Surprises are fun—in birthday gifts and haunted houses.  I don’t find that they’re very conducive to a prayerful state, though.  I’m trying to keep these posts positive about the Latin Mass, rather than a list of negatives about the Novus Ordo Mass, but one thing I never liked with the NO Mass was the tendency for surprises.  I’ve never seen extremes like clown masses or Dorito “hosts” around here, but you never knew when you’d be asked to hold hands with the people across the aisle, or a priest would start the Mass by striding out front and asking the out-of-towners to introduce themselves, or someone would give a talk after Mass with a puppet.

Even if you enjoy those things, the variations mean you have to keep your head up and stay prepared so you can react when something unexpected happens.  (If you’re easily spooked, they make you feel like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, as the saying goes.)  If you’re deep in prayer, the people next to you will think you hate them when you don’t hold hands or whatever the latest thing is.  I much prefer the consistency of the Latin Mass.  There will be no surprises, so I know exactly what’s going to happen (now that I’ve been to a few), and I can relax and be as deeply meditative or as focused on the Sacrament as I like.  The priest is going to say all the prayers and readings as they are in the missal, the bells are going to ring at the proper times, and everything will be nice and consistent.  No surprises.

Photo from Flickr.com

That’s not only true from week to week within a single church that practices the Roman Rite, but also for all Latin Masses held around the world.  You might walk into two Novus Ordo Masses in the same town and have two very different experiences, but you can walk into two Latin Masses anywhere in the world and assist at the very same Mass (except for the sermon, which will be in the local language).  That gives me a sense of unity with the entire Church that I never felt before.

This unity even stretches over time, as the Latin Mass has been changed very little for the past 1500 years, and substantially goes all the way back to the Apostles.  At any hour of the day, a Mass with the same language and motions and meaning is being said somewhere on the surface of the earth.  In a sense, the Latin Mass is one long prayer that Catholics of all nations and races have been saying consistently and continuously for centuries!  That seems like a very powerful idea to me; one that inspires me whenever I’m part of it.

When I’m at Mass now, I’m praying the same prayers and assisting at the same rite as my grandparents (until the 1970s, anyway), my great-grandparents, and most of the saints.  There’s a real feeling of connection there that goes way beyond the group of people in the pews.  I’m not usually much of a joiner, but that’s one “community” I like being a part of.

I got some cool stuff, too, which is always nice.  We spent some of the deer hunting money my folks gave us on a really nice food processor.  The only odd thing about it is that you turn the pieces clockwise to remove them.  Maybe it was intended for sale south of the equator.  Anyway, it seems to be very good quality, and it does a fine job of turning pork rinds into powder for breading things.  It came from Amazon, so I’ll have to do a review of it once we’ve used it more.

My sister gave us the book lover’s version of Trivial Pursuit.  Now, I probably read close to a hundred books a year,  so I think I qualify as a “book lover.”  I pulled ten cards out and read the 60 questions on them, and got 1½ right.  Yikes, it might take us all day to finish a game!  Most of the questions seem to be about classic literature, and most of my reading has been epic fantasy, sci-fi, mysteries, westerns, and so on.  Maybe when we actually play it, we’ll run into more of those kinds of questions.

I got two of those “Life Is Good” T-shirts from Angel.  I have to admit, I don’t completely understand the Life Is Good phenomenon.  I’ve heard other people rave about them, and I’m not sure exactly why.  I do like them, though, because they seem to be very good quality and they’re not advertising a shoe or beer company.  Works for me.

I got a left-handed weekly planner, where the pages go “backwards.”  It’s kind of a cool idea, but it might be hard to get used to, after 30+ years of using right-handed books.  It also has little jokes and facts about left-handedness, though, so that’s fun.

My brother’s family got me a stand for grilling beer-butt chicken.  That’s where you stick a can of beer (or other liquid) into the cavity of a whole chicken, and stand the chicken up on the can while it grills.  The moisture rising into the chicken is supposed to keep it from drying out, but it can be hard to keep the chicken from tipping over.  This stand holds the beer (and thus the chicken) in place, and can hold two at once.  Should come in handy this summer.

My godson Stephen got me cheese.  You can never have too much cheese.  One block is like basil and tomato flavored or something, so that should be interesting.

Those are some of the highlights.  We also gave some really fun gifts, like the T-shirt for my niece that says, with the lettering upside-down, “If you can read this, get me up and help me catch my goats.”  Almost everyone in my family has been knocked down and stepped on by some kind of runaway animal or another; but since she’s the one who raises goats, she won the prize.

So, now we settle into a few months of winter, with only our seed catalogs to keep us company and remind us that spring will be here eventually.  It’s usually about now that I start circling about three varieties of every vegetable in the catalog, making overly ambitious plans for all the things I’d like to grow if I had a 5-acre garden.  Kind of silly, but it helps put some color into those cold, gray winter days.

Covenant snatched at her wrist. “Listen.” His voice must have held emotion—urgency, anguish, something—but she did not hear it. “This you have to understand. There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.”

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

In this first book of The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen R. Donaldson, it has been ten years since Covenant’s last trip to the Land.  During that time, he gets control of his leprosy and begins writing again.  His life reaches a certain level of peace until Lord Foul is able to use someone close to him to pull him to the Land again, to give Foul another shot at using Covenant’s ring to escape the world which is his prison.

Everything is different this time, though, because Linden Avery, a doctor who just moved into town and met Covenant, is pulled into the Land with him.  Where Covenant’s leprosy makes him fear power, Linden’s childhood upbringing and vocation make her crave power—power to heal and make things right, whatever the cost.  Last time, Covenant had the power of the wild magic but didn’t know how to use it; this time Foul makes his power come too easily, so every time he uses it he risks destroying the world.

Ten years in Covenant’s world translates to four thousand years in the Land, and Lord Foul hasn’t been idle.  He has corrupted the Earthpower that was the essence of the Land’s beauty and life, changing it over the centuries into the Sunbane, an extreme distortion of nature and weather that makes bare existence difficult.  The people of the Land have lost their wood and stone lore, and the Lords have been replaced by the Clave, who claim to be fighting the Sunbane with the blood of people they take.

Linden can sense the pain of the Land the way Covenant could on his first visit, and the fact that she can’t escape it or fight it tears at her soul.  She yearns for power like Covenant’s so she can rip the Sunbane out of the earth, though she knows that could destroy the Land entirely.

I’d have to say I like this series better than the first three books, although you shouldn’t read these without reading the others first.  It’s a completely fresh look at the Land, and Covenant is a different person after ten years and what he went through last time.  Having Linden as the co-protagonist makes a big difference too, as her aggression about power and fighting evil counters his hesitancy.  For people who found Covenant unlikeable, especially in the first book, she’s a much more sympathetic character.  Seeing them alternately through each other’s eyes offers insights into both of them.

The stakes are higher here, in a way, and yet more subtle.  In the first series, Foul came with armies to defeat the Lords, intending to defeat Covenant in the end and take his ring.  Here, he tries to box Covenant and Linden into a position where they’ll destroy the world for him.  He’s spent four thousand years setting up this scenario, and it’s a doozy.

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.

Photo from Flickr

I wish I had a nickel for every time I was headed out the door and realized I didn’t have my keys, and had to go searching through pockets and other places for them.  Or every time I got into my truck and realized my keys were still in my jeans pocket, and had to go digging for them.  Or every time I go out to the garage, thinking it’s still open from the last time I went out there, and have to come back for my keys.  I don’t cuss very much, but I bet 80% of the cussing I do is key-related.  (The other 20% is from stubbing my toe, or when I sit down at the table to eat and realize I forgot to get a fork.)

I suspect most engineering and programming types feel similarly about locks and keys.  Whether we’re talking about physical keys or software keys, they only stop the casual burglar; a serious thief will break the window or the copy protection.  But they always slow down your own access to your stuff, slowing the flow of information or people, even when they work well.  When they don’t work well—when a key sticks or a lock is frozen, or it’s too dark to see which key is which, or you lose your keys—they’re a pain.

In the software world, when you get used to working with open-source software like I do, dealing with key-licensed software seems like a ridiculous dance.  If I want to install an open-source e-commerce package like OS Commerce, for example, I download it, install it, configure it, and start using it.  When upgrades come out, I download and install them.  Simple.  If I want to use a licensed package like X-Cart, I have to buy it and wait for them to supply me with the correct package and license key.  I may have to register the key and wait for confirmation, although that’s faster than it used to be.  Then when I need to upgrade, I’ll need my purchase information again to get the upgrade packages from them.  When they rollover to a new major version someday, I’ll probably have to start the whole process over.

Luckily I don’t have to deal with that mess very often—only when someone else picked the software.  I still have to deal with my house and truck keys, though.  It’s really about time we had cheap and reliable retina or fingerprint scanners to replace our primitive key locks.  There will be ways to circumvent those too, but they’ll still slow down the casual snooper and help us feel safe.  Most importantly, I’ll cuss a lot less.

My main impression of the past year is that it flew by in a hurry.  I guess that’ll happen, when you move and get married and get busier at work all in one year.  Then there was the work at St. Rose, which I didn’t spend all that much time at, but when you go from zero hours of volunteering to some hours, it’s a change.  By most people’s social standards, I probably haven’t been that busy; but compared to my usual pace, this year has almost been hectic.

I’ll also remember this as the year of cluelessness about economics.  Gas prices went over $4, and people claimed we had hit Peak Oil and prices would never come down again.  Um, it’s $1.59 today.  Did we find a big ocean full of oil no one knew about?  No, it just turns out oil is a commodity, which means the price of it depends less on actual supply and demand than it does on perceptions in the commodities market.  The same thing was true of grain prices, which rose for the first time in decades and had people preaching doom about food shortages, despite the fact that the US government continues to pay farmers not to farm over 34 million acres of ground.   Another doozy:  The Clinton and Bush administrations decided to push lenders to give low-interest and no-money-down mortgages to high-risk applicants who would have been turned down by sensible standards in the past.  When many of those people predictably failed to keep up their payments and the home lending system crashed, experts decided this was the fault of deregulation twenty years ago.  Hmm…

Oh well, enough of the dumb stuff that happened.  On to some good stuff…

This was the year that the local food movement seemed to really gain traction in this area, getting regular mentions in the newspaper and attention from the grocery stores.  I expect that will continue in the coming year.  We did pretty well, raising some of our own food and buying some of the rest locally, but I hope to make a greater effort on that this year.  There are at least four farmers’ markets now in Quincy througout the week (that I know of), so it’s not hard to get to one and know where at least some of your food comes from.

This was also the year that the Latin Mass was brought back to Quincy.  That has rekindled my Catholic faith, which was pretty much at a low smolder in recent years.  Judging by the enthusiasm shown by all the people who helped get St. Rose ready with time and contributions, and the number of people who have been attending Mass since it started, I’m not the only one.  I’m looking forward to seeing how it grows and contributes to the faith of the community in the coming year.

Like I mentioned, I got married, which is pretty cool.  We’re still adjusting, because we’re both old enough to be pretty set in our ways, and a lot of my stuff is still boxed up in the garage because we don’t have much space, but none of that matters much.  It feels like we’re going somewhere together, with the same future in mind, which is really nice.

This was the year low-carbing seemed to really come together for me.  I finally reached a point where I knew I had to stick with this if I didn’t want to be diabetic or worse in another five years, not to mention increasingly overweight.  I’ve known that for a while, but for some reason it took a lot of research, self-testing, and time for it to sink in and become a real conviction.  Finally, I can politely turn down anyone’s dessert, no matter how hard they worked on it, no matter how many times they ask me if I’m sure I don’t want some.  It was a long road getting here.

Oh yes, this was also the year I got all the Magnum P.I. episodes on DVD, so be warned: there will be a slug of Magnum episode reviews coming at some point in the future!

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but I do have some goals I plan to work on.  I have at least a half-dozen new web site ideas that I think could be popular and profitable, some of my own and some jointly with others, but they’re all stalled at the construction stage or three-quarters-formed in my head.  I’ve also got one of two online game ideas that I think are solid.  I intend to get all those into production this year, one every couple months.

I’m going to keep blogging here, at least every weekday and most weekends.  Readership is inching up ever so slowly, so that’s encouraging.  I’ll keep writing the Latin lessons weekly, which means they should continue for at least two years.

We want to find a place to start farming, even if it’s on a very small scale for now.  (We’re looking mostly in the Payson/Plainville area, if anyone knows of some pasture/timber ground with water on it that’s available for sale or rent.)  For starters, we want to raise enough beef, pork, chicken, and eggs for ourselves, but eventually we want to be able to sell to others too.  We’re also interested in raising freshwater prawns (shrimp), but that’s probably a longer-term project.

It’s starting to sound like next year will be even busier than this one, but if we get all that done, it’ll be worth it.

To summarize: over six months, a low-carb diet beat high-fiber, low-fat, and low-GI diets in every way: weight loss, blood sugar levels, the important cholesterol numbers and ratios (the changes in HDL and triglycerides are especially striking, but no surprise to someone who’s been talking to low-carbers for years), and even blood pressure.  We win.

Photo by recyclethis.co.uk

The focus on low-GI (glycemic index) carbs was a way to try to have our cake and eat it too—as long as the cake was made from whole grains.  Low-GI carbs are basically what we used to call “complex carbs”: long-chain starches that take longer to break down in the body, so they don’t spike blood sugar as drastically.  For diabetics, this affects how much of what type of insulin to take, and can mean the difference between diabetic coma or just poor health.

But in the long run, all non-fiber carbs are broken down into simple sugars and absorbed, no matter how complex they were when you ate them.  (And they break down faster than people used to think.  Dr. Bernstein points out that if you chew up some complex carbs and spit them out onto a blood sugar testing strip, it will show the presence of sugar; so they’re starting to break down as soon as saliva touches them.)  Low-GI carbs may not spike blood sugar as much in the immediate term as high-GI carbs, but they’ll keep it high longer while they’re being broken down, and the total amount of insulin that has to be produced to handle them will be about the same.  Since excess insulin triggers most of these other problems like high triglycerides, low-GI carbs don’t help much there, as the charts show.  Lowering carbs, regardless of type, does help.  A carb is a carb is a carb, for the most part.

Anyway, if you’re interested, don’t take my word for it; go read the whole thing.  Low-carb studies this clear have been scarce, since no one wants to fund anything that could be said to encourage the eating of fat.  Usually they claim to be low-carb while having people eat a fairly high level of carbs like 150g/day, or they combine low-carb with calorie restriction or something else that confuses the issue.  This is the first time I’ve seen one that compared low-carb to other diets this honestly over this long a time period, and the results are very clear.

Photo by Carolyn Coles

I’m not exactly what you’d call a clothes-horse.  Since I work from home, most days my only fashion decision is whether to bother putting on shoes with my jeans and t-shirt, or stick with slippers.  If I couldn’t ask my wife whether my clothes match, I’d have to buy Garanimals.  I own one suit and about half a dozen ties—most of which were gifts, and at least one of them was last in style about the time Miami Vice went off the air.

So I don’t want to sound like a clothes snob, and I wouldn’t want anyone to let a lack of dressy clothes to stop them from coming to the Latin Mass, but I’m glad people make an effort to dress nice.  The men run the gamut from nice jeans and a collared shirt to three-piece suits.  The women wear dresses or nice slacks, and many choose to wear veils.  Kids tend to dress like their parents.  Some people have to dress more casually for weekday Mass because they’re on their lunch breaks and have to come in their work clothes even if they’re in construction, but they still do their best.  No one wears T-shirts with distracting slogans, or jeans or pants tight enough to get the people behind them thinking really inappropriate thoughts.

In general, people look like they’re wearing their “Sunday best,” whatever that is for them.  For me, that adds a touch of reverence and respect, and helps set a mood of what we’re doing here is important.

When I was a kid, we had our “church shoes” that we only wore to church, and woe betide the child who got his church shoes dirty!  It was just one of those little things that said going to Mass was special, that it deserved something extra, so I’m glad to see people wearing their “church shoes” again.

This second lesson covers the first conjugation (of verb forms), the present tense, word order, using the accusative for direct objects, and a few other odds and ends.