I read a couple of good books. "Great Beast" by Ian Morson is a mystery set in Oxford England in medieval times, 1268. The detective is Falconer, a teacher at Oxford. These are all nicely done mysteries, if not great. This one involved some Tartars or Mongols who had come to talk with King Henry III. An elephant, from another source, not the Mongols, is also involved as is Roger Bacon, the free-thinking Franciscan.

The murder and the solving of it was very clever but I enjoy these books because of what they say about the medieval era. All the people nowadays who enjoy dressing up as medieval people never reach quite the depths of filth that they all lived in and the whole medieval mindset is one that is very hard to understand.

The other book "The Family Tree" by Sheri S. Tepper was very good and very scary. It wasn't scary to read but a good adventure tale involving two time periods 3000 years apart but when I was done what she had written about was very scary, terrifying actually, regarding environmentalists who are willing to do anything to save the planet and anti-environmentalists who will do nothing to save it but only want to save themselves. A very good read.

I also did a some cooking since the other thing I did today was eat, and eat, and eat. Yep a real waist extender of a day. It wasn't anything major, just a constant grazing. Apalling, but so nice. Once again I pondered becoming vegetarian, since it sounds so uplifing and healthy, but once again I said 'naah!'. "

While vegetarians have very good reasons and I do think that most animals are raised and butchered under rather bad conditions, I still think we are omnivorous and, while we certainly need to cut down on meat, we'll always eat it and need to look more closely into how it's raised. While I have never hunted and don't want to, hunters are probably the most honest about where their meat came from. The rest of us try to pretend that it, well, you know, just appears in little shrink wrap packages in the meat department.