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.

I’m not a big fan of captchas, but I’m even less a fan of sorting through 500+ spam comments every month just in case a real person’s comment gets caught in there.  Now commenters can be certain I’ll see their comments and be able to approve them.  As always, please let me know if something doesn’t work for you.

Our soup-and-sandwich lunch at St. Rose went quite well.  The snow and slick roads probably kept some people away, but we had a pretty full house right after High Mass.  At least we got some practice at running something like that and raised some money for the organ repairs; and we didn’t run out of anything except pie (there was plenty of cake and cookies).  There were lots of compliments on the food, and from what I could see from my post at the money table, things ran smoothly and everyone had a good time.  There should be another meal of some sort toward the end of February, so I’ll be sure to announce it when I hear something.  We’re tossing around some other fundraiser party ideas too; it’s just a matter of figuring out what we can handle and what will attract people.

At pool league last night, I kind of got the shaft (excuse the pun).  We thought I was playing the other team’s 5-handicap (I’m a 4.)  So after he won a game, I won a game, and he won a game, we were essentially tied, both needing three games to win.  He wasn’t shooting very well for a 5, and I would have won the third game if I hadn’t shanked my last shot by trying to get too fancy with it, so all-in-all I was feeling pretty confident that I could win three before he would.

In the fourth game, I was down to the 8-ball and maybe one other, and he made a nice run-out of about 6 balls for his third win.  Suddenly he’s coming over to me to shake my hand, like it’s over.  I’ve played guys who lost track of a game before, but never someone who thought he had two more wins than he actually had!  I checked with my captain, who said it was 3-1, and she checked with the other team, and sure enough, it was 3-1.  But it turned out the guy was a 3 handicap, not a 5, and the match was over.

I can’t say I would have won if I’d known, but I sure would have been playing more carefully if I’d known I was facing a 3 playing above his level rather than a 5 playing below it.  Oh well, I guess it was a good reminder of why I need to stay focused and do my best on every shot, regardless of the situation.

We recently received an ice cream maker as a late wedding gift, and made our first batch of frozen yogurt (with strawberries) the other day.  We used Splenda, so it had a manageable 7 carbs per half-cup serving.  (My idea of a “serving” of ice cream used to be closer to bucket-sized than half-cup-sized, but oh well.)  It tasted great, but when left in the freezer it froze nearly as solid as ice, since Splenda doesn’t have the same structural properties as sugar.  So we’re going to have to experiment with other ways of keeping the ice cream soft, like adding a little alcohol or emulsifiers like guar gum or xanthan gum.  (Or only make as much as we’ll eat at one sitting.)  We’ll be sure to post the results on one of our blogs when we do.

I found out this weekend that I need to sell four hogs (or eight halves) by early March.  Guess I’d better wrap this up and get to work on my post about that!