"I didn't attend the funeral but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

I ordered an export brace and a monte carlo bar for Sally and both should arrive Tuesday. Unfortunately, the special bolts req'd for installation are on back order and aren't predicted to arrive for another week.
Those two parts are both substantial frame stiffening pieces that I hope will firm up Sally's ride. On a 50-year old car I won't be surprised if the above pic is lived out as I try to get the stock parts off and the new pieces on.

Here's a picture of Exodus, the handsome guy who spent quality time Stella for a couple of days. He's a Nubian, a breed typically raised for milk not meat. But as you may notice by this photo Nubians have a smaller frame than Boers. Because this will be Stella's first kidding and those are often difficult for the doe this should give her a better chance at a trouble free delivery.
That more than makes up for any slight reduction in mass in the kids we'd get with a Boer buck.

That dappled color is very desirable in goats. Some breeders will pay a lot extra for coloring they want in their herd. In this case it doesn't matter because Stella isn't a registered goat.

I read this morning that a guy nominated for some govt. post has withdrawn his name. The headline (I didn't read the article) said he was a "climate change denier." I'm not sure what that means and I suspect it's a deceptive term. Who doesn't think climate changes? Yesterday's weather was warmer here than today's.
OK, let's assume it's a legitimate way to refer to weather changes over an extended period of time. How extended? Year-over-year? Decade-over-decade? Century-over-century? Should we have some agreed upon definition before we start labeling people with loaded terms?
But even if we did agree - let's say it's millennium-over-millennium - the ambiguities still exist. Experts agree the earth has gone through several warming and cooling periods. We all learned in school about "ice ages" and the great warming periods when the glaciers receded and left valleys and lakes behind. That is, cycles are an established "fact" of history.
Note: I put fact in quotation marks because accepting that data assumes uniformitarianism and a very, very old cosmos - something I'm not so sure about. But that's another issue.
The question, assuming we're in a warming stretch, is the degree to which human activity is a causative factor, and that's a sticky problem. The only way to know for sure would be to eliminate it from the sample group and there's no way to do that. Assuming carbon emissions are contributing to climate change is it a 10% or 90% factor? Mr. Gore would have us think something closer to the latter number is applicable, but he has absolutely no evidence to support that conclusion. By the standards of the scientific method (a test group unaffected by the variable) we can't figure it out. Someone could argue it's 5% and be beyond any challenge.
But hey, this guy's cancelled govt. gig is about headlines, not science. (It all is.)

The text of both books is finalized and I only await covers from Aly and Kim. My revisions to the second book changed the spine width just enough that Aly is making that adjustment. Kim is a mother of three boys who tries to coordinate her excellent skills with her busy schedule.
I'm working at patience.

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The above was written before church, part at home and part at Starbucks. Since then things have been very active on several fronts and I'm amped up!

I got a draft of the cover design Understanding Your Bible and I love it. Kim is going to make two small changes, including correcting a misspelled word on the back cover (my bad) and then it will be ready to send to Amazon.
Aly should have the revised cover for Questions In Dispensationalism done in the next day or two. It looks very good, too! My hope was that both would be ready for publication at about the same time and that looks like it will happen, maybe before the end of the week.

The middle of last week I sent an email full of questions to two of the guys in NY who are working out the details for my month there. This afternoon I got a reply with answers to all of them except a couple that await decisions at their end (any extra mid-week sessions?). As those details come together I'm getting increasingly eager to do this. I do miss the interaction with people in a learning environment; there's nothing quite as energizing as that dynamic. It's my drug of choice.

Sally is running SO strong. Except at initial start-up, when it looks for all the world like an internal combustion catastrophe. She runs so rough that the whole car shakes and the exhaust throws out enough white smoke the neighbors must think we've got volcanic activity over here.
The carb.
If it was black smoke I'd know it was too much fuel in the fuel/air mixture. Adjusting the manual choke I installed as it stumbles doesn't seem to make any read difference to the problem.
I've been avoiding it for as long as I can. I think I have to do a carb rebuild. Ugh.

There's another big thing stuck in my head but that may be an entire post by itself. I've just finished lunch so after the standard SAN (Sunday Afternoon Nap) I'm going to go for a run. And then *maybe* the Super Bowl.