This is the best one I’ve seen this year.

Over the past decade or so, Pike County, Illinois, has become known nationwide for great whitetail deer hunting.  The crops here grow deer the size of small cows, and the racks aren’t bad either.  Due to the slow economy, some of the regular out-of-state hunters are taking the season off, so there’s a chance for new people to get in on the action for a reasonable price.

My folks have openings for hunters on their 350-acre farm.  They charge $200/day or $1000/week per hunter, and have both archery and firearms days left.  If you’d like more details, see our whitetail deer hunting page on the farm’s web site.  Bow season goes into January, but the rut is coming up fast, so contact us soon if you’re interested.

Here’s a story about a Texas couple, Deidrea and T.K. Laux, who found out the baby they were expecting had a rare DNA problem that probably wouldn’t allow him to live more than a few days past birth, if at all.  They decided to give him that chance and make the most of whatever time they had. Read more »

I’ve got a new Latin lesson up, starting on the subjunctive mood.  The subjunctive comes very early (lesson 15) in the Missal Latin book that we’re going through at church, compared to the Classical Latin books I’ve got (lesson 28 and 50), so I thought I’d better get to it myself.  We almost never use the subjunctive in English, but Latin uses it so much that it’s hard to find a long passage of text for exercises that doesn’t.

I remember the subjunctive being a tough one for our class in school, because the subjunctive is one area where there’s no simple translation in English.  Latin is very particular about separating things that have happened or will happen from things that might happen.  So you often can’t just translate the words literally anymore, but have to figure out what they meant and then find the best way to say that in English.  When you can translate the meaning of a sentence instead of the individual words, you’ve reached a different level.

I usually don’t post on the weekends, because there are usually plenty of things going on, and when there’s free time, it’s best used for resting.  So I think on Sundays I’ll start posting a motivational or inspirational piece that I ran across during the week.  That won’t take an hour or two of writing and proofreading—I hope.

So here’s the first one.  It’s short and sweet, but a good reminder that we all face struggles, and that we can overcome them.  (Hat tip to Fallible Blogma.)

Two years ago, we started a leaf pile.  I staked down a circle of chicken wire at the far end of the back yard, and we’ve piled all our leaves in it ever since.  The reasoning behind it is that, if you put your leaves in your compost pile with other stuff, the leaves will mat together and take forever to break down, especially the big flat leaves like maples.  So you compost your leaves separately, and after a few years you get this really great leaf compost.  It just takes a long time. Read more »

One of the cornerstones of faith in the low-fat diet for a long time has been the low prevalence of heart disease among Japanese people.  Way back when Ancel Keys did his famous Seven Countries study, and picked seven countries out of a bunch more that supported his thesis, one that stuck out was Japan.  Traditional Japanese at the time ate a high-carb, fairly low-fat diet based on a ton of rice and some fish, and they didn’t have much heart disease, and they got more of it when they moved to America.  Keys jumped on this as proof that fat causes heart disease, and we’ve been repeating it ever since.  You’ve probably heard it many times, maybe even repeated it yourself: if you want to be healthy and thin, eat broiled fish and rice like the Japanese.  (The reasoning behind the Mediterranean diet is much the same.) Read more »

There are many web sites out there that make me think, “Man, why didn’t I think of that?”  So many ideas seem obvious once someone else thinks of them, but they weren’t beforehand.

One of my favorite recent finds of this type is News from 1930.  Each day, he quotes and summarizes a bunch of articles from the Wall Street Journal of the same day in 1930.  (The page I linked to was a Sunday so the Journal wasn’t printed that day, so he picks some favorites from the week.)  Some typical selections: Read more »

No, this isn’t a post about a German communist.  We grew some red cabbage this year, just for fun, and then we had to figure out what to do with it.  I read somewhere that it’s not good for sauerkraut, but I couldn’t remember why, so I started looking for it online.  It turns out lots of people make kraut with it and claim it works just fine, so that’s what we did after all. Read more »

This lesson has been up for a while, but I wanted to get things moved before I posted any new ones.  It’s on infinitives, so now we can translate, “to be or not to be.”