The title means “random stuff.” I was going to use the Latin word for “miscellaneous,” but it turns out that’s . . . “miscellaneus,” so people would think I just misspelled it. It also reminded me it’s been a long time since I watched the movie Top Secret.
I had a great match at pool last night—4-0 over another 4-handicap like myself. I don’t know what happened, but after a couple weak shots in the first game, I ran the table and hardly missed another shot after that. One shot had the whole bar cheering, although it was more strange than difficult. I don’t have the angles quite right because this is really pushing the limits of my drawing skills, but it looked something like this:
The blue balls were my opponent’s, blocking that pocket. The red and black ball were mine. (Yes, I know the second ball shouldn’t be black in 8-ball, but I’m not gonna redraw it.) I had to cut the red ball fairly sharply, and it cut the second ball, sending it back across the table at well under 90 degrees to my original shot. It looked really cool, but making the shot isn’t hard as long as you can see the angles. It’s not the kind of shot you need to try very often, though, because there’s usually a simpler option available.
Four weeks to go in the session (plus Easter off). We were six games out of first place going into last night, and we took 3 of 5. So our chances aren’t good at this point, but we’re not out of it. Last night reminded me why I play league: Livermores’ is a nice corner bar where the people are usually pretty laid back and friendly; the other team was cool and sportsmanlike; and the music wasn’t overly loud. All in all, it was a good night. Maybe for the summer, while I take a break from pool, I can find a softball team that needs a slow-footed infielder.
I don’t know if I mentioned it already, but we bought eight chicks a few days ago. They’re in the garage under a heat lamp for now, and they seem to be bigger every time I go check on them. They’re eight different egg-laying breeds, seven girls and one who hasn’t chosen a gender yet. We’re not sure if we’re going to build a chicken house or use some sort of large mobile “tractor” cage, but we’ve got some time to figure that out. Angel’s going to be blogging about them with pictures, so I’ll just point over there when she does.
Lettuce and Swiss chard are coming up in the garden now, so I’ve seen everything except carrots. They usually do take longer. After the snow, the soil was really saturated, but the sun later that day helped dry it out a little. Even our 11-inch-high raised beds were holding water for a while, but they drain a lot faster than the soil at ground level does.
I don’t get sick very often these days, but with the combination of working a lot of stressful hours and the weather jumping around lately, I picked up a cold a couple weeks ago. I got over it once, then last weekend it came back stronger. It’s been really miserable this time. I’m so stuffed up it’s hard to breathe, especially at night. For some reason, it doesn’t occur to me to do something smart like have some chicken broth, so I just sit around sniffling and breathing through my mouth waiting for it to go away.
photo from flickr.com
I’m not really hungover; all I drank at the bar last night was water. But I’m tired, achy, and sort of foggy and slow, so most of the same symptoms are there except for the headache.
I’m going to be glad when this pool league session is over. I enjoy playing and being there, especially when I win like I did last night. But it makes Sunday too long a day, starting with 8am Mass and ending around 11pm after pool league, usually with a family visit or a party of some sort in between. For an introvert like me, even if all those things are enjoyable, they certainly don’t make for a day of rest. I feel like I need to start taking Mondays off to recover from Sunday. That doesn’t seem right.
Oh well, seven more weeks and this session will be over. I’ll take the summer off for sure, and then switch to a weeknight if I play in the fall. When I used to play on Tuesday nights, that was much better.
When it was raining yesterday, I wished we’d gotten some garden seeds planted. But it got so cold last night we might be glad we waited. If it’s too cold for germination to start and the seeds are completely soaked for a few days, they may rot. After this storm front moves through, we should be able to plant our early stuff just in time for the next sunny spell.
My FreeBSD-induced traffic surge seems to have dwindled now. It’s amazing how you can write 100+ articles about all sorts of different things, and you never know which one is going to happen to catch the attention of a much busier site and get you a link that quintuples your traffic overnight. I guess that’s why most blogging experts focus more on how to create or attract links from big sites than they do on writing the actual content. The content doesn’t have to be especially good or original, if the right person decides to share it.
Recently we tried a new recipe I found on Jimmy Moore’s low-carb site, low-carb baked macaroni and cheese using shirataki noodles. It was pretty good, but I made the mistake of replacing the bread crumbs with crushed pork rinds and the rinds turned out to be fairly stale, so that flavor kind of overwhelmed the mild flavor of the mac-and-cheese. Next time we’ll get some low-carb bread for the crumbs; with those it’s still supposed to have only 5 grams of carb per serving. Fresh pork rinds would probably work okay too, but it really doesn’t need to be lower in carbs than 5/serving. When we get it the way we like it, I’ll do a full article on it with pictures and talk some more about those noodles.
Cards
I’m really falling down on my blogging duties lately—darn work anyway. Why can’t I have 10,000 visitors a day, so I could just spend the day writing and playing bridge? Ah well, someday. Read more »
I had a moment of panic this morning when I changed from a spam-filter plugin to a captcha for my comments and registration form. Suddenly I couldn’t get anything but a blank page when I went to my blog. I had the awful thought that something might have gone haywire and deleted all my stuff, but it turned out I only needed to delete my cookies, and all was well again. Whew. Read more »
