Sorry, everyone. I've been traveling, am behind on work, and have also acquired a lovely cold/flu thing. But I haven't actually perished. Yesterday I overcame all these obstacles for a bit and made some nice pickles which S. christened "Colonel Mustard in the Root Cellar with the Giant Zucchini." This is a good name because it is both descriptive and vaguely obscene.

(The reason comments have disappeared on old posts is that I didn't want to deal with a deluge of comment spam while I was away. There ought to be some way to make the old comments viewable in the meantime, but we used brute force to turn them off and I haven't investigated the subtleties yet. Clearly I need to upgrade my Movable Type, as well.)