and hardly missed another shot after that.  One shot had the whole bar cheering, although it was more strange than difficult.  I don’t have the angles quite right because this is really pushing the limits of my drawing skills, but it looked something like this:

The blue balls were my opponent’s, blocking that pocket.  The red and black ball were mine.  (Yes, I know the second ball shouldn’t be black in 8-ball, but I’m not gonna redraw it.)  I had to cut the red ball fairly sharply, and it cut the second ball, sending it back across the table at well under 90 degrees to my original shot.  It looked really cool, but making the shot isn’t hard as long as you can see the angles.  It’s not the kind of shot you need to try very often, though, because there’s usually a simpler option available.

Four weeks to go in the session (plus Easter off).  We were six games out of first place going into last night, and we took 3 of 5.  So our chances aren’t good at this point, but we’re not out of it.  Last night reminded me why I play league: Livermores’ is a nice corner bar where the people are usually pretty laid back and friendly; the other team was cool and sportsmanlike; and the music wasn’t overly loud.  All in all, it was a good night.  Maybe for the summer, while I take a break from pool, I can find a softball team that needs a slow-footed infielder.

I don’t know if I mentioned it already, but we bought eight chicks a few days ago.  They’re in the garage under a heat lamp for now, and they seem to be bigger every time I go check on them.  They’re eight different egg-laying breeds, seven girls and one who hasn’t chosen a gender yet.  We’re not sure if we’re going to build a chicken house or use some sort of large mobile “tractor” cage, but we’ve got some time to figure that out.  Angel’s going to be blogging about them with pictures, so I’ll just point over there when she does.

Lettuce and Swiss chard are coming up in the garden now, so I’ve seen everything except carrots.  They usually do take longer.  After the snow, the soil was really saturated, but the sun later that day helped dry it out a little.  Even our 11-inch-high raised beds were holding water for a while, but they drain a lot faster than the soil at ground level does.

My latest Latin lesson is up, starting in on the third declension, so I’m back on schedule.  When I started relearning the language, this is where I started having to work at it again.  The first two declensions and everything else up to that point came back to me pretty quickly when I reviewed it, but the third took some study.  Before long I’ll be learning most of  it as I go.

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Well, my cold that I was whining about yesterday seems to be passing.  I could actually breathe through my nose when I woke up this morning.  By the way, did you know the British spell it “whingeing”?  I’ve seen that in a few books, and it looks bizarre every time.  Almost as bad as “gaol” for “jail.”

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I don’t get sick very often these days, but with the combination of working a lot of stressful hours and the weather jumping around lately, I picked up a cold a couple weeks ago.  I got over it once, then last weekend it came back stronger.  It’s been really miserable this time.  I’m so stuffed up it’s hard to breathe, especially at night.  For some reason, it doesn’t occur to me to do something smart like have some chicken broth, so I just sit around sniffling and breathing through my mouth waiting for it to go away.

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Ok, I’m definitely back to daily blogging as of now.  Yes indeedy.  The Big Project that’s been consuming all my time and energy went live this weekend, and there’s still some debugging to do and additions to make, but the bulk of the pressure is gone.  I learned some things about myself and programming in the process, which I’ll talk about some other time.

New Latin Lesson #13: the vocative case and imperative mood—the two things you need to know to give commands.  Next lesson will start on the third declension, which is harder than the first two, but it’s also the one with the most useful words.  I keep wanting to put excerpts from prayers and scripture in my lessons, and I can’t because they always have a few third declension words in them.  You can read a lot of stuff without knowing the fourth and fifth declensions, but without the third it’s tough.

I got the other garden bed ready the other day, adding a few inches of compost and a bit of topsoil on top to make it easier to plant in.  I planted a row each of radishes and turnips in it, but it looks like birds made off with some of them.  If they don’t start showing up soon, I’ll have to replant and put chicken wire over it this time.

In the other bed (which had chicken wire from the start) radishes starting poking through a couple days ago, but I haven’t seen anything else yet.  This rain today should give things a boost, but now we need a warm, sunny day to work with the moisture.  Lows in the 30s like tonight’s forecast won’t speed things up much.

Here’s one for the Why Didn’t I Think of That? file: Meat Madness.  In the spirit of the NCAA basketball tournament, someone made up a 32-meat bracket, to determine the champion of all meats by letting people vote on the matchups over the next couple weeks.  The regions are Seafood, Pork, Poultry, and “Red” Meat.  The Pork Region looks like the power division, and I’d put my money on bacon to take the whole thing.  Bacon isn’t just great by itself: it makes everything else better too!

Tuesday was the big corned beef and cabbage feed at St. Rose, to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.  I’d never helped with or even been to one of those before, so I didn’t really understand why people seemed to think it was going to be a lot more work than the soup and sandwich dinners we’ve done.  Now I know.  I didn’t get in on the preparations, and I couldn’t be there at 5am like some folks were, but I was tired enough after ten hours of taking money and cleaning up afterward.  A lot of people really put in a tremendous effort.

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I almost forgot to flog tomorrow’s big dinner at St. Rose: we’ll be serving corned beef and cabbage from 11:00am to 7:00pm, or until we run out, whichever comes first.  There will be entertainment at various times of the day.  Check that link for more info.

We planted our first seeds today: peas, Swiss chard, radishes, lettuce, cabbage, and carrots.  I’ll write more about the varieties when I have more time, and put up some pictures when things start coming up.  We had to put some fence over top of the bed:  freshly dug and smoothed soil like that is awfully tempting for dogs and squirrels to dig in, as we discovered last year.

Latin Lesson #12 is up, on the pluperfect and future perfect tenses.