Imagine that the seat belt law were expanded tomorrow.  Imagine that it not only required you to wear a seat belt, but each of your seat belts had to be marked with a number and that number registered with a government agency.  Each time a seat belt left your property, you would have to notify that government agency when it left, where it went, and for how long.  You would also have to record every other person who used that seat belt.  All this would be recorded in a master database, so that any time a seat belt failed to save someone in an accident, it could be traced back to everyone who ever used it or owned it, to try to determine what went wrong.

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Well, I finally played bridge with real-live people recently.  I didn’t feel like I was ready yet after only a year of study and practice, but some friends set it up, so I went along somewhat reluctantly.  As it turned out, I was fine on the mechanics of the game itself, but unsure about a lot of the little side issues that don’t come into it on the computer—who shuffles the deck for the next deal, who cuts the cards, what do you do if someone misdeals, etc.  The other players were really nice, though, and broke me in gently.  The hardest part of the evening was refusing all the tasty-looking desserts and snacks they’d made.  All in all, it was a really good time.

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Newest Latin lesson is up, covering third conjugation I-stems and the ablative of separation.  Easy stuff.  Next week, relative pronouns.

Earlier this year I wrote a piece on making yogurt from raw milk, which has actually become one of my most-read articles.  Back then, I used whatever plain yogurt was on sale as my starter.  Most batches were successful, but sometimes the resulting product would be runny, or it would get too sour before it reached the right consistency.  I figured I wasn’t maintaining the proper temperature or letting the milk get too old or something.

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Time for another garden update, with extra pictures!  Comments follow the images.

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Here’s a great talk by Gary Taubes called “Why We Get Fat.”  I really can’t recommend it enough.  If you don’t have the time or the inclination to read his long, scholarly tome Good Calories, Bad Calories, do yourself a favor and watch this instead.  He sums up the weight gain/loss part of his book in less time than a TV drama, and there are no commercials.

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I was all set to write a couple blog posts Friday night, and then things got interesting.  A storm was coming up in a hurry, so we ran out to pick the peas real quick, since we wanted them for supper.  When the rain started beating down, the chickens just huddled up in a bunch against the fence.  I was going to go out and chase them into their house, but the lightning changed my mind.  If they want to get soaked, that’s their business.

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I’ve got a couple of long single-topic posts in mind for tomorrow, so I’ll do a small roundup today.

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I’ve wanted to learn more about St. Athanasius for a while, ever since a visiting priest quoted him in his homily:  “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”  That got my attention; I’d never heard it put that way before.  Athanasius emphasized the Divinity in ways we don’t hear all that much these days, because he was battling the Arian heresy, which said God never became man.  That’s probably all I should say about that until I learn more.

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New Latin lesson is up, on the third conjugation.  I think this is one of the harder lessons, so they actually get easier from here.