A Month Away

 ... taught me how to slow down my thinking.

No Net November didn't go exactly as planned. I stopped writing and stopped tweeting, but I got bored and still lurked from time to time on various sites, watching the news and reactions. Because I didn't have to feed the blog with daily content, I didn't spend nearly as much time on it and actually found most of it to be of no value. I would bet my consumption dropped to a quarter of what it had been before.

The biggest change was that I was able to chew on ideas for a day or four before taking some notes to turn into blog posts in the future. Because of that, I was far less aggressive in my thinking. Polemics come naturally, but they are also usually filled with logical errors, truth-grooming and unnecessary snark. A polemic exists to establish one position as good and another as evil, so it's simplistic by its very nature. A fast typist can knock them out almost daily and I'm a reasonably fast typist.

Think of a polemic as Purina Blog Chow. You practically buy them in bulk to feed the blog and pour them into the blog's dish each morning without much effort.

Polemics are also boring once you've read enough of them. Yes, yes, I know, Democrats are imbeciles. Yes, yes, I know, Republicans are evil. What a yawnaroo.

After No Net November, I've decided to continue blogging, but not hew to a daily schedule. Instead, I'll post when I think I've got a coherent next step in some thread I'm pulling or if I've found something I want to share for fun or because it's beautiful.

For example, I finally took my piles of cayenne peppers out of the freezer and processed some of them into Louisiana Hot Sauce. I used three different recipes from the web and one of my own creation. Now I need to take them in to work with a pile of Saltines and see what people think.

I read somewhere that fermented cayenne peppers make the best hot sauce, so I took about 80% of my crop and am fermenting them now. You'd think the tobacco experiment would have taught me to avoid fermentation and that you can't trust everything you find on the Internet, but here I am again, betting almost all of my harvest on the Roulette wheel of some stranger's advice. They're fermenting nicely and should be ready to process by Friday. We'll see then if this was another ghastly mistake from the gardens of the Catican Compound or if it was a glorious success.

A full gallon of fermenting cayenne peppers. You can see the bubbles of gas released by the wild biological action going on in the container. It's like a Hollywood action movie, only with microorganisms as the actors.