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’ve got a list of “fall-back” topics to write about when I don’t have a new idea, but none of them appeal to me tonight, so I guess I’ll just start writing and see what falls out of my head. By the way, if anyone is getting a weird thing where their browser fades this page and makes it impossible to click on anything, please let me know. I think it’s just happening to me because of a Google Analytics problem; at least I hope so.

We planted garlic a couple days ago. It really should have been planted a month ago so it would have a few weeks to get established before the ground started to freeze, but chores are like fine wine to me: I like to let them get plenty of age. Now I need to tack plastic across the bed to keep the soil warm for a while. Hmm, maybe there’d be room to spread some lettuce seed under there too, and have a little winter salad.

I added some compost from the compost bin first, to replace the soil that settled and some that got kicked out of the bed when Pepper dug up a huge bone a couple months ago. I still have no idea how that got in there in the first place.

I haven’t had the time to do any more ActionScript programming, but that might be a good thing. I’m still annoyed with it and thinking of going with Java for that project. Incidentally, I was at the library today and noticed that they sure have a heck of a lot of computer books. I assume those were all donated by Quincy people. There are plenty of PC wizards in Quincy, so I wasn’t surprised to see a few shelves of books on Windows and DOS and MS Office and such. But there were quite a few books on more obscure, non-PC topics like TCL/Tk programming and TCP/IP networking. There were even a couple books on Perl! I wouldn’t have guessed there were more than a half-dozen people in Quincy who knew anything about TCP/IP, but apparently there’s at least one who knows it so well he could afford to give the book away—or who bought the book intending to learn it and then gave up.

I love libraries, but a book has to be pretty awful before I’ll give it away, so they don’t get many books from me. I make for that by always being late returning them, so I donate in the form of regular late fees.

I won’t go into a full rant about this, but the library’s online catalog system is horrible, far worse than the last two they had over the past several years. One example: you type in a search, say “Isaac Asimov.” It comes up and shows you the first ten matches for the search, and at the bottom a link says, “See All (79).” (First of all, why the parentheses around 79?) You click on that, and it shows you the same ten matches again, only now at the bottom there are links to page through the other 69 matches. That’s so dumb I think someone has to be playing a joke on them.

From home the speed to it isn’t bad; but from inside the library, it’s so slow some days that I think they might be running their access point across one of those 50-baud modems that you had to insert your phone handset into. (Remember that from War Games?) And for some reason, the login on the PCs is only good for 18 minutes, so if someone hasn’t used the machine recently, you have to login and restart the browser again. Again, bad joke. Their IT person needs a drug test.

There will be a bake sale at St. Rose this Sunday, Dec. 7, from 8:00-3:30. I assume it will be in the hall west of the church. I don’t know if I’ll be contributing any low-carb goodies; guess I’d better be deciding that. Someone’s also putting a church cookbook together already, so I ought to pick out some recipes for that. Cookbooks like that are always loaded with desserts, since those are usually the handed-down-by-family recipes everyone’s most proud of, so I suppose they’ll have room for some of my meat- and dairy-based concoctions too.

I wanted to blog regularly about our garden this year, with pictures and updates on how things were growing, what we were planting or harvesting each week, and so on. Clearly this did not happen. Oh well, something to do better on next year. I thought I’d write up a little recap, though, and maybe I’ll remember to look back at this next year to remind me of a few things.

Our garden consisted of two 4′x8′ raised beds in the back yard, with about 5-6 hours of sunlight.  The raised beds were a blessing this year, since we got tons of rain for once.  Other people had plants drowning, while ours could drain and maintain the right moisture for most things.  We never had to water at all, which was very nice.  So, on to the individual plants:

Lettuce: It’s always the same story with me and lettuce.  I get excited about all the varieties and plant half a dozen different kinds, and then end up only picking it 3-4 times before it all bolts.  We really only need 2-3 plants for the amount of lettuce we’re actually going to use; but in March, salads sound really, really good.  This year was the same: planted too much, didn’t thin it enough, and it got tall and spindly and bolted.  While it lasted, we ate as much as we wanted, though.

Peas did very well.  We had an edible-podded snap pea variety, the name of which I don’t recall, and Little Marvel and Alaska for shell peas.  Little Marvels really can’t be beat.  The Alaskas were nearly a week early, but the Little Marvels drastically out-produced them.  After opening a few dozen Alaska pods with only 1-2 peas in them, I knew why my mom sticks with Little Marvels.  The edible-podded ones grew to the top of a 3′ fence and back down to the ground again.  They did great, but all the peas got a rust or mildew from the wet weather, and died off a little sooner than they really should have.

Radishes did well, but I didn’t replant them after the first batch, so I just got one big helping.  The wet weather was good for them.

Carrots were a complete loss, as they usually are for me.  I’ve never grown a decent crop of carrots, and I don’t know why I keep trying.  I don’t even like them much, except for a little flavor in soups and stocks.  Our soil was too nitrogen-rich and wet for them, and they mostly just grew tops.

Onions were also almost a complete loss.  They really didn’t like the rich, compost-heavy soil or the moisture, and they grew maybe twice the size of the original sets.  I cleaned up 50 or so of them, and they all fit in a half-gallon freezer bag.  I’m tossing them into stocks and crock-pot recipes a half-dozen at a time, so they won’t last much longer.  We probably shouldn’t try onions or carrots in these gardens again, unless we mix some sand into a corner to make the soil drier.

Swiss chard was awesome as usual.  I’d never grown the Bright Lights variety before, and the colors are very pretty, but the taste is a little bitter or something, not as good as the old standard Fordhook.  It’s still going strong now, just a little droopy from the recent frosts.

Green beans (Blue Lake bush variety) did great as usual, but we could have used more of them.  By the time we planted them we were running out of space, so we just ended up with about four square feet of them.  We managed to freeze a few quarts, though, after eating plenty of them fresh.

Tomatoes did great, which was unusual around here this year, from what we heard.  Four Roma plants produced enough for a few salads, five pints of diced tomatoes, a couple batches of sun-dried ones, and a few quarts of sauce.

That was it for our little backyard gardens.  We also tried some new varieties of squash and melon in a plot over at the community garden, but that didn’t go so well.  Several different people grew squash, and when the squash bugs got started, they wiped out all the vining plants in a hurry.  Our plants melted in a little over a week.  We did manage to harvest a couple dozen white scalloped squash before the invasion, though.  The downside to those is that they need to be picked small or they get tough and tasteless, so going across town once a week to check them really isn’t often enough.  We learned that, for us, a garden needs to be close by, preferably where you see it every time you go outside.

Next year, we may add another 4×8 bed, but we haven’t decided that yet.  If we cut back on the lettuce, carrots, and onions, leave out the colored Swiss chard, and add more green beans, we should be in good shape, even with our small plots.

I know I’ve posted a lot about low-carbing and diet lately, and I don’t want my blog to be all about that, but I ran across another very good article today. This one is all about the cholesterol myth: where it came from, why it has such a stranglehold on us, and why it’s wrong. Money quote:

The MR-FIT trial in the USA was the most determined effort to prove the case. This was a massive study in which over 350,000 men at high risk of heart disease were recruited. In one set of participants, cholesterol consumption was cut by 42 percent, saturated fat consumption by 28 percent and total calories by 21 percent. This should have made a noticeable dent in heart disease rates.

But nothing happened. The originators of the MR-FIT trials refer to the results as ‘disappointing’, and say in their conclusions: ‘The overall results do not show a beneficial effect on Coronary Heart Disease or total mortality from this multifactor intervention.’ [my emphasis]

That’s an enormous study, and there are plenty of others like it, but they go against conventional wisdom and billions of dollars invested in food and health marketing, so they’re ignored. Here’s the link!