Quit Whining About Enemies You Feed and Arm

I’m enjoying my adventures with the propane grill and my new Coleman propane burner.

The first rib eye I prepared using the grill was very good, but I felt it needed more heat, and I also wanted to see if I could fry with the grill. I have been experimenting.

I bought myself a cast iron griddle from Walmart. I have cast iron skillets, but I prefer to have a dedicated piece of cookware for frying steaks, because they leave residue behind. I figured I would lay the griddle on the grill, turn the grill up, and see what happened.

The short version is this: the grill will not get hot enough to fry a steak. When you fry steak in butter, you need to be on the verge of burning the meat. When you get the heat right, it puts a dark brown crust on the steak, without ruining the inside. By “ruining,” I mean medium-well or better. Anything past medium is a catastrophe. The griddle I bought fits the grill like it was made for it, and it would do a bang-up job on a huge mess of eggs, but for meat, it won’t work, even when you remove the heat deflectors from above the burners.

It may be possible to lower the griddle farther if I remove the rack, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I also tried making the burners hotter.

My grill came with a propane regulator that’s not adjustable. You get the pressure you get. I looked around on the web, and I learned that there are adjustable regulators that improve grill performance in some cases. I went to Lowe’s and bought one. It’s a Loco-brand regulator, and you have to admit, that sounds promising. It’s for a turkey fryer. When I tried to use it on the grill, I found that the flames went out when I turned it up. I don’t know if leftists have somehow managed to rig grills up so they can’t be hacked, or what. It’s the kind of thing they love to do. Anyway, I haven’t managed to get more heat yet.

I also got a Coleman butane stove. This is a single burner the size of a phone book. You insert a tiny can of butane in it, and you get 7200 BTU’s. It’s very light. Maybe they realize people will put them in backpacks.

I had a hard time getting fuel. For some reason, Walmarts run out. I got around this by ordering it for pickup at a local Walmart. That way, they had to hold it for me. Today I tried it on a porterhouse. I couldn’t find a good deal on a rib eye.

Summary: it’s fantastic. It’s more than hot enough to put a good crust on a steak. Zero complaints. I need a small griddle so I can stop using my Griswold skillet, but other than that, I’m ready to go. The stove is a blast to use. You can carry it (and its fuel) in one hand. You can put it on any flat surface while you cook, because it won’t heat anything under it. It’s stupendous. Now I can fix steaks without cleaning the kitchen.

If you love frying meat on the stove, but you hate the mess, check the Coleman stove out. You won’t be sorry.

For under $150, I can barbecue as well as anyone, and I will never have to touch charcoal.

In other news, I threw some books out today. Nice segue, I know. God keeps showing me that I have opened doors for Satan, and one way I do this is by holding onto objects Satan likes. I threw out my blues CD’s a while back. I have since thrown out most of my jazz. Today I got rid of books that were unsavory.

Satan has a really neat way of getting us to approve filth. He tells us it’s culture. Example: the incredible obsession with nudity during the Renaissance. Most parents would have a problem with a son who put photographs of naked men on the wall in his room, but how many would complain about a picture of Michelangelo’s David? Right now, you can walk into a chapel in the Vatican–a Christian church–and see a vast array of naked figures on the walls and ceiling. Imagine going in there and trying to hold up a Playboy centerfold. They’d throw you in the street. Imagine trying to go in naked. The cognitive dissonance is thunderous, but no one seems to notice.

The word “renaissance” means “rebirth.” Europeans idolized the ancient Greeks, and they copied them slavishly. The Greeks loved dirty art, and Europeans revived their trashy passion. While rediscovering science and math, Europeans gave a new birth to some things that were better left dead.

Europeans revered Plato and Socrates, even though they were, by any reasonable standard, perverts and sexual predators. They revered Homer even though his work glorified paganism and kept its false gods before the public eye.

A couple of years ago, I decided to go back over some books I avoided reading in college. I took a course called Literature Humanities at Columbia University, and I didn’t do much of the reading. My professor thought I was an eccentric genius, so he didn’t fail me, but I did very little work, and I didn’t go to class. Another reason I didn’t fail: along with a huge percentage of my peers, I cheated on the final exam. Some of the instructors released the questions in advance, and naturally, people got together in groups and worked on the answers before taking the test.

I used to feel bad about cheating. I only recall one definite instance of cheating on tests in my life. I may also have cheated somewhat on Columbia’s Contemporary Civilazation final. I can’t recall. Through the irresponsibility of the instructors, many people had the test questions, so things happened.

I never cheated in order to do better than other people. I only cheated to avoid failing a course. Maybe that’s not as bad.

Anyway, I bought horrible books by people like Homer and Aeschylus, and I forced myself to read them. I bought Plato’s Symposium, which is about a bunch of homosexual predators getting together to see who can be the most pedantic. I bought a number of things. I bought Vergil.

God has been telling me not to expose myself to occult materials. He even told me to quit watching Marvel movies, because–let’s face it–characters that defy physics are using occult power, even if Stan Lee blamed gamma rays. I shouldn’t watch movies about occult phenomena. I should stay away from entertainment involving witchcraft, curses, and so on. A day or two ago, God asked me something: how are works by pantheists any different from movies about witches and vampires? They’re not. They celebrate false gods and magic.

I decided to get rid of Homer, Vergil, Aeschylus, Ovid, Euripides, and whatever else seemed problematic.

I have my dad’s old Great Books of the Western World set. This is a bunch of classic works, in a collection like an encyclopedia. I hated to pull Homer and Vergil out of it and put them in a trash bag and ruin the set, which had been preserved for 50 years, but I did it.

I felt some small twinges of misgiving about discarding the works themselves. It seemed strange for an educated, cultured person to throw out Homer and Plato. Satan had part of me convinced that it was somehow wrong for a person with a proper respect for humanity’s accumulated knowledge to throw out ancient books. I was right to throw them out, though. The fact that trash is thousands of years old doesn’t turn it into treasure.

Plato and his pals used to adopt kids and sodomize them repeatedly until they got too old to be attractive. The compensation was tutoring. This was considered okay in ancient Greece. I’m sure parents were ecstatic when they learned that great men wanted to use their sons like women. It must have been a tremendous honor. How can centuries of tradition turn such perverted, Satanic notions into things we should keep on our bookshelves in Christian homes in 2019?

It’s all at the dump now. No going back.

It’s very strange that we’re so comfortable with nude art. I’ll tell you something that may amaze you: it’s possible to create great art without nudity. It’s okay to paint a woman with her clothes on. It doesn’t make you less of an artist.

I’ve taken a number of figure-drawing classes. We used naked models. It wasn’t actually helpful for people to be naked before us. It’s not like clothing on a model will prevent you from learning. The body is very simple. Clothing is complex. We would have learned more from drawing clothed models. Drawing clothing takes skill. Leonardo used to do studies of fabrics so he would be prepared to paint clothed people. This type of art is called “drapery.” You can look it up.

Arty people sometimes claim nude art is somehow pure, and that it’s abnormal to be stimulated by it. Yeah, okay. And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

I recall reading Chuck Jones’s autobiography. He told a huge lie in it. He wrote about going to art school. He said he was very excited when he accidentally saw part of a girl’s upper leg outside of class, but he didn’t feel anything when he saw totally nude models. What a crock! Regardless of what men who have taken art classes may have told you, a naked woman is just as exciting to look at in a class as she would be in a bedroom. I’m pretty sure I was never late to a figure-drawing class, and it wasn’t because I was naturally punctual. I wanted to see who was going to show up naked for us. Whenever the model turned out to be a man, I was very unhappy.

The earth is a dirty place, and we are very used to uncleanness. Much of the time, we don’t even notice it until someone points it out to us.

Yesterday, I found a new Youtube creator. He’s a guy who was homeless for a long time. He was addicted to cough syrup, of all things. The active ingredient, dextromethorphan, causes hallucinations. That’s kind of sad, because it was supposed to be a harmless alternative to codeine. Anyway, he had a very, very hard time getting free, even though demons were cast out of him more than once.

He mentioned a problem he had with a poster. He was living in a Christian shelter by choice, to avoid temptation. One day he bought a Beatles poster in order to decorate his wall. He said his peace disappeared. He had to get rid of the poster.

He talked about a famous exorcist named Bob Larson. You can see this man on Youtube. I don’t endorse him, because he’s a showman and he makes money from exorcism, but he may still know a few things. According to the former cough syrup addict, Larson says demons draw power from objects. He says a man who was being exorcised kept looking at an object, and the demon told Larson it was because the object gave him power.

Whether Larson is generally sound or not, I can’t tell you, but he is probably right much of the time. Even the worst preachers are mostly right.

The man who made the video says you need to do an inventory of your house and get rid of anything that isn’t godly. How about that?

I had never thought of objects giving demons power. I think of them as things that stink and draw flies (as in “lord of the flies”), or as signs that advertise openings to demons, or as doors. I suppose it makes sense to see evil objects as sources of power for demons. A lease gives a tenant power to stay in an apartment, so if an object gives a demon the right to stay in you, it gives him a kind of power. Authority is power.

The Beatles, in case you didn’t know, were very evil. They promoted drugs and heathen religions while fighting Christianity and Christian morality. Rock and roll really is the devil’s music. It’s not just something ignorant people say.

You can’t have it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Not unless you’re okay with very serious problems God refuses to solve for you. Grow up and get rid of it. Stop holding onto a dead lifestyle that won’t even exist in heaven. You’re never going to hear a Beatles song up there, so why hold onto them now?

I don’t want demons in my life. I don’t even like roaches, and roaches are much nicer than demons.

I expect to see an improvement in my life now that I’ve discarded the writings of perverts and pantheists. There has always been a conflict between Hellenism and Christianity. Christians are supposed to be holy, and “holy” means “belonging to God.” We can’t have everything defeated and lost people have. They can watch TV shows we can’t watch. They can smoke things we can’t smoke. They can go places we can’t go. That’s just how it is. They get to do these things because they’re going to hell.

To keep one foot in the world is to give your enemies power over you. We do this, and then we cry to God when things go wrong. “I’m a good person. Why did this happen to me?” Often, it happened because you invited it.

You may wonder why God doesn’t tell us about the dangers of forbidden objects, explicitly and repeatedly. That’s simple. We were supposed to be full of the Holy Spirit. Two thousand years ago, people knew this. They were supposed to pass it on. Each generation of Christians was supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and pray in tongues every day, and God was supposed to teach every one of us through tongues and other gifts of the Spirit. Our forebears gave the Holy Spirit up, so we weren’t taught. This is why we’re ignorant. God held up his end of the bargain. He gave us the Holy Spirit, and he promised–look it up–that he would teach us all things. Human beings are the reason it didn’t pan out.

God doesn’t automatically fix everything we ruin. He has done enough for us already. He is 0% responsible for our problems. That’s something we really need to learn. No one is even a tiny bit responsible for what other beings choose to do. God is not obligated to run around behind us, saying, “You dropped this.” He already allowed himself to be tortured to death for us. That ought to be enough. It’s a wonder he does anything at all for us.

Look how most American Christians live. They listen to evil music. They fornicate. They watch filthy entertainment. They get drunk and high. They participate in astrology. They worship athletes and entertainers. They celebrate Halloween, which is tantamount to begging Satan to hurt your children. We put idols in our houses because we think they’re art. We carry good luck charms. We amass big collections of recordings by musicians who belong to Satan. Then we wonder why we get cancer. We wonder why our kids become addicts.

My sister is a drug addict, and she is as full of hate as anyone I have ever known. She has no impulse control. She is sadistic. She abuses other people. She is the worst liar I have ever known. Being around her is torture. Nonetheless, when bad things happen to her, such as losing her home or winding up in a homeless shelter, she feels like a victim and tries to find someone else to blame. Here’s what I say: “What’s happening is normal and right and to be expected. This is exactly what’s supposed to happen when you do these things.”

The other day I realized I would much rather see her die than be subjected to her abuse ever again. That’s really something. The family is unanimous. My mother, who was very kind, asked God to take my sister if she wouldn’t change, and my dad said it would be better for her to die than to go on as she was.

To some extent, virtually everyone is like my sister. We cause our own problems, and then we tell everyone we’re victims.

I am not a victim. I’m a bad person who has done stupid things, and I have suffered the natural and correct repercussions. I may have been a victim when I was very young, but that was a very long time ago, and it has no bearing on my guilt or innocence today.

Even if other beings have sinned against me, and they will be judged for those sins, I still deserved what they did. It doesn’t mean they didn’t sin. It just means I should have expected to be sinned against.

I should not say, “Why me?”, when things go wrong. I say it when things go well.

Anyhow, the Greek rapists of boys are no longer featured prominently in my library.

Maybe this will be helpful to you. If you have a curse you can’t get rid of, maybe you’re the one doing the cursing.

After ranting about the horrible state of the pool hardware industry, I’m glad I have something positive to write about. My Pit Boss portable grill arrived today, and it’s a keeper.

I’ve been frying steaks in a cast iron skillet on the stove, and while they taste fantastic, it’s a bad method. Wife-designed kitchens like mine don’t stand up well to heavy doses of greasy smoke, and cooking a decent steak without making smoke is not possible. You have to burn the meat a little, or else you’ll ruin it.

I decided to get a gas grill, but when I started looking around, I remembered something: there are no good gas grills. It doesn’t matter what you pay. They all fall apart in a relatively short time. Spend $5000 on a grill if you want. It will have problems just like the ones from Home Depot.

I considered getting a grill from Home Depot or Lowe’s for maybe $200, figuring I would take it to the dump when it started to fail, but then I saw the Pit Boss grill on Amazon. For a hundred bucks, you get enough room to cook 6 big steaks at once, which is plenty, if you’re honest with yourself. The grill is about the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter, and it has a handle, so you can close it up and take it wherever you want. It’s all stainless, so it won’t rust enough to matter. How could you not want a grill like this?

I was so excited when the grill arrived, I drove to Tractor Supply and got a propane tank. Their propane system was not available, so I had to go to a hardware store for gas. I took the tank home, fired up the Pit Boss, and threw a cheap rib eye on it.

The grill has some kind of battery-free ignition system on it. It has two burners, and each burner has a knob. You turn the knobs to open up the gas and light the burners. Very easy.

The grill part of the grill is very nice. It’s 1/4″ stainless rod. If you buy a Home Depot grill, you get porcelain over something that rusts, at best. No comparison. The rack on the Pit Boss reminds me of the rack on the $2200 DCS I used to have.

The instructions say to run the grill for 30 minutes before putting food on it. I don’t quite understand that. I probably ran it for 5 minutes before adding the meat. It looked hot to me, and the built-in thermometer said it was hot, so I didn’t see any point in wasting time and gas.

Here’s how the grill works. It has two oval burners. Over each one there is a bent sheet of stainless. The burners heat the stainless, and the stainless radiates heat to the meat. I didn’t want to use the sheets. I like some charring on my steak, and I was afraid the metal wouldn’t radiate enough heat. I decided to try the sheets anyway, to see what would happen.

I have no doubt that the meat would have failed to char enough, but for the fact that fat dripped on the stainless sheets and caught fire. The fire charred the steak pretty well. Some people don’t like it when fire hits their beef. I don’t get that. If you don’t want a charred taste, why would you use fire to cook your meat? You can just bake it, have a grey steak, and save yourself the trouble.

The steak had a good charred flavor, and it was nice and hot under the charring. That’s how it should be. I hate a rested steak. Resting is a myth that won’t die. A steak should be very hot on the outside, and you lose that when you rest a steak. People claim a steak won’t be as juicy if you don’t rest it, but that’s ridiculous. First of all, it will only lose a teaspoon or so of fat, and second, you don’t really lose it. It stays on the plate where you can dip your steak in it.

You know what you’re really doing when you rest a steak? People claim there are secret channels inside the meat, and the juice runs around through them and redistributes itself. Laughable. Cut a steak open some day and look for the secret channels. What you’re really doing is letting the fat get cold so it’s thicker and less runny. Hot fat tastes much better than cool fat. This should be obvious.

The other day I saw something posted online by Ruth’s Chris. They claimed resting was great for steaks, but guess what? They don’t rest theirs. They come out fast, on super-hot plates, still sizzling from the salamander. They actually brag about their hot, sizzling plates.

A plate removed from a salamander will not be sizzling-hot after 5 minutes of resting. Physically impossible.

The nonsense they posted about resting was clearly written by an ad copywriter who had no idea what Ruth’s actually does. It’s a lie.

I’ll post a photo of the food. For some reason, I really like frozen broccoli with cheese sauce with steak, so that’s what you’re seeing. I wouldn’t eat it if it were a special occasion, but for a Monday night with no one else around, it’s fine, and it’s a lot easier on my stomach than a big potato. I’m convinced potatoes are poisonous. Not that I plan to quit eating them. But when I eat a big dose of potato, I feel like I swallowed a beach towel.

I plan to try two other methods of cooking. First, I’ll try it without the stainless sheets in the way. After that, I’ll try it with the sheets removed and a cast iron griddle on the rack. I love a steak fried on cast iron.

I found a very nice cast iron griddle at Walmart. The brand name is Ozark Trail. Lodge quit making the griddle I like, so I had to switch.

The grill is terrific. It makes me wonder if anyone needs a big grill. You could feed 10 people with this thing, no problem. If the size worried you, you could spend a grand total of $200 and use two grills. It sure beats spending a fortune on a large grill that’s a pain to use, doesn’t work any better, takes up more room, and doesn’t last any longer.

The grill doesn’t heat whatever it’s sitting on, so you could set it up on a plastic table or a cooler if you wanted. The legs fold up, and it has latches to keep it closed while you’re traveling.

I highly recommend this grill, but I can’t promise it will last. I’m assuming I can get at least two years out of any grill. When it finally dies, I fully intend to keep the rack. It’s way too nice to throw out.

It’s going to be so nice to be freed from the chore of cleaning beef fat off the stove and hood.

I should use this grill and my little butane stove as much as possible for messy cooking. They’ll be lifesavers until I get a glass-topped stove.

An Entire Industry That Manufactures Nothing but Junk

I feel like it’s time to buy a grill and a propane burner.

My kitchen is very nice. It has a stove with 4 burners and a grill, and it also has a fume hood. Still, the sad truth is that heating meat until it smokes doesn’t work out well in any home kitchen. Amateur kitchens are not built for cooking. They’re built for women, and most women have very unrealistic cooking priorities. Women want kitchens that look cute and quaint, so there are always a lot of things that look great new yet end up nasty because they’re so hard to clean.

There is a reason why so many real kitchens have stainless or tile walls.

Long ago, I decided the best way to get a great steak, in a home kitchen, was to fry it in butter on cast iron. This sends a lot of smoke into the air, and much of that smoke is really grease droplets. Over time, they accumulate on things. If you fry meat in your kitchen regularly, you will end up with a brown film of grease on your cabinets, walls, ceiling, and vent hood.

My kitchen has painted walls, a painted ceiling, and some kind of paint or plastic coating on the cabinets. The ceiling is very high. I don’t want to have to clean all that over and over. The vent hood lets a lot of the smoke from frying blow right by it, so it’s not that helpful.

I need to get me a propane burner and put it on the patio for frying steaks. It will look bad, but I will never have to clean anything but the skillet. Actually, I should get a rectangular griddle. That’s what I used to use back in Miami, and it was wonderful.

A grill would also be helpful. Burgers also mess up the kitchen, and sometimes you want one that’s grilled, not fried. I like to mix salt and garlic into ground chuck and grill it.

I said my stove had a grill, but here I am saying I want a new grill. Why? Because the stove’s built-in grill is totally worthless. It doesn’t get hot enough to grill anything. Also, it makes a mess.

I’ve been looking around online, trying to decide what kind of grill to get. Part of me says I should blow a lot of money and get a top-notch “professional” stainless grill that will last forever. The problem with that plan is that I tried it once, and it didn’t work. I have some wisdom to share.

1. There is no such thing as a “professional” barbecue grill. Using the word “professional” in a grill ad is fraud. They are all sold to home cooks. You have never gone to a big restaurant and eaten a steak that came off a “professional” propane grill. Restaurants use things like electric salamanders.

2. “Professional” grills aren’t worth the money. I bought a $1200 DCS grill. It was only a 30″-wide built-in, and it was a long time ago, so don’t be deceived by the somewhat low price. DCS is one of the top “professional” grill makers. The same grill costs $2200 today. It worked fine for a while. Then the plastic on one of the knobs melted, and the manifold started leaking. Getting it fixed was impossible. I could probably have found parts had I searched long enough, but I gave up on it.

There were some nice things about the DCS. It had very heavy stainless racks, and there were few if any parts that could rust. Still, it gave up the ghost after very little use. Goodbye, $1200. And the food wasn’t any better than it would have been had I bought a gas grill from Home Depot.

I’m thinking I should get a $179 dollar Home Depot propane grill. If I take care of it, which is not hard, it should last several years.

Let’s say it lasts 4 years, which is a completely reasonable expectation. The DCS grill I bought costs $2200 now. That means I can get over 49 years of trouble-free grilling for the cost of a DCS, which might last 3 years before needing difficult repairs.

Another nice thing about a cheap grill is that if I move, I can leave it here instead of taking it with me.

I may get a small propane grill that sits on a table. Cuisinart makes one, and people love it. They work very well, but sometimes the knobs go bad. There are a million sources for knobs, so I don’t care about that issue. You don’t have to buy the Cuisinart version. There are lesser-known brands that sell for maybe a third less. For a little over $100, you can get a grill that does a great job and doesn’t break your heart if you have to take it to the dump in two years.

The main problem with a tabletop grill is the need for a table. And I suppose plastic is not the smartest material for that purpose, and plastic is what I have.

Anyway, it looks like a good move to consider.

To sum up, it appears that there is no such thing as a quality gas grill, so you might as well go cheap and save money.

To get back to cooking steaks outdoors, I have a pretty good Lodge griddle, which I left in Miami. Of course, they have discontinued it, so I can either drive to Miami (no) or look for something else. Walmart has an Ozark Trail griddle which looks good and costs very little.

I should run up there. I can get a griddle there, and I can pick up a new propane burner and a tank at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

Right now, there are two rib eyes in my fridge. The local Winn-Dixie turns them loose cheap once in a while. When I first noticed them in 2017, I didn’t think to look for the words “choice” or “prime” on the packages, because it didn’t occur to me that any mainstream grocer would go below choice. Once I decided to check, I found that the packaging didn’t say “choice” anywhere on it, so I guess the steaks are select or something worse. That’s not a big deal. The rib eye is such a superior cut, a sub-choice example will still probably be an excellent steak, and if you get it for five or six bucks per pound, you have nothing to complain about.

I prepared a standing rib roast from this stuff once, and it was excellent. Prime would have been better, but it was very good. If I had read the packaging more carefully, I would have passed it by.

A choice New York strip is not much better than leather, so I wouldn’t take a chance on going below choice. A rib eye is different. Also, you can look at the meat through the plastic and see if they let a cut with unusually good marbling slip by.

But Wait…There’s More

I just found out Coleman makes a 7200-BTU butane burner. It’s very small, it’s very cheap, and you can set it right down on a table. I think I’ll grab one and wait to make a final and more expensive decision.

Now if I can Just Get it to Cast Itself into the Sea

God has given me another productive day. The trick is to pray, curse your problems, and bless your efforts, in the name of Jesus Christ, BEFORE the problems pop up.

I’ve been working on three stubborn stumps in my front yard. I got one out this weekend, and then yesterday, I went after another one, and I got a bonus. I located a huge rock near a stump, and I managed to get it out of the ground and move it out of the area. I also succeeded in removing the second stump.

Today I went after the third stump. I prayed for help. I spoke the Lord’s opposition to the difficulty of removing it, and I spoke his help to me. After maybe 90 minutes’ work with the subsoiler, drill, sawzall, and Root Assassin, the stump surprised me by surrendering suddenly. It popped out of the ground for no obvious reason.

Here it is. I may have it bronzed.

I bent the tabs that connect the subsoiler to my hitch. I don’t know how I did that. My tractor is not big, so you would think it wouldn’t be able to bend what appears to be 7/16″ plate. I don’t care, however, because the subsoiler still works, and even if it didn’t, the amount I paid for it is a lot lower than the cost of having people come in and remove stumps and rocks. I don’t care if I break three of these a year.

Now there are no stumps in the area where I was working, and a big rock which would have caused problems is gone. I have three little blackberry plants ready to go in the ground. I just have to get more soil. When I began this project, I didn’t know I’d have four huge holes to fill.

I’m wondering if I should put clay or some kind of waterproof material in the bottoms of the holes, to retain water. The dirt here drains way too fast.

The Internet, which never lies, says blackberry roots don’t go deeper than 10″. I could put pieces of tarp down about 15″ and then put soil and plants over them. I wonder if anyone has tried this.

I also finished sewing my second knife sheath. I bought a Lionsteel M4 with olive wood handles, and the sheath that came with it wasn’t right for my jeans. This sheath was harder to sew than the first one. I don’t know why. Anyway, here’s a photo.

I still have to finish up the edges. Right now, the sheath is drying. I wet it down and molded it around the knife’s handle so it would hold the knife in place without a strap. I may have to add a strap later, though. That’s okay. The stitching is not great, and I may redo it. If I do that, I’ll have a good opportunity to add a strap with a snap.

I sharpened several knives. I bought a Cold Steel Swift with CTS-XHP steel. Cold Steel doesn’t use CTS-XHP any more because they can’t get a reliable supply, so it’s getting hard to find these knives. I found one on Ebay for something like $20 below the street price, so I had to buy it. Yesterday, I used it to trim a piece of leather, and it went dull right away. I had to do something.

My understanding is that manufacturers supply defective edges on knives. They sharpen them with belts, and they do it too quickly, softening the steel on the edges. This gives you a very sharp knife which gets dull fast. I think this is what happened to the Swift. Cutting the leather shouldn’t have affected it at all.

I got out my diamond hones and a weird ceramic hone, and I touched it up. Did I get rid of the soft steel? I don’t know. I’ll keep using it. If it gets dull fast, I’ll know the answer.

It’s so sharp now, it’s creepy. The fact that it sharpened up so fast may indicate that the edge is still soft.

The Swift is a very, very nice knife, but it’s an assisted-opening design. You open it part of the way with a little button on the blade, and then a spring slams it open the rest of the way. I don’t like that. I can open a knife just fine by flicking my wrist. Using a spring seems dangerous.

The whole point of buying a steel like CTS-XHP is to avoid frequent sharpening, so I hope the knife isn’t a dud. I have a Gerber Gator II with cheap steel, and it’s a great knife, but for the fast dulling. I paid $15 for it. If I’m going to get cheap-steel performance, I might as well pay cheap-steel prices. The Gator II is indestructible, and it has a very comfortable handle.

I also sharpened my Entrek sheath knife. I have seen the way Ray Ennis sharpens these knives when he makes them, and I don’t think it’s their best feature. Apart from the heating issue, the knife, as it came from the factory, didn’t seem to want to bite into things.

I have DMT diamond stones, but I didn’t use them. I like kitchen-style hones. I have them in two diamond grits, plus the ceramic one and two steels. They seem to work just as well as stones, and they’re easier to use. Also, you don’t have to use liquid.

On top of all this, got a lot of business done. Leases for rental properties and so on. And I stocked up on groceries. Breakfast was sub-optimal this morning because I was running low on things. I had three fried eggs with cheddar cheese, plus whole wheat toast. I had been planning to eat fresh vegetables, boiled eggs, pita, and so on.

Tomorrow, the sheath for the Lion Steel knife should be dry, and after a little finishing, I should be able to use it. I want to get used to going out in public with a sheath knife. I feel conspicuous, but open carry is 100% legal, and I prefer sheath knives to folding knives.

Time to shower up and spend time with the birds. Hope your day was as good as mine.

Disks of Decadence

I don’t know if this is good news or not, but I have finally come up with a recipe for perfect pancakes.

Today I looked in the fridge, and I realized I was missing one of the ingredients for a healthy breakfast. I’ve been eating a kibbutz-style breakfast for a while: raw vegetables, pita, hummus, and so on. I used to eat homemade vegetable stew, but I got tired of making it.

One of my vegetables was nowhere to be found, so I figured I had a good excuse to make pancakes.

First, a word about syrup. I will eat two types of syrup: pure maple syrup and syrups that don’t pretend to be maple syrup. I will eat syrup made from blueberries, sugar, and starch, but I won’t eat Aunt Jemima or Log Cabin fake syrup.

I like a strong maple flavor. There are some very weak maple syrups out there, and I don’t think they’re worth the money. Good syrup costs as much as decent wine, so you might as well get something you can taste.

I have been a fan of grade B syrup for years. Grade B is darker than Grade A, and it has a stronger flavor. Supposedly, it’s intended for baking, but I put it on pancakes and waffles.

Back when I was checking out different brands of grade B, I came across Anderson’s syrup, from Wisconsin. As I recall, it was cheaper than Vermont syrup, and I figured it had to be about the same, so I tried it. It turned out to be a top-notch product.

A few weeks back, I saw I was running low on Anderson’s, so I went to Amazon and looked for it. I saw a Vermont brand–Butternut Farms–at a lower price. I thought I should give it a try. MISTAKE! It ruined my waffles. It was watery and bland. It gets great reviews on Amazon, but it’s worthless.

Even though I still had most of a jug of it, I bought more Anderson’s. Now I use the Butternut syrup for things like oatmeal, just to get rid of it.

On a whim, I tried a “dark” maple syrup I found at the local grocery. It was better than Butternut Farms, but not good enough for me. I’m sticking with Anderson’s, which I refrigerate to discourage mold.

That’s the syrup story.

As for pancakes, I had tried a bunch of recipes, and some were okay, but on the whole, they were not nearly as good as my waffles, which were absolutely perfect. Today I realized the obvious: I needed to make pancakes with waffle batter. Duh.

The pancakes were fluffy and delicious. No leathery texture. No heaviness. I might as well give you the recipe. You can decide whether you want to make pancakes or waffles. It makes 3 pancakes or two big waffles.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup biscuit flour (not self-rising)
3/4 cup milk (maybe buttermilk?)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar
3 tablespoons fat
1 egg

For fat, I like to use two tablespoons of melted bacon grease and one tablespoon of melted butter.

Melt the fat and add the milk. Warm the milk so the fat stays melted. Not too hot, because you’re going to add an egg yolk.

Separate the egg. Beat the white until it’s stiff. Add the yolk to the milk and beat until foamy.

Combine the dry ingredients. Mix the wet ingredients in. Adjust the consistency by adding milk or flour, if needed.

That’s all there is to it.

I like to put the syrup in a Pyrex cup with butter and nuke it so it’s hot when it hits the food.

I cook my pancakes on medium-low heat, on a cast iron griddle. Turn them after they fill up with bubbles in the middle and the edges start to look dry.

I put my plate under a heat lamp while I cook. I put the pancakes on the plate as they come off the stove, and they don’t get cold.

Making this recipe is not much harder than dumping mix into a bowl and adding eggs and milk, so you don’t have a good excuse for buying a big box of chemicals instead of cooking from scratch.

If you try it, let me know how it works out.

Plus Ham

Today has been a very good day.

Yesterday, I finally gave in. Rib roasts have been on sale for about two weeks, and I was tired of passing them by. I grabbed a small one, and this morning before breakfast, I seasoned it and coated it with butter and garlic. It sat at room temperature until not long ago, and now it’s cooking at 250 degrees.

After I prepared the roast for cooking, my cousin called, and we had a long conversation about God. I helped her out with some information and Youtube links. Very productive. I think she, her mother, and her son are going to get a lot closer to God.

We also discussed other things. For one, my grandmother’s country ham recipe. My aunt had it. My cousin sent me photos of the cards my grandmother wrote it on. I am in business. The nearest grocery has already confirmed that they will sell me an uncured ham.

While I was on the phone with my cousin, my neighbors invited me to Easter lunch. I enjoyed free food and good conversation. Among other things, those assembled discussed our shared hatred of squirrels. I said I never lifted my foot off the accelerator when I saw one on the road. My neighbor’s wife said she always tried to hit them.

Nice.

After lunch, her husband took their grandchildren out in their front yard for some healthy childhood activities: shooting a compound bow and a BB gun. He put some clay pigeons on a cardboard target and let his grandson and granddaughter do their worst. I took a photo.

Naturally, like any red-blooded American male, I sensed a challenge. I talked some smack and said I could do better. Then I pulled my Glock, put the laser dot on the upper clay pigeon, and graced my hosts with a mag dump.

The kids protested that they were only 7 and 9, but I wasn’t having any of their excuses. Then I told them the Easter Bunny wasn’t real.

Actually, I stood back quietly and told them they were doing great. They did pretty well with the bow.

In any case, I was inspired. I got out my VZ.58 and giant Chinese laser and shot 60 rounds in my pasture.

People have a lot of different strategies for home protection. Many choose pistols, which seems ridiculous. It’s easy to miss, or shoot yourself, with a pistol, and they don’t hold much ammo. And the ammo is weak. My current solution is a folding semiauto rifle with a laser, shot from the folded position.

Everyone says you shouldn’t shoot from the hip, but with a laser, you don’t really need to see the sights. That’s my theory.

I took the gun to the pasture in bright sunlight, and I found I could shoot a pretty tight pattern at 30 feet with very little effort. I’ll put up a couple of targets. The third target, which I shot first, isn’t quite as good (because I wasn’t trying at all), but the rounds still landed within a five-inch circle.

I feel like my theory makes sense. Keep electronic hearing protectors by the bed with your rifle. Put them on when you realize you have guests. Use the laser to pop them from 30 or 50 feet away. Your average criminal would be lucky to hit a cruise ship at 30 feet, so even if they shoot back, you have a huge advantage.

I don’t know if I would actually choose to shoot another person in a situation like that, but I feel I should have the choice.

The laser is easy to see in bright sunlight at 30 feet, so it’s impossible to miss inside a house. Even if you manage to find 100 feet of open space, you will still have no problem seeing a green laser.

I like it. I think it’s a great idea. My guess is that 0.01% of the shooting world will agree with me, but then they love dumb ideas that defy common sense. They tell women to carry crummy little revolvers instead of compact Glocks, for example, as if women are just too stupid to work semiautos. They take pistols seriously as home defense weapons, when there is no conceivable reason to forgo the superior performance of long guns in the home.

Pistols are for carry, period. That’s the whole reason they exist. A pistol should only be used when you can’t have a long gun. When you’re in your own house, you can carry a bazooka if you want, so there is no reason to settle for tiny guns that fire small numbers of weak rounds with poor accuracy.

In a famous 1998 shooting, a war veteran with an M1 carbine shot a deputy with a pistol 10 times, and he shot from the hip part of the time. The deputy emptied at least one magazine and only hit him once. Using a long gun, the criminal disabled the deputy with accurate shots to his limbs, and then he was able to approach him and execute him with a shot to the right eye. It was a complete mismatch.

If you want to see why I don’t like pistols, check out the video below. Two trained cops armed with pistols take on a nut armed with a pistol, at close range. Many bullets fly. Not one hits a human being. What else can I say?

Tell me that would have happened if one particpant had had a long gun.

I guess you could say I have an opinion.

People have told me you can’t fire a shotgun from the hip. Well, I’ve done it, and it works just fine. I fired a Saiga-12 at 50 feet using a laser, and I didn’t shoulder it. No problems at all. I don’t know where people get their weird ideas.

They say you can’t reacquire a target with a shotgun if you fire from the hip. Like it’s easy when you fire from the shoulder! And if you have a laser dot telling you where to shoot, reacquiring targets is not hard no matter what you’re shooting.

I like lasers and rifles for home protection. What can I tell you?

I hope your day is going as well as mine.

Plus Ham Info

I am trying to avoid getting back into cooking, because the love of pleasure is a bad thing, and I have been gluttonous in the past. Nonetheless, I keep getting ideas whether I want them or not, and I’m glad I’ve developed a collection of my own recipes.

Today I decided to make a few biscuits. I was out of bread because of the trip, and I didn’t want to drive to McDonald’s for breakfast. I found a recipe I created a few years back, and I decided to try it.

The biscuits were very good. They’re certainly better than any homemade biscuits anyone else has made for me. I think they can be better, though. Let’s face it; McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A make really good biscuits, and the rest of us should be up to their standard. Here’s the recipe, as it stands after today:

INGREDIENTS

1 3/4 cups biscuit flour (not self-rising)
1/4 cup starch
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
4 tsp. baking powder (not soda)
3/4 cup buttermilk
2 tbsp. bacon grease
2 tbsp. butter

A little starch makes the biscuits less rubbery; biscuits shouldn’t feel like bread. The sugar isn’t there to make them sweet. It’s just enough to round out the flavor. Chick-fil-A uses a great deal of sugar in its biscuits. Too much.

The important thing is to burn and chill the butter. You can put it in the microwave in a Pyrex cup and burn it a little. You don’t need the junk that settles out. Combine 2 tablespoons of lightly burned butter with 2 tablespoons of bacon grease and chill it until it’s solid. Burning the butter a little gives it a lot of flavor. Bacon grease makes the biscuits flaky.

It’s a lot of trouble, but you have to ask yourself whether you want good biscuits or amazing biscuits.

You mix the dry ingredients and then cut the fat in until you have crumbs. Mix the buttermilk in, roll the biscuits out, and bake them at 450 for around 13 minutes.

The only thing I’m not thrilled about is the texture of the tops of the biscuits. I think I know what to do. McDonald’s brushes biscuits with melted butter. I think that’s the answer. I don’t know when I’ll make biscuits again, but when I do, this is what I’ll do.

My grandmother used to put a small amount of grease on top of her biscuits before baking. I’ve tried this, and the fat disappears into the biscuit. Sorry, Granny.

Baking at 450 seems to be important. I used to bake biscuits at 400, but it’s a mistake.

You may not need to use all of the buttermilk, because the actual amount of flour and starch you measure may vary. Truthfully, flour should always be weighed, not measured in cups. When you use a cup, you will get inconsistent results because the flour may be compacted to different degrees. You won’t know how much flour you’re getting. Weighing is the way to go. Use a gram scale. They’re cheap. I need to correct this recipe and turn the flour and buttermilk measurements into weights. It would also be helpful for the hard fat, because it’s not easy to get hard fat into a cup.

You can’t throw up your hands at grams and weighing, just because your great aunt measured everything with a coffee cup with a broken handle. Tradition is great, but being stupid is never a good thing. Your great aunt may also have used a stove heated by burning wood, and you don’t do that. I hope.

This recipe is a work in progress. I don’t know when I’ll be completely satisfied.

I’ve been Googling around, and it appears it’s possible to cure a country ham at home. You have to have a fridge where it can stay for a few months, but after that, the cure keeps it preserved, so you can hang it anywhere. I may try it, if I can get my grandmother’s recipe. There are two kinds of hams available commercially: expensive ones, and bad ones. The real thing at a decent price would be better.

She used to keep saltpeter in her kitchen, so I think that’s what she used instead of pink salt. We used to think she bought it to put in my grandfather’s food, but maybe that wasn’t the case.

Things are going very well today. I have already been used to help two people for God, and it’s not even 11 a.m. Can’t complain about that.

Yesterday a wonderful thing happened. I felt tempted to do something stupid, and God helped me. I was getting close to home on the drive south, and I kept feeling temptation. I used my supernatural tools, and it seemed like I wasn’t winning. Eventually, I spoke God’s help and victory to me, and I spoke his opposition to the people and spirits that were against me.

It was raining very hard when I approached the house. I turned into my driveway, and I pushed the button on the gate remote. Nothing happened. At the same time, I got a message from my phone, saying the power at the house was out. No power, no gate. There was no way I was getting out to climb the fence in the rain.

I reported the outage by phone, and when I checked, the online map only showed one tiny outage in the whole county.

After a while, a pickup showed up, and a man from the power company approached my car. He said he had looked at all the lines near my house, and he couldn’t see anything wrong. He said he was going to turn the power back on in a few minutes.

After another 10 minutes or so, my phone told me the power was on, and I went in. The temptation was gone, and I was fine.

This experience was neat in more than one way. First, it showed that God was really there. He came through for me, fast. Second, it showed that speaking things into existence works, when you do it in accordance with God’s will. It’s a very powerful thing. Third, God did everything for me. He was glorified. I would have failed without him.

This is the kind of Christianity I want. I don’t mind failing and having God take over and give me victory. It’s how things are supposed to be. We’re told to glorify Jesus all the time. That only makes sense if we’re glorifying him for things he does. He would not ask us to glorify him for things we do using willpower. It would be stealing.

When you say, “Glory to Jesus,” you’re really saying, “This is not my job. Jesus will have to do it, and he gets the credit.” Churches have taught us to be tough little soldiers who lift themselves by their own bootstraps, but that’s what the Jews who rejected Jesus taught. It’s pride, and God hates pride. The Bible says God will fight you if you’re proud.

I feel much closer to God today. I feel his reality more intensely, and it’s paying off.

I’m also much less stressed than I was while my dad was alive. Back then, I knew Christians were supposed to have peace, but I couldn’t hold onto it. I was in an unequal yoking I had chosen years before. I chose physics and law and my dad’s company over God, so I had to spend years being pulled out of that mess. I sleep better now. I don’t feel the worry I had to fight last month. I can’t tell you how great it is.

When you get into something God doesn’t want you to be part of, he may not deliver you quickly. You may get a sentence of many years. This is especially true when you marry or reproduce outside of God’s will. I’m lucky it was a parent who didn’t have long to live. What if I had a crazy wife with 40 more years left on her clock?

My dad was transformed at the end, and he became a wonderful father, but that amounted to about a month and a half. Before that, there was always tension.

A real Christian doesn’t get puffed up and tell everyone what he does for God and how “sold out” he is. A real Christian is like a 35-year-old man who lives by taking money from his mother’s purse. God gives us charity, not wages. We are the reason he was crucified. We haven’t earned anything good. If our work pays off, it’s only because God chose to allow it. Many people work hard and fail.

God taught me to say I’m “pleased,” not “proud.” After he taught me that, I thought of the baptism of Jesus. God spoke, and he didn’t say he was proud of Jesus. He said he was “well pleased.”

We have been taught to be self-reliant because our ancestors could not get God’s help and could not teach us how to get it, either.

I think worry will continue to wither.

I don’t know if I’ll go ahead with the ham project or not. Something to think about. I sent an email to a local grocery company to see if they sell uncured hams. If I follow through, I will write about it here.

I Begin Life on my Own

I made it back from Kentucky this afternoon. My dad’s viewing was on Friday, and he was buried on Saturday.

The first place where I had a meal outside of Florida was a Chick-fil-A in Georgia. I went to several Chick-fil-A’s on the trip. They treat customers so nicely, it made me feel better about everything. The first one I visited had fresh flowers on every table.

This, and not the food, is why Chick-fil-A dominates. People who hate Christianity will never understand that. Every employee is required to demonstrate an attitude based in Christianity.

The first place where I stayed was in Ooltewah, Tennessee. Very nice hotel, and very quiet. They had tourist brochures. I couldn’t resist taking one to read. Rock City. When I was a kid, and we drove to Kentucky or North Carolina, we passed endless mailboxes, barns, and outhouses bearing painted messages that read, “See Rock City.” My dad never stopped! I still wonder what I missed. He said it was a tourist trap. I forgive him, though.

I nearly took a side trip to another attraction, the Lost Sea, just to get a shirt. My dad actually let us see that one.

My caregiving experiences took over my life, and my blog reflects that. I don’t want to spend the next year as The Grief Blogger, trying to get sympathy from as many strangers as possible. Healthy people get over family deaths. They don’t milk them. I will try to keep that in mind as things wind down, but I still have a few things to say.

While my dad was going through his astonishing transformation, I routinely prayed for God to help him bear whatever fruit he could during his remaining days. God has been faithful to answer. Even before I left Florida, two boys who heard my dad’s story decided they wanted me to baptize them. My friend Mike, the hospice exec, sent employees to read my blog. In Kentucky, God added two more people to the list of those affected: my aunt and my cousin.

I will call my aunt Thelma and my cousin Louise in order to have names for them.

Thelma has been through a lot. She divorced young, and the aftermath was unpleasant. She has had a lot of anger and trials. Louise has also had problems. Her dad died in 2017, and it appears that she inherited very little. She says her brother and stepbrothers got what would otherwise have come to her. Her health is not good, and she has a son who has a serious heart defect. Things are not going well for her financially, and she hasn’t had a good relationship with God.

My mother’s parents had 8 grandchildren, and for some reason, two of them–Louise and my cousin JD–got much less attention than the rest of us. It’s a mysterious thing. I don’t know if they felt unwanted, but it always seemed like no one wanted to fuss over them the way they did over the rest of us.

Thelma had a stroke not long ago. I didn’t know about it. The family was blown apart by my grandparents’ failure to do proper estate planning, and by the way some people behaved after my grandparents died (If anyone I know is reading this, no, I did not get any of the good stuff), so communication is not what it used to be. That’s as much my fault as anyone else’s. She doesn’t appear to have any lingering effects from the stroke, but Louise is looking after her anyway.

Louise feels that Thelma, who was responsible for bringing her up as a Christian, focused too much on God’s anger and the end times. It turned her off and discouraged her. On my first night in Kentucky, the three of us talked until it was very late, and I told both of them as much as I could of what I had learned about God.

Louise has been hurt a lot, but she doesn’t seem bitter at all. She is very open to establishing a relationship with God. Before I left Kentucky, she let me pray for her, and we asked God to give her faith and show her he was real. I believe that was night before last. The seed was planted. Now I’m waiting to see what sprouts.

It’s a real privilege to be used to help someone in my family. Most of them won’t want my help (or anyone else’s) in the area of religion. For some reason, my relatives seem to think I’m stupid, even though I’m the most highly educated person in the family. I admit, I’m eccentric, but so are almost all of them. If my grandparents or any of their daughters had had a child that wasn’t eccentric, they probably would have taken it back to the hospital, fearing it had been switched.

You know what Jesus said. “A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” I’m not saying I’m a prophet; I’m just citing a principal that applies to all people, in every area of life. We tend to dishonor capable people who are close to us. Oddly, we tend to honor outright fools instead.

The viewing was strange, but I thought it was great.

Including myself and the funeral director and his wife, there were 11 people. One cousin couldn’t make it because his boss wouldn’t turn him loose. One lives in Illinois and may have been busy; I haven’t heard from him, but he sent some nice flowers. My sister didn’t respond to my efforts to communicate with her. One aunt didn’t go because she was having blinds installed, and her husband stayed with her. I think everyone else is dead.

My understanding is that people from the town where my mother was born–the town where my dad was to be buried–had a gabfest about my dad’s death on Facebook, so I was afraid there might be more people than I could handle, but that didn’t pan out. I have deleted my dad’s Facebook account, so I don’t know what has been happening.

There was no church funeral. I was very tired, and I had no help, so I kept things simple. Thelma and Louise would have helped round up musicians and so on, but I figured very few people would come, and I didn’t want to put the burden on them. I decided to have a viewing and then say a few words at the grave.

I got some photos printed at Walgreen’s before I left. One showed my dad at the assisted living facility, eating brownies I made for him. The other was a photo of the life jacket God used to try to get his attention. I put these photos up beside my dad’s Amazon urn, and I hung the life jacket on a rack meant for flowers. I knew it was an eccentric thing to do, but I didn’t care. It was my show. I felt like the little red hen, eating her bread by herself.

The photos looked very good. Walgreen’s had some nice frames for $12.99 each, but they screwed up when I went to get my photos, and I had to wait a long time, so an employee gave them to me for $10.00 apiece. I intend to keep them, even though I bought them in a hurry.

I told everyone about the life jacket miracles, and I told them how God had changed my dad toward the end. I gave them as much of his testimony as I thought they would tolerate. I’m satisfied. It was a precious opportunity to share important knowledge. I suppose most of the people I talked to won’t be changed, but a few may. I’m not responsible for the way people take the things I say, but I do have an obligation to say them.

Beside the grave, I reminded everyone that God is very real, and that he is there for everyone. I tried to make them understand how important it was to get to know him. I probably offered to help; I don’t recall. I would say the whole thing lasted 6 or 7 minutes.

There were two attendees I didn’t expect to see. They’re my second cousins. One was a judge, and the other works for the courts. I’ll call them George and Ruth. Their mother was a remarkable lady. It seemed like there was nothing she couldn’t do. My grandfather was a circuit judge, and she was his right arm for years. He would have been lost without her. My mother and father took her with them on a trip to Europe, along with my Aunt Jean. I suppose their branch of the family was the closest to ours.

They couldn’t have been nicer to me, not that I should have been surprised. That’s the kind of people they are. I expected my dad’s passing to be ignored by nearly everyone, but my cousins brought food for everyone, and I’ll tell you something else they did. It may be a private matter, but I don’t care. George gave me a card, and inside the card was a check for $100.00 for burial expenses. I couldn’t believe it. I do not need the money, and I didn’t even know, or send anything, when his mother died.

I got to talk to George about God before I left. We were all sitting in the kitchen at the funeral home, eating the food he and Ruth had brought, and I tried to give him as much information as I could in a short time. I learned that he hadn’t been taught a lot about God, so I tried to steer him away from some traps. I have been praying for him. I hope for the best.

I have learned some disappointing things about other members of my family. Apparently, they worked against George when he ran for re-election. After all his mother did for my grandfather, that was disgraceful. I had heard something about it in the past, but because of my familiarity with the rumor mill and its reliability, I hadn’t been convinced, but since then I have heard more. Now I know the stories are true, and so, I suppose, does everyone in three counties.

It was magnanimous of Ruth and George to even show up this weekend, but to treat us as well as they did, well, that’s going above and beyond. They didn’t say, “Your family hurt us, but we’re here anyway.” They didn’t bring the election up.

They had a sister named Debbie. Her life ended very poorly. When she was young, she was pretty and charming, and as far as I knew, everyone loved her. Later on, she married a selfish man, and he took her daughter away when they divorced. After that, her mental state declined, and she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was never able to get it together, and she eventually died from lung cancer.

I always felt bad for her, and although I didn’t say much at the time, I prayed for her. I thought she was a wonderful person, and life was very cruel to her.

I should have been more involved with my relatives when I was young. I was too introverted. Also, because I grew up with so much abuse, I had a natural tendency to feel that people weren’t interested in hearing from me. I didn’t think they hated me; just that I was not someone they thought about or missed. I had the feeling that if I had called them, they would have wondered why I was doing it.

Ruth invited me to the family reunion that’s coming on Labor Day, and I might actually go. My sister stole a bunch of family photos when my grandmother died, and I have been too lazy to sort and scan them and see if I should turn any of them over to other people. I thought that if I took them to a reunion, people might be able to figure out who was in the photos and where they were taken. I can do some of that myself, but some photos are mysteries to me.

Every time I get away from that town, I feel like my family and heritage are lost to me forever, so I quit thinking about them, but when I go back for funerals, it all comes back to life.

I gave Ruth my email address. She says she’s going to make me a copy of the family cookbook. I didn’t know it existed. I thought those recipes were gone forever.

Aunt Thelma claims she has my grandmother’s recipe for country ham. I sincerely hope she does, because no one could cure a ham like my grandmother and my great Uncle Charlie.

We all talked about Eastern Kentucky and its shortcomings. The simple truth is that it’s not a good place to live because too many of the people are backward. The area is crippled by intense racial prejudice, sexual sin, a deteriorating work ethic, and a perverse love of ignorance and drunkenness. I was surprised to hear Ruth agree with my assessment. She says she advises her grown children to make lives for themselves somewhere else.

I have an aunt who defends the area, but the obvious truth is that Eastern Kentucky is like a Christmas tree with very few lights working. When my mother was a kid, the region was so backward the rest of America sent missionaries there, and for decades, bright people have been moving elsewhere. The endless flight of the best minds has taken a heavy toll.

Regarding the brain drain, Harry Caudill, author of the book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, said everyone who had any get-up-and-go got up and went. I don’t know how original that thought was, but he was correct. My second cousin Byrd was a circuit judge, and he bemoaned his loneliness as an educated person. He said, “Just once, I’d like to use a three-syllable word.”

I heard an interesting story about bigotry while I was there. My grandfather died in the 1990’s, and a black woman showed up at his funeral. In the town where he died, this was a startling event. She was an attorney. She worked in Breathitt County, which was part of his circuit. Breathitt is a very dark place.

She said my grandfather had helped her with her career when she showed up in town. This is why she came to pay her respects. It must have been very scary for her to live in that area by herself, so I suppose she was touched when anyone reached out to her.

Some time after that, someone burned her house down. I assume she got the message and moved on.

I don’t think my grandfather was terribly advanced when it came to race relations, but he wasn’t an idiot.

There are smart people in Eastern Kentucky, and there are good Christians there. The problem is that they are few and their influence is small.

After the burial, I drove around with Thelma and Louise. We went by a 120-acre farm my family sold after my grandparents died. But for the dark cloud over the area, I wish I could buy it back and live there. It’s remote, and the back portion of it drops off in sheer cliffs overlooking the Red River Gorge. I can afford to buy it, but it won’t work. Not unless I can get used to hearing the N-word and dealing with people who don’t want to grow up. I have so many black friends, and I have two black godchildren…how would people treat me after they started visiting?

Here is the gate to the farm.

Here is a view of the farm in the distance. The grey barn is on the property. The barn to the left is not. My grandfather dropped a cow on me in that grey barn. Long story.

Right now, I live in the South. My nearest neighbors are from Alabama. Backward, right? No. The husband is a math major. The wife is in some medical field or other. Wonderful Christians. Kind people. You don’t have to be a fool to be from the South, and being from the South is no excuse.

On the way back, I took a couple of detours into Tennessee. I found myself driving through the Smokies. It was wonderful. It was so much like the Gorge. Mountain laurel everywhere. A babbling creek with pools and rapids. Trees I could actually identify. Here, as wonderful as the area is, everything is either a trash oak or a palm tree.

Most of the time, I was in a national park, but I wonder if there are similar areas where I can buy land. I wonder what the people are like. I’m told they’re not too trashy. Tennessee has its bad areas, but I don’t think it has ever been as disappointing as Eastern Kentucky. As you drive from Eastern Tennessee into Kentucky, everything starts to look less shabby and unkempt. It’s as if an invisible hand had shown up and shoved the buildings to make them stand straighter.

I’m too tired to write any more. I drove 500 miles today, which is 5/6 of my personal limit. I’ll get back to this tomorrow, in all likelihood. There isn’t that much more to tell.

I never got to see Rock City, if that’s what you’re hoping. I still have time, though.

World’s Best Dad, Eating the World’s Best Brownies

Love of Food Still Suppressed

I don’t know if my spam filters are deleting legitimate comments. It’s hard to tell, because I don’t see the same things readers do. When I want to find out what’s happening, I have to log out and make comments. The system seems to be working. If it’s killing your comments, you can email me and let me know.

I’m blogging today about my baptism experience. I went to Clearwater to have my water baptism redone correctly, and it produced clear results. The problem with receiving supernatural help from God, though, is that it doesn’t always last. We are ignorant about things like miracles, healings, and deliverance, so we aren’t good about holding onto the changes God makes in us. People get healed and then relapse. Addicts get delivered and then fall back into addiction. You have to be careful not to be too quick to assume you have a lasting result.

On the day of the baptism, before I even went to the tank, I got re-delivered from the love of food. It happened before lunch, and the baptism took place later in the afternoon. My eating habits changed. I felt as though an inner voice was rising up in me to counter the drive to obtain and consume food and drink.

As of today, it’s still working. In fact, I have something interesting to report: I seem to be in danger of eating too little.

Yesterday I had breakfast and lunch, and I figured I was pretty well set for the day. Later on, though, I started to feel like lunch had not been big enough. I felt like my blood sugar was on the low side. It seemed that I needed to eat something more. I had a nearly empty container of ice cream in the freezer, so I took it out and finished it off. After that, I was fine.

I’m very happy about it. A person who had to be reminded to eat is very blessed.

Skinny people love to call fat people undisciplined, but the truth is that nearly all of them weigh less because they don’t like food as much. We all know skinny people who are irresponsible and weak. If people like that really liked food, they would be as big as houses.

Think of all the thin celebrity drug addicts and alcoholics. Here are a few: Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Robert Downey, Whitney Houston, Keith Richards, Jim Carrey, Shia Laboeuf, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne. Not models of self-control. If these people had loved food, they would have been morbidly obese.

We know of drug addicts who also became obese. Think of David Crosby, Robin Williams, John Belushi, Jim Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, James Gandolfini, Chris Farley, Elvis Presley, and Artie Lange. John Belushi used to go to restaurants and order entire fried chickens, somewhat like his character in The Blues Brothers.

Many people simply don’t care that much for food. It’s a great thing. It’s completely positive. It doesn’t lead to starvation, because even though they don’t care much for food, their bodies drive them to take in what they need. It just keeps them healthier, more fit, and better-looking than the rest of us.

I love the idea of not loving food. It will bring me a lot of things I want. Who doesn’t want their clothes to fit better? Who doesn’t want to avoid having two sets of clothing: the fat clothes and the “real” clothes? Who doesn’t want to be able to go up a set of stairs without breathing hard afterward?

I’ve never been huge, but I don’t want to be fat at all.

Here’s something interesting: the Bible is very hard on lovers of pleasure. Take a look at this:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

Paul criticized lovers of pleasures in the same sentence with blasphemers. Wow.

The kind of pleasure he is talking about is the selfish pleasure of the flesh, not pleasures like the good feeling you get from being in God’s presence or doing good.

Let’s check the Greek.

It comes from the same root as “hedonism,” and here is what Strong’s says about the pleasure involved: “pleasure, a pleasure, especially sensuous pleasure; a strong desire, passion.”

It’s not what you feel after a good prayer session or a miraculous healing.

These days, I find that I sometimes try not to cook as well as I can. I’ll be working on a dish, and I’ll think it’s important to get the very best ingredient or use the best method, and then I’ll correct myself. Food doesn’t have to be sublime. Good is sufficient. Why should I make food that intoxicates me? I don’t need that, and it usually takes more work. I don’t need to be my own drug pusher. The food I make is so good, I may be able to overcome my deliverance if I tempt myself too much.

All the things I’m writing apply to temptations like sex, covetousness, and provocation to anger, too. In modern America, we yield to temptation as a matter of course, but we should be toning it down. You don’t need the best sex possible. You don’t need the nicest car made. You don’t need to be around people who provoke you; it’s not really necessary to have a Twitter account.

Food isn’t the only thing I resist better now.

So far, the baptism seems to have been a big success. Our ignorance about baptism may explain why Christians are so much like other people. We divorce just as much. We look at porn. Many of us are as fat as pigs; we even follow obese preachers who are clearly controlled by their flesh. The Bible says we’re not supposed to be slaves to sin, and it wouldn’t say that if God hadn’t given us the tools to get free.

In order to stay free from an addiction, I believe you have to refrain from tempting yourself with occasional plunges into self-indulgence. I believe you also have to go easy on other people with the same problem, because if you’re self-righteous about it, God may let you fall back into your old habit.

I’m about two and a half weeks into it. I can’t tell you where I’ll be a year from now. I feel very hopeful.

The outfit that baptized me is called The Last Reformation, and I found them on Youtube. I had a habit of looking up street healers and watching their videos. Here’s something strange: I found a number of healers before I found TLR, and now I’m seeing Youtube comments that indicate that they know the TLR people. Some of them have attended TLR events, and some are just friends of TLR veterans.

I think God is knitting people together outside of churches, just as I have been predicting for years. I believe God told me it would happen.

I will never join TLR. I’ve said that before. I’m all done following men and movements. I won’t join a church, either. I know TLR will eventually fall into corruption unless Jesus comes soon, and I’m sure they’re not correct about everything. I don’t want to be part of the mess if they fall. Nonetheless, they seem to be part of a very solid quasi-denomination that has arisen without much human planning.

Once you put a name on a movement and name officials, things start to go south. I suppose it defines a target for Satan and gives him a choke point to attack. It’s normal, and it should be expected. It has never failed. I don’t want to be permanently identified with anything that is likely to fail, but TLR does very good work for the time being.

I will keep reporting on my status. If you want help with your own compulsions, consider getting yourself baptized properly.

Healer’s Wife has the Claws Out for Him

The other day I wrote about the problems women cause when they do inappropriate things to get attention in church. It was a revelation to me, so I shared it. I mentioned it to two friends, and they agreed wholeheartedly; they took the topic and ran. I touched a nerve.

Today I was watching a healing video in which evangelist John Mellor healed a man who had been injured in an industrial accident. The healing was wonderful, but the video was marred by a female voice. A woman who could not be seen kept yapping at Mellor and the other men at the front of the church. She gave orders they didn’t need to hear. She interrupted. When the man got healed, she made Mellor put the man’s wife on stage, and of course, that took the attention off the healing and put it on another woman.

She was very rude.

It looks like the stage mother was Mellor’s wife. She had an Australian accent (he’s Australian), and she called him by his first name. I could be wrong, though, because she acted like she was his mom.

It was really something. There were five men at the front of the church, and I doubt any of them were under 60. They didn’t need a woman to tell them what to do. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to run a healing.

At one point, she squawked, “You’re ruining the testimony!” Can you imagine trying to preach with someone like that humiliating you in front of the church?

Unbelievable.

Instead of stepping aside and putting her in her place, Mellor obeyed a lot of her orders. He skipped around like a poodle taking orders from a trainer in a carnival act. “Sit up!” “Do a somersault!” As soon as he turned to move one way, she yapped, and he turned and went another way.

It was very ugly to watch. He seemed completely intimidated. At times he seemed to resist her in a passive-aggressive way, while smiling and joking to simulate the retention of dignity.

I can’t respect him while he allows this to go on. What a poor example he is setting. It would be off-putting to see an unbelieving couple act this way, but it’s worse when they’re Christians teaching other people.

The Holy Spirit speaks to husbands, and husbands are supposed to pass the information on to wives and children. This is the system God has ordained. There is no other. There has never been a women’s liberation movement in heaven. When families get out of order, it causes problems.

It’s very hard to be a father and husband. You are held responsible for everything. If your family lacks, no one will hold your wife responsible, even if it’s because she lost her job. You will be blamed for being a bad provider. If your wife and kids are out of control, everyone will blame you, but if you’re out of control…everyone will blame YOU. You have to make hard decisions, and if your family rebels, you have to fight them as well as the difficulties the decisions present.

Imagine what would have happened had Paul been married to a dominating harpy.

“The Holy Spirit says we have to go to Ephesus.”

“Well, your precious friend the Holy Spirit will just have to settle for Tarsus. There are plenty of people he can save right here. I just made it into the ladies’ auxiliary, and if the Holy Spirit thinks I’m pulling up and starting over in Ephesus, he has another thing coming!”

The other day I saw a preacher talking about hard decisions he had made. He and his wife bought a house and started fixing it up, and they got into debt, which meant he had become a slave to the house. He had to keep his job and stay where he was, in order to pay bills. He felt God wanted him to be free, so they sold the house and moved into an apartment in an undesirable neighborhood. After a while, God told him to move to another town, when he and his wife had no money to make the move. Imagine what he would have gone through, with a woman who wanted to pull in another direction. He would still be in the house, helping her put up pink wallpaper.

Things can be even worse when a wife gets jealous and decides the Holy Spirit is giving orders through her instead of the husband. That’s not how God works. He won’t give you a system and then tell you to corrupt it. He won’t tell you to do something and then tell your wife to tell him to do something else. On the other hand, he MAY tell you to tell your wife to shut up.

God cursed the human race with female rebellion in Genesis 3. He told Adam his wife would desire to rule him. Look it up. It’s not a blessing.

Christians are supposed to form what is called “the body of Christ” or “the bride of Christ.” We are supposed to submit to God as a wife submits to a husband. When a man marries a spoiled hellcat, he finds out how we make God feel every day. We insist that God help us with our own bad plans.

While I was at the TLR event in Dunedin, Torben Sondergaard criticized what he called “the American gospel.” It says this: “God will help you do whatever you choose to do with your life.” Do you want to be a famous singer? God will make it happen. Do you want to be a rich businessman? God will make it happen. Torben reminded us that this is not what the Bible teaches. We are supposed to give up our plans and let God decide what we do.

Pushing God to actualize your dumb plans is manipulation, and God can’t be manipulated. He hates it. It’s like witchcraft.

Christianity is what happens after God wrecks your precious plans.

I’ve seen a terrible problem among Christians. I know people who married the wrong individuals and then turned to God and received the Holy Spirit. Because they were already chained to people who did not listen to God, they suffered a lot.

The world made them suffer, and their spouses made them suffer.

Their spouses made them suffer more than the world did.

What a curse. God told me it’s more important to get the wrong people out of your life than to put the right people in it, and how right he was. I always say cancer is better than marrying the wrong woman, and I have never had reason to backpedal. Cancer kills in a few years. A poisonous spouse does it over half a century, and he or she will also hurt your kids and grandchildren.

Cancer can only kill you once. A nasty wife will kill you 20 times a day.

Here is what Proverbs 21:9 says:

Better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman.

Here’s Proverbs 25:24:

It is better to dwell in a corner of a housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman.

Yes, they’re virtually identical. God felt it was so important, he had to tell us twice.

I wouldn’t trade places with John Mellor for all the money in the world. I don’t care what his wife looks like. I don’t care how much she does for him (service and fawning can be the most powerful forms of control). The world supplies plenty of humiliation and emasculation; I don’t need a wife who will do her best to supplement it.

Speaking of burdens, I have decided I don’t like Christmas any more. I loved it when I was a kid, when other people did all the work and paid all the bills, but I’m fed up with it now. Yes, I said it. The whole holiday needs to be remodeled.

I like doing things for friends and relatives. I like having meals with them. I like buying them things. I do not like doing it all on command, as part of a secular lemming flash mob.

I’m having friends over for dinner tonight, and I look forward to it, but I’m only making four things: rib roast, potatoes, Caesar salad, and Texas trash. You can’t enjoy getting together with people if you’re working like a galley slave.

My feeling is that Christmas works best when you keep the materialism very subdued and you don’t stuff yourself. A lot of people are going to wake up on December 26 several pounds fatter and a few thousand dollars deeper in debt. That’s not merry at all. I’m pretty sure I’m spending less than three hundred dollars on gifts, I don’t plan to jam myself full of food, and I refuse to have cookies and cakes lying around all week. They’re fine to have around while we’re celebrating; after that, they go in the trash.

Christmas is like a bridezilla wedding. We get all worked up over it, trying to make it perfect. We act like it’s the greatest thing that ever happened to us. Then the day after Christmas comes, and BANG, it’s over. Life is just like it used to be, except you have a big mess to clean up.

Jesus is insignificant at Christmas. We barely mention him. I gave someone a gift card from Amazon, and I tried to find a “religious” card. They had ONE religious card. On CHRISTMAS. It was a ridiculous nativity scene with some text that seemed to come from a bored intern at Hallmark. The rest of the cards…snowmen and candy canes.

Thank goodness all those snowmen went to the peppermint cross for us.

Let’s see…Jesus allowed himself to be tortured to death so we could be healed of our diseases, freed from stress, saved from hell, and taken to heaven. Isn’t that more important than a new video game box?
We act like saying “Jesus” is the same thing as dancing and singing in blackface. He’s God! He’s the only God there is! Who cares if his name bothers people? They’re not in charge of the universe. They’re a bunch of deluded mortals we were left here to teach.

I think we pump holidays up in order to comfort ourselves because of the emptiness we feel the rest of the year. If you serve God, you should have ample opportunities to share love all year round.

You know a holiday has gotten out of hand when you look forward to getting it over with.

My roast has been in the oven since 8:30, and now I have to clean up the house and feed my dad. I hope he likes his gifts, and I hope we have no caregiver catastrophes to spoil the day. I expect this to be his last Christmas or birthday at home, so I would like things to go smoothly.

You Need an Edge

Since I spent a grand on being re-baptized (or baptized for the first time, if the original effort doesn’t count), I feel I should follow up here and write about what has happened since.

Before I got baptized, I hoped demons would leave me during the process, ridding me of compulsions and unwanted thoughts. I’m not saying I have institution-grade compulsions or that I hear voices, but like everyone reading this post, I have had drives I could not control, and I have had thoughts I didn’t like.

If you don’t think you have compulsions, ask yourself two questions. 1. Am I fat? 2. Do I want to be fat? If the answers are “yes” and “no,” you have a compulsion. Do you smoke? Do you bite your nails? Do you snap at people even though you try not to? If you look at yourself honestly, you will find your compulsions.

If you don’t find them, then you have a problem with lying.

I know a woman who brought a lot of ridicule on herself by saying, “I don’t have any bad habits.” Everyone who heard it knew how absurd it was, and they were still talking about it years later, laughing at her. You may have denied your bad habits. You may not have been perceptive enough to see your bad habits. You have still had them. I don’t care who you are.

You don’t have to be a serial killer, a junkie, or an anorexic to have bad habits. If your bad habits haven’t ruined your life, it just means you’re high-functioning.

When I was in the tank, I felt things moving around in me, but then I’m a charismatic Christian who prays in tongues for hours every day, so that was normal for me. I feel supernatural things all the time. While they were baptizing me, I couldn’t say I felt an abrupt change. I didn’t see goblins fly off through the air. I didn’t scream or start tossing the people who were helping me.

Honestly, it would have been neat had things like that happened. I’m like everyone else. I love a good supernatural experience.

As I have written previously, I did not feel good at all after the baptism. I felt oppressed, and I had a nightmare later. I woke up many times during the night. I still felt that I had done the right thing, and I knew that unpleasant experiences did not always add up to error. I knew Satan was petty, and I knew he liked to torment people who got breakthroughs, hoping to convince them nothing had changed.

Think about boxers. Sometimes when a boxer lands a nice-looking shot, his opponent will shake his head, trying to say it didn’t hurt. Like my dad once told me, that’s just a way of saying, “You hurt me.” It’s a bluff. Satan is the same way. When you score a goal, he may deny it in hopes you lose faith and give up the progress you’ve made.

I didn’t get an instantaneous improvement from baptism, but I hoped things would improve in the days that followed. That’s exactly what has happened.

I got delivered from the love of food in 2009, and for a long time, I didn’t eat much, and I lost weight. Then I screwed it up by going to an all-you-can-eat rib place, and since then, it has been on and off. The day I was baptized, I found I wanted to avoid food. This happened at lunch, which was before the baptism. I can’t explain that.

I have been very good since then, and it hasn’t taken much effort. Mainly, I have to remember how important it is to hold onto this. I have to value it. I can’t let myself sink into thoughts of cooking and good food. Sooner or later, something bad would happen. If I don’t appreciate what I have, I will lose it again.

I’m also much less angry, and I want to stay away from anger. I was looking forward to watching The Equalizer 2, which is basically an orgy of cruel revenge. I don’t want to go near it now. I don’t want to hear about other people’s suffering. Morbid curiosity, which is actually vicarious cruelty, is leaving me.

I am less worried than I was before. I woke up last night and started worrying about some things, but I shut it off quickly and went back to sleep.

I’m doing better with responsibility than I was last week. I’m very glad of that, because the weight of dealing with my dad has driven me to escape responsibility a lot, and it has caused problems. Much of the anxiety we feel in life is the consequence of letting responsibilities go.

When I think about the difference between being ruled by iniquity–by unhealthy, carnal compulsions–and being ruled by the Holy Spirit, I think about casinos. To run a successful casino, you don’t need to rig the games so people always lose. All you need is a slight edge which is permanent. People think casinos are honest, but that depends on what “honest” means to you. They will tell you the truth about the odds, but the games are all set up so they aren’t quite fair, and this is legal, because it would be impossible to run a casino that didn’t win more often than its customers.

A tiny advantage in the odds of a game adds up to millions over time. The Internet says casinos only have a 52-56% chance of winning at blackjack, for example, but blackjack makes them a great deal of money.

To overcome iniquity and avoid sin, you don’t need to be completely free from carnal desires. You just need to be a little bit less inclined to sin than to do the right thing. Without the Holy Spirit, when temptation comes, you will fight until something tips you over the edge, just barely, and then you sin. When the Holy Spirit helps you, you may get close to the edge, but you don’t go over. That’s good enough. It describes what is happening to me now, most of the time.

Is what is happening to me real? Yes. I can tell you that for a fact. I don’t have the willpower to control myself without help from God. If I did, I would not concern myself so much with things like baptism and casting out demons.

You can’t manufacture willpower. Sometimes people develop it suddenly in response to traumatic experiences. A person who has an extremely unpleasant experience after doing something stupid may be able to give it up afterward out of fear, but an average person can’t choose to become self-disciplined and do it without help. Even if there were a program to help you do it, you would need willpower to make the program work.

Is what is happening to me permanent? I don’t know the answer, since I haven’t lived my whole life yet.

If what is happening to me is related to baptism, why did it start at lunch, before I was baptized? I don’t know. Maybe a spirit that was compelling me saw that it was about to be put out of business, and it gave up. I don’t think demons always wait until they’re cast out to react. A demoniac approached Jesus, yelling and so on, because the demons were upset by Jesus’ presence, and Jesus had not yet done anything to them.

Is there anything disappointing about my post-baptism life? Yes. I want to be free of compulsions and spirits, but I know God wants to give us more than freedom. He wants to fill us with love and peace. I don’t have that yet. Sometimes God’s love flows through me for a while, but it’s not constant. I hope I get there, because the presence of love inside a person is like a healing medicine and a vaccine. It doesn’t just make you nice; it repairs you and protects you. Besides, it’s very pleasant. Much more pleasant than anger and resentment, which go hand-in-hand with fear and worry, not to mention illness.

God himself is love, so if I don’t have love flowing through me all the time, I must not have the full presence of God.

Day after tomorrow, I have to cook Christmas Eve dinner. It’s a concern, because I cook amazing food which is hard to turn down. I’m being conservative. I’m making a rib roast, potatoes, and Caesar salad with anchovies and homemade croutons. My friend Amanda is bringing a dessert; I don’t even care what it is, because I want to avoid pushing for perfection. When I suggested she bring dessert, I didn’t try to think of the best-tasting choice possible.

In addition to this simple meal, I might conceivably make Texas trash. That’s all. I thought about making cheesecake, but my cheesecake is the best I have ever had, and I think I would be pushing my luck. I don’t need that level of temptation.

Today I went to the store, and rib roasts were on sale for $4.99 per pound. Is that God blessing me or Satan tempting me?

I bought a big one and cut it off the bones. I salted it heavily, put it back together, and wrapped it in a clean towel. Tomorrow I’ll coat it with garlic butter. The garlic will sink in while it sits in the fridge. Should be great.

Breakfast today and yesterday: two slices of buttered toast and decaf. Today at lunch, I had tuna salad on a baguette, with water. Later I ate some grape tomatoes. I kept feeling I needed to stay away from the Coke and Powerade.

I don’t know what will happen in the future. I’m not going to claim baptism has changed my life permanently, until I have some evidence that this is the case. I’m just telling you what’s going on right now. If it all falls apart, I will say so.

Rethinking Holiday Gorging

I’m sitting here with Marv while he enjoys his time out of the cage. I’ve been watching Youtube, looking for videos that will be helpful in my efforts to be sanctified and corrected.

I started looking at a Derek Prince video about laziness, but since I am currently caught up in a holiday which has become a celebration of overeating, and because I am not completely happy about it, I changed my mind and started looking for material on gluttony.

I got completely delivered from gluttony in 2009. Then one day I went to Sonny’s Barbecue with my friend Mike, and we had the all-you-can-eat ribs. It seems like ever since then, the victory has been tempered.

Before my deliverance, I used to stuff myself routinely. It’s pretty unusual for me to do that now, but I do eat more than I should. When I moved to this farm, I worked outside a lot, and I lost weight no matter what I ate. Then the work slowed down, and I was in the habit of eating more than I had before, so I picked up some pounds.

I have been thinking about my strange talent for cooking, and I have been considering its negative effects. I can cook a lot of things I really enjoy eating, and that presents a problem. Because I have a long list of recipes, I can always cook something I haven’t had in a long time and tell myself it’s okay to eat it because it’s a rare treat. That might be okay if you can only cook 4 things, but when you can cook dozens, you can have a rare treat several times a week. Every dish is “special.”

I thought about that, and then I asked myself what I’m trying to do when I eat something “special.” There had to be a root iniquity that paved the way for gluttony. I realized I was trying to reward myself. “I worked all day with the chainsaw and tractor, so now it’s okay to have a pint of ice cream.” “I spent 5 hours dealing with a mess my dad made, so now it’s okay to have a big bowl of pasta.”

Why would I do that? Why would I feel like I needed a reward? The answer is self-pity. I allow myself to overeat sometimes because I’ve convinced myself I’m a victim. I feel that I’m owed.

I don’t think of myself as a self-pitying person. When I have a problem, I don’t ask God why it hit such a wonderful person. I assume I’m doing something wrong. I ask for correction. I try to attack the problem. I don’t like self-pity. Nonetheless, it looks like I have it. I may have a flavor that’s different from the ones I recognize, but it’s still self-pity.

Here’s another strange question I asked myself: I can’t do anything sinful to reward myself…so what do I do? Other people get drunk or high on Saturday night. They indulge in sexual sin. They gluttonize. I can’t think of anything I can do, as a Christian.

I don’t know if people are supposed to be able to reward themselves, but we do. Tonight I’m thinking about that, so it’s only natural that I would wonder if there are any rewards I can give myself.

I can turn off the phone and read a good book. I can go for a walk in the woods. I can watch a movie I like. Those things aren’t all that rewarding, though. Not like a pint of ice cream, a line of coke, or a night of fornication. No one ever says, “I’m going to go crazy and spoil myself tonight with a nice walk.”

This is really weird. Maybe we’re not supposed to give ourselves rewards. If not, what are we supposed to do when we’re tired or upset? Do we just take the hit and walk it off? Maybe that’s the actual answer.

It’s not a pleasant prospect. I don’t want to go through life sucking it up and enduring. It would be sort of like going through life holding your breath. Eventually you want to exhale.

Unpleasant things happen to us all the time. Life on earth is like being outdoors in a hailstorm that never stops. You keep getting whacked. One would think God would occasionally provide pleasant experiences to counterbalance the whacks. Surely there must be something.

I’ll have to ask God for the answer. Whatever the situation is, I want to know and accept it.

When you’re a worldly person, you don’t expect to deprive your flesh all the time. You look for cheat days and so on. Christianity doesn’t work like that. You never get a free day to sin. There are no vacations.

I’m always glad to find out I have a character problem, because the information is an open door to freedom. Character problems cause failure and suffering, so when you find out you have a character problem, you suddenly have a way to improve your life. Fix your character, and you will definitely be freed from certain things.

I am not a victim. I like to say that to myself. It’s a little bit like taking a bad-tasting medicine, but it’s a good thing to say. It’s true. People and spirits have done terrible things to me, but that doesn’t mean I’m a victim. My sins and iniquities more than justify every bad thing that has happened. If I admit I’m part of the problem, I claim that in the past, I’ve changed my life for the worse. If I can change it for the worse, I can also make it better. God told me that when I deny an excuse, I take my power back.

I used to drive my sister crazy by saying, “You’re not a victim.” I was angry when I said it, so maybe I should have refrained. It made her furious. It enraged her to be told she wasn’t a victim. False victimhood was a treasure to her; she built her life around it. She truly loved it. She used it as justification to treat people horribly, and she didn’t want it taken away.

I don’t get furious when I say it to myself, but it’s sobering.

When I was young, I was sure I was a victim. I was raised in a house of hatred and abuse. All sorts of misfortune came to me, for no apparent reason. People mistreated me. Maybe I had a point when I was very young, but once I became an adult, I should have knocked off the victim nonsense and taken responsibility.

Interesting stuff.

I really don’t want to stuff myself on holidays any more, and I hate the effort of cooking elaborate meals. Maybe I’ll blow off Christmas dinner entirely. I’m souring on the whole concept of feasts.

What kind of holiday is it if you have to eat yourself sick in order to feel like you celebrated?

Cooking Hints of Dubious Value

Another Thanksgiving dinner is behind me. I learned some things.

For the first time, I did exactly what I wanted to do, instead of making the cranberry sauce and gross oyster dressing my dad used to insist on. It was the right idea. The food was phenomenal, and he didn’t complain once.

When you listen to other people, your food will generally suffer badly. My big talent is not the ability to cook anything you throw at me and make it taste good; it’s the ability to write recipes. People who can’t cook have no idea how that works. It means this: if you ask me to cook for you, don’t tell me what to do, and don’t ask me to change my recipes. There is absolutely no point in letting me cook if you’re going to add your really bad ideas. You can cook your own bad food without my help. If I listen to you, you’ll moan about how bad the food is, and then you’ll tell people I can’t cook.

“Oh, can you use margarine instead of butter? Oh, have you tried turkey instead of pork?”

No; I can’t. If you want Weight Watchers food, go buy it in a Weight Watchers box like everyone else.

I made a pizza for a vegan friend once. It’s surprising she was willing to eat the cheese, since some poor cow’s teats had to suffer multiple microaggressions in the name of capitalism. I bought the plastic sausage my friend requested. It tasted like formaldehyde. And I am not using the word “formaldehyde” in order to be funny. That’s really what it tasted like.

Thank God she was used to the taste, so she didn’t run around afterward telling everyone my pizza tasted like formaldehyde.

I’ll tell you how most people approach cooking. They decide they want to cook something. They open a book or go to the web and pick a recipe. They assume the recipe is good without really knowing. They cook. They feel like their work is done. Most people have no palate, so they don’t know whether their food is good or not. They figure it must be good if they followed a recipe.

That’s not how a good cook does things. A good cook always creates his own recipes. He may start with someone else’s recipe, but that’s just a way to get the project going. He will always make changes later. A good cook isn’t satisfied with a recipe until he, himself, is stunned by the result.

If you’ve put in the time creating a great recipe, and then someone who can’t cook asks you to take out the cream and use skim milk, the correct response is, “Let’s go to Burger King instead.” If you don’t want the recipe, you don’t want the cook, even if you don’t realize it.

This year, I learned fresh turkey is the way to go when you bone your birds. If you thaw a turkey, you’ll probably run into ice when you bone it, and that makes your hands numb and causes problems. I used a fresh turkey this time, and I had no difficulties.

I sewed up the bird with dental floss, and it worked fine, but I should have used dental tape. It’s easier to work with, and it seems to be easier to pull out when the bird is done.

It’s pretty hard to over-salt a turkey. I boned my turkey, opened it up, salted it hard on the inside and outside, and then applied a seasoning mix that contained salt. In all likelihood, it had already been injected with salt at the turkey factory or whatever. It was great. Most turkeys don’t get enough salt.

Seasoning a turkey is really simple. I crushed 9 beef bouillon cubes and mixed them with melted butter, sage, Korbel brut, salt, and pepper. I could also have added garlic, but I forgot. I made around 8 ounces of this stuff, and I slathered it on the inside of the bird before I sewed it up. When the bird was stuffed and ready to go in the oven, I covered the outside with the seasoning mix. When you use what I use, the turkey will taste exactly the way a classic roasted turkey should taste but usually does not.

The stuffing was magnificent. I made cornbread with bacon grease, and I used it as the foundation. I sauteed 4 Aidell’s andouille sausages in butter and stirred them in, along with the sage, butter, eggs, beef broth, Korbel, and so on. I thought my dad would blow a gasket because of the sausage chunks, but he threw it right down and said it was excellent.

The turkey was fantastic, but I think it would have been even better had I cooked it at 200 instead of 275. Low temperature cooking makes a turkey juicier. I like to pray in the morning, so I didn’t get the turkey in the oven until almost noon. I had to jack up the temperature a little in order to have dinner in the afternoon.

There is nothing unsafe about cooking a turkey at 200. As long as you get the stuffing up to 165 at the end, you’re fine. I turned the heat up to 400 when I was getting close, to brown the skin.

I think people worry about turkey germs too much. Have you ever known anyone to get sick from Thanksgiving dinner? I haven’t. The government (famous for making great food) used to tell people to bring turkey to 185. Ridiculous. That’s at least 20 degrees past done, and it turns the turkey into rubber.

The government says to cook beef to an internal temperature of 145. Come on! That ruins it. I go 120 and call it done.

I came up with a good way to get the right amount of potato jacket in your mashed potatoes without choking your potato ricer. I peeled stripes off the potatoes before I boiled them. The remaining skin wasn’t enough to bother the ricer. After every potato chunk went through, I knocked the peel off the perforated plate and into my potatoes. Very easy.

I think potato ricers are overrated. I’ve used mine for a number of years, and it’s not noticeably better than a masher. The potatoes look really fluffy when they come out of it, but then you have to stir butter, milk or cream, salt, pepper, and garlic into them. After that, the result is a lot like what a masher provides.

I’ve had very good mashed potatoes at expensive restaurants, and they never looked like they were prepared with a ricer. Maybe I should dump that thing.

The beans were intoxicating. I found big green beans at the store. I broke them and simmered them for several hours yesterday. I seasoned them with a smoked ham hock, salt, pepper, a tiny bit of sugar, and some butter. The hock meat fell apart into the beans. I left the beans in the fridge overnight to let the flavors mingle. Today they were superb.

To get any flavor out of green beans or greens, you have to boil them until the texture starts to give way. It would be nice if you could have firm beans AND flavor, but you can forget it, because it doesn’t happen. If you’ve always eaten your green beans firm, you have no idea how good beans can taste.

Yankees criticize southerners for boiling vegetables until they turn into mush. I think they get the idea that we can’t cook from going to restaurants in the south where the food is bad. If you go to a Morrison’s cafeteria (a southern chain), and the beans are mushy and flavorless, the problem is this: you went to Morrison’s, where nearly everything is bad. If you ever tried my beans, you would understand why I cook them for three hours.

My gravy came out really well this year. I made it a little thinner and browner this time. I saved grease from the bottom of the turkey pan so I can make more later.

I learned pecan pie tastes even better if you screw up and triple the vanilla. I also added a little sorghum, because I was afraid I had left too much Karo in the bottle. I wanted to make up the difference. The sorghum improved the flavor. I also added a little whiskey, as always. I usually use Jack Daniel’s, which is a poor drinking whiskey that makes an excellent seasoning. This year, I did something awful. I had a nearly empty Knob Creek bottle, and I used it. Knob Creek is very good whiskey. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but JD would have cost me $19, and who knows when I would have used it again.

I think things worked out well. My dad was happy, the workload was not too bad, and I got a decent meal.

I still have a lot of food. I plan to get rid of it no later than Saturday. I don’t want this stuff sitting around tempting me. Thanksgiving is over. Time to move on. I could have a debauched weekend of reheated turkey and stuffing with gravy. All of these things get better after a day in the fridge. I’m not going to do it. It’s a sick American tradition that needs to go.

It’s kind of sad, seeing food this good go to the dump. I have never had holiday food that comes anywhere close to what I can cook for myself. I don’t care. It has to go, go, GO.

Christmas will be a lean operation. Prime rib, potatoes, salad, and maybe cheesecake. Much easier than what I just did. Then I’ll throw the leftovers out again.

I rarely cook anything good these days. It’s no longer a hobby. I try to make things that are quick and reasonably healthy. Holiday foods are aberrations.

This may be my dad’s last Thanksgiving, so I’m glad he enjoyed it. A friend congratulated me on my dad’s “first” Thanksgiving, meaning his first since he asked God for salvation. That was nice, but I’m not sure my dad is saved at the moment.

I don’t know if he understood what he was doing when he asked for salvation. I’m not even sure why he agreed to do it. Since then, he has said things indicating he doesn’t really believe.

I don’t believe in the doctrine of “eternal security.” I just learned the proper name for it a few days ago. I used to believe it. It means you can never lose your salvation. I’ve seen all sorts of testimonies from Christians who believe they went to hell, and I read a convincing book by a lady who said she was taken to hell and saw Christians there. I think at least some of these people are telling the truth.

Some people will point to verses like, “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Here’s a problem:

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

It certainly appears that Jesus was describing Christians who had called on him.

If calling on the Lord, all by itself, will bring salvation, why can’t renouncing God later, through words or actions, remove it?

Revelation 14 says people who renounce Jesus during the tribulation will go to hell. I don’t see why things should be any different now. I believe fear of hell is one of the main reasons the martyrs of the past were willing to be tortured and killed rather than repent.

Here’s what Revelation 14 says:

And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.

You have to be careful about focusing on one verse and forgetting the rest. Peter said this:

For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning.

Did the disciples receive salvation when they believed in Jesus before he was crucified? Many would say yes, but if that’s true, what about Judas? The Bible describes him as “lost,” and he committed suicide in a place that symbolizes hell. It sure looks like he went to hell, but if he believed before he died, and he could not lose his salvation, what’s going on?

If my dad can’t lose his salvation, then I should never have bothered talking to him about God, because he went to Sunday school when he was a kid, before becoming an atheist. If calling on God in 1938 solved all of his problems, then I have been spinning my wheels over nothing.

I hope I’m mistaken, because it would mean most people I care about would be in heaven or on their way there, but I think salvation can be lost pretty easily.

Am I worried about my dad? No, because God keeps telling me he will be saved. My expectation has always been that my dad will give up for real when death looks him in the face. That can still happen. Maybe what happened in September, when he asked for salvation the last time, was just a rehearsal.

I want to get this right. My own salvation, I mean. I don’t want to die and find out I’m on the wrong path.

Tomorrow I plan to eat normal food again. I almost dread Christmas dinner. I do not understand why I have a talent for cooking, since it causes more trouble than it’s worth. Today I wondered if it might have come from Satan instead of God. Maybe when I cook, demons are telling me how much butter to use and which spice to add. I hope not.

Derek Prince cautioned people to avoid the martial arts, because they tend to be entangled with eastern religion. He said he cast demons out of a karate expert, and afterward, the man couldn’t do a kick he used to do. Supposedly, demons had been helping him kick.

Maybe the stories about Robert Johnson are true. Maybe you really can sell your soul to Satan in exchange for the ability to play the guitar.

I would hate to get in trouble with God just so I could make coconut flan.

Anyway, Thanksgiving is over. Now I can relax.

Icebergs Ahead

I am working on Thanksgiving dinner for two.

I have a great tip for anyone who drinks eggnog. I’m too lazy to make my own, so I buy the store stuff and doctor it if necessary. Adding more vanilla and nutmeg can help. That’s not the tip.

I have put several different spirits in eggnog. Bourbon. Brandy. Probably rum. This week I tried something new, and it turned out to be better than anything else I had tried. I had to pick up some Grand Marnier for my cranberry relish, and it was sitting on the counter while I poured myself an eggnog. The wheels turned.

It’s excellent. I filled a mug halfway, added Grand Marnier, and filled it the rest of the way. I dusted the top with nutmeg. I can’t recommend it highly enough. My guess is that an XO brandy would be even better, but to spend $200 per bottle for something you put in eggnog is to meddle with the primal forces of nature.

Grand Marnier is one of those things that doesn’t fit in just everywhere. You certainly wouldn’t want to drink it straight. It’s good for things like injecting orange sections or strawberries you intend to dip in chocolate. It’s also an ingredient of crepes Suzette. Now I know of one more use for it.

I hope the relish comes out good, because I had a little incident with the pecan pies. I misread the list on the Karo bottle, and I put in three times as much vanilla as I was supposed to. I have a feeling it will be better this way, but I’m still kicking myself [Note: it was wonderful.].

In other news, I called my dad’s doctor today and said I wanted information about hospice evaluations. I also called a hospice that was recommended. My friend Mike is a hospice exec, and he told me I needed to get on this now, before things really get crazy. He kept pushing me to do it. I think he’s used to hearing about people who were in denial and kept putting it off. That’s not me. Half of my family is dead, and I accept death as part of life, so I don’t shy away from death-related responsibilities.

When you get old and need a lot of assistance, you eventually become eligible for hospice care. They have a bunch of criteria. Can you walk? Can you communicate? They look you over and make a decision. If you fail, you get hospice care, and Medicare pays for it. That’s the test I’m trying to get for my dad.

I have always thought of hospice care as something you receive in a hospice, but there is more to it than that. You can receive hospice care in your own home. That’s what I’m shooting for right now. They’ll move equipment in and send people to help you bathe and so on.

Mike thinks my dad is ready. I’m not so sure. Some sources say you can get hospice care if there is a good possibility you will die during the next 6 months. Others say you get it if you’re expected to die during that time. My dad could die during the next 6 months. I have a feeling he will. But he could make it another 5 years, and no physician has flatly stated he is likely to go within 6 months.

I called the hospice Mike recommended, and they told me they wanted a referral from my dad’s doctor, so I left a message at the doctor’s office. Maybe we can get an appointment or phone consultation next week.

Mike says doctors hate to recommend hospice care. He says they hate to talk about death. I think that’s true. I don’t think any doctor ever told my mother she was terminal.

I don’t know why they won’t talk about death. I hate to think it’s because they make so much money on futile efforts to prolong life. Maybe they just don’t want to be involved in the discussion, because they don’t want responsibility. If that’s the case, they should man up. When you get a medical license, you agree to deal with every aspect of your job.

Maybe they don’t talk about death because they’re afraid of it, and they assume everyone else is, too. Solid Christians tend to have little fear of death. Most people scared and repelled by it. Most doctors aren’t solid Christians.

It would be nice to have people come every day and deal with my dad. He doesn’t have the kind of respect for me that he has for strangers, so they would be able to get a lot more done than I can.

His mobility is not what it was two months ago. At some point within the next three months or so, I expect him to start requiring so much help getting around, sitting, and standing, that we have to come up with a new solution. Will it be new devices? Assisted living? A move to a hospice? I don’t know. I know I can’t carry him around, and I’m not going to start helping him in the shower or on the toilet. That’s too much. You do those things if you live in India or Sudan, on ten dollars a month. Here, you look for professional help.

Some people seem to think changing a parent’s diapers or washing their private parts is a beautiful bonding experience. Not me. I think an ordeal like that is an insult from Satan. I’ve already seen way more than I want to.

My friend Amanda has offered to stay with him if I need to travel to Miami. Today I realized that’s off the table. He is starting to have problems that go beyond what you can allow a friend to deal with. The next time I travel, it will have to be Visiting Angels or some other business.

The more I think about it, the more I think physical illness is better than dementia.

When a relative dies from cancer, at least you can still interact with him. You can still have conversations. The patient can help you plan and react. He can understand what’s happening to him. He can grow. He can atone.

With dementia, it’s like half of the person has departed for good, and you’re left with the other half. It’s like the executives have left the building, and you get to talk to the janitors and the answering service. Once it really sets in, you can’t discuss the problem with him in any meaningful way. That’s especially true when the patient is a master of denial, like my dad. He sees a dementia diagnosis as a slander to be vigorously refuted.

If my dad had cancer, we could still talk. He could help me with his care. Spending time with him wouldn’t be work. I wouldn’t have to get away every day and be alone in order to get over dealing with him. At the end, we would be able to say important things to each other. Vascular dementia may leave him with the mind of an infant, so when he dies, he may not be able to communicate or understand at all. That’s how his sister went.

If I get any useful results from my hospice inquiries, I’ll write about it. Maybe I can help other people prepare better than I did.