In our last local election here in Quincy, the people voted for the status quo. Our incumbent mayor had been showing signs of big-fish-small-pond syndrome, allegedly telling a reporter to watch himself, and making city government a little too cozy for his friends and insiders. People understand—even expect—a certain amount of payola and nepotism in city government, but they also expect some restraint. (See also: Blagojevich.) If you hire your nephew for an ordinary wage to mow the city golf course and he plays 18 holes while on the clock every day, people will shrug that off as the cost of government. But if you hire ten nephews and pay them each $100K to work as beer inspectors in the local taverns, they’ll throw you out of office. There are limits, and the mayor was starting to stretch them in many people’s minds.
I pulled the first radishes out of the garden yesterday. They were pretty small, but they were getting crowded, and it’s always nice to have those first fresh ones of spring.
First Radishes of 2009
Also got the green beans planted, just in time for the rain that’s falling today. They’re mostly Blue Lake bush beans, which always do well, but we’re also trying some Contender this year. The catalog really talked those up.
Things are growing fast now, including the weeds, so I pulled a bunch of those yesterday and gave them to the chickens. They’re growing fast too; I’m going to have to get a chicken house built in a couple weeks so we can get them out of the garage.
Wow, I should have had some money down on this. In the Meat Madness contest I wrote about a few weeks ago, Bacon won the tournament just as I predicted, defeating Steak in the finals 465-351. I crumbled some bacon up in my egg salad a couple nights ago; it really does make everything better.
It’s been five weeks now since we planted the first things in the garden. Sometimes radishes would be ready that quickly, but we did have some pretty cool stretches. They shouldn’t be far off, though. I thinned things somewhat the other day and fed what I pulled to the chickens, but I need to do some more. Time for some updated photos; as always, click to make them bigger.
As of yesterday, I’m back on my eating plan to lose weight, control my blood sugar, and stay healthy. The carb cravings are still pretty strong, so for now I’ve been eating a lot of eggs and simple meat like sausage patties, to keep my belly full so I don’t eat anything stupid. In another couple days, my sugar and insulin should be normalized, and I’ll add more variety.
We had some new people at the 8:00 Mass this Sunday, and I discovered afterward that we’re not doing a very good job of helping newbies get started and follow along. After you’ve been going a while, it’s easy to forget how confusing it was the first time, but it doesn’t have to be that way if people are helped a little. So for people who are thinking about joining us at St. Rose, here’s a step-by-step guide that I hope will prevent some confusion.
Angel wrote a couple good posts on low-carb eating recently, which reminded me that I haven’t talked about my diet in a long time. There just hasn’t been much to report. We haven’t tried many new recipes lately, mostly just sticking to meals we’re used to, and I didn’t lose any weight over the winter.
I can’t blame that on the diet, though; it’s my own fault for not sticking to it strictly enough. It seems like I’m pretty strict, until I actually keep track and add it up. About once or twice a week, I’ve been eating too many carbs. Sometimes I go way overboard, like on Easter, when the candy and cheesecake were just too tempting. Other times it’s not drastic, like eating a pound of peanuts or a few too many crackers, but still too many carbs to stay firmly in ketosis (fat-burning mode).
Like I mentioned a week or so ago, there was a lot going on at St. Rose in the last few days of Lent, leading up to Easter. I couldn’t make it to the Maundy Thursday Mass, unfortunately, but I was able to go to the Good Friday liturgy and Easter Vigil Saturday night. Both were long, but definitely worth the effort.
Latin Lesson #16 is up, covering Third Declension I-stems. They’re more annoying than hard, because they’re declined so similarly to the non-I-stems that it’s easy to get them confused. I always want to stick the -i ending on the ablative for all the other third declension nouns, for some reason. Maybe now I’ll be able to keep them straight.
Swarms of Readers---No New Content!
Once again, I failed to blog for a couple days; and once again, my traffic went up. Here’s a graph that shows the trend of daily visitors since Tuesday, when I made my last post. One of these days I’m just going to stop blogging, and see how long it takes for it to start coming down. Maybe if I only blogged once a week, I’d get seven times the readers!
On the other end of things, I had 108 comments waiting for my approval when I logged in this morning. On the bright side, I knew they had to be spam or some kind of error, so I didn’t get all excited like I do when it says one comment is waiting. Sure enough, they were all spam from some gaming site. I use a captcha to prevent automated comments, so either someone came up with a way to beat the captcha, or someone took the time to sit there and type in the captcha code for 108 comments. It’s most likely the former, so I may have to find a different captcha if it happens again. I blocked this guy’s IP address from visiting my blog at all, so he won’t be back; but if one can do it, it’s only a matter of time…
Here’s something that’s made of awesome. If you haven’t liked Mel Gibson’s latest string of movies, watch this anyway; it’s worth it.
