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.