St. Rose is having a soup and sandwich lunch this coming Sunday, the 25th, from 11:00-4:00.  It’s on the St. Rose web site, but I still get St. Rose searchers here because of my articles about it, so I thought I’d announce it too.  The meal is $6/person or $25/family, and includes chicken noodle soup, ham and bean soup, cream turkey sandwiches (whatever that is), and coffee and ice tea.  There will also be two raffles: a 50-50; and one for an overnight stay at Stoney Creek Inn plus a gift basket.  Tell all your friends!

Hey, I’ve got two “followers” on Twitter already!  Maybe it’s not as silly as it looks.  I put a little widget in my blog’s sidebar to show my “tweets,” so everyone can bask in the glow of my <140-character thoughts.

I also put an Amazon banner on my blog.  It’s supposed to show items that relate to the content on the page, but it may not match well right away.  I hope it’s not too intrusive, and that people don’t think I’m selling out.  At current traffic rates,  I stand to make about 10 cents a day, so I don’t think my greed is out of control.

I thought I’d use Amazon rather than Google AdSense, since AdSense is everywhere these days, and I really do like and use Amazon a lot.  Also, so much traffic comes from Google that if you count on them for your income too, it’s too much eggs-in-one-basket to feel safe.  Do something to make them dislike your site, and they can hurt you from both ends.  It doesn’t matter now, but I don’t want to set myself up to be dependent on any one company in the future.

Our new pool league session started last night.  We did pretty well, winning 3 out of 5.  I started out smoking against a 3-handicap, winning the first three games easily; then I tightened up a little and let the next two games slip away, so we were both “on the hill” (one win away from winning the match).  I managed to pull out the last game for the win, though, so I’m undefeated for the year!

Speaking of smoking: I noticed a guy smoking in the back employee area (illegally!!!) but I never noticed the smell; yet when I got home, I could smell it on my clothes.  Weird how that works; I guess I still expect some smoke smell in a bar, enough so that I don’t notice a little of it while I’m there.

I’m going to have to lay off the Christmas nuts for a while.  I seem to have no ability whatsoever to regulate my consumption of them.  I’ll gladly sit and crack almonds, pecans, Brazil nuts, and hazelnuts until I’ve eaten pounds of them.  Thing is, they’re all wonderfully low-carb if eaten in normal amounts of an ounce or so.  But if I eat a pound for lunch and another pound for dinner, that’s not so low-carb anymore.  Peanuts are the same way; I could sit and eat a bucketful of peanuts in the shell and end up taking in 100 carbs.  I wouldn’t feel as bad as if I’d eaten 100 carbs worth of potatoes because they’d be spread out over more time, but I sure wouldn’t be losing any weight.

On a related note, I’ve stopped using Fitday again.  It’s just too much trouble when you cook at home, especially when you make things up as you go along.  For lunch today I had a ham salad sandwich with low-carb bread.  (Something I don’t use very often, since two pieces reach my per-meal carb limit.)  To enter that into Fitday, I’d first have to enter the ham, onion, celery, pickle juice, and mayo I used to make the ham salad, to get total counts for the ham salad itself.  But before I could do that, I’d have to enter the olive oil, coconut oil, egg, mustard, and lemon juice that I used to make the mayo, to get values for the mayo to figure out the ham salad.  After all that, I’d have to enter the cheese, lettuce, mayo, and bread that went with the ham salad to make the sandwich.  All these ingredients at each stage would have to be measured by volume or weight.

That’s just way too much work to put in on one little sandwich.  It’d take longer to get it all calculated and recorded accurately than it did to make them all.  Much simpler to estimate in my head: “Ok, 10 carbs for the bread, one for the cheese, say 5 for the ham salad to be safe—16 total.”  I could enter that into Fitday, but if I’m estimating, I might as well just write it in a food journal of my own that doesn’t make me re-login every time I use it.

Anyway, no more nuts for me for a while.  Except peanut butter on pork rinds—I seem to be able to limit myself to a reasonable amount on that, and they’re darn good.  That reminds me: I need to come up with more low-carb dips and coatings for pork rinds.  They’re about the only way to get some crunch into this diet.

I haven’t paid much attention to the NFL since the Chiefs hired Herm Edwards and surrendered all hope of winning for a while, but I did catch the first half of the Cardinals/Eagles game Sunday.  It was fun watching the Cardinals take a big lead and end up winning, after all the sports experts dismissed them for winning a weak division and treated them like a second-tier team that didn’t have a chance.  Now they’re one game away from really making all the talking heads look like fools.  Fun to see Kurt Warner winning again too, since he was supposed to be washed up a few years ago, and he takes a lot of grief for his outspoken Christianity.  Always nice to see a guy almost as old as me who can still outplay the kids out there.  Here’s hoping they take it to the Steelers.

In other news:

My wife Angel just started a blog of her own.  I don’t know what all she’ll be writing about, but she’s a good writer, so go check it out.  Her article on driving through the Alps in her tiny blue car (which you might have seen around Quincy) is both funny and interesting.

My RSS feed was getting hammered lately according to StatPress, going from 3-5 hits a day to 40+.  That didn’t jibe with the rest of my stats,  so I started looking at the raw logs.  Turns out it was all search engines that StatPress didn’t recognize as such.  Did some more research and found out StatPress has been superceded by StatPress Reloaded, so I installed that, and that corrected things, shifting lots of my supposed “visitor” traffic over to “seach engine” traffic.  It doesn’t look as impressive now, but at least it’s fairly accurate.

I tell clients not to watch their stats and rankings and all that, but it’s hard not to, especially when you’re just getting started and each viewer is a large percentage of the whole.  Too much stat-watching just makes a person crazy, though.  I probably should just check it weekly, or even monthly.

I had to change the starter in my truck today.  It’s been wanting to start less and less, and the last couple really cold mornings, I had to roll it downhill and pop the clutch to start it.  That’s okay in a pinch, but it’s not always convenient to park on a hill, so I figured I’d better get it done before I get stuck somewhere.  It was a fairly simple job except for breaking loose one stubborn bolt.  I finally put a pipe over the end of the ratchet and started pulling:  something had to give, either the bolt or my wrench.  Luckily the bolt gave first.

It sure is nice doing work like that in a garage on clean concrete.  It was a little chilly, but so much better than sliding around in dirt or gravel.  Lots easier to find a bolt when you drop one, too.

The darn County Market hasn’t put the nuts in the shell on sale yet.  It used to be: they put the nuts out when the Christmas shopping season started, then after Christmas, they chopped the price to get rid of them all before year-end inventory.  And I’d go stock up and eat them ’til spring, like a squirrel.  My theory is that, since the stores are so much bigger now, they really don’t need the space like they used to.  They can leave them at the regular price in a corner somewhere and let people pick at them until they’re gone.  I’ll keep watching and hoping, though.

The only downside is the nutshells. It’s impossible to crack these things without pieces of shell occasionally flying away. It’s just a given that we’re going to sweep some up this time of year, and eating them in bed is a very bad idea. They’re worth putting up with the shells, though. I like them all, even the Brazil nuts, which can be a bear to crack open. Sort of takes me back to those childhood Christmas mornings when we woke up to find presents under the tree—and nuts, malted milk balls, hard candy, and my mom’s peanut brittle in bowls on the table. I can’t really eat the other stuff now, but I can still have the nuts. They were always my favorite anyway.

To me, the best tasting ones are black walnuts, which we harvest at least every other year, but for those you need more than a standard one-handed nutcracker. For those, you need a hammer, a brick, or an industrial-sized cracker. Then the pieces of shell are really flying. They sure taste great, though, and they’re full of nutrition. I need to try to work some into a low-carb cheesecake somehow; that’s sounding very good right now.