I have been researching gluten for an article on InDepthInfo. In the course of work on it, I was surprised to find that I manifest many of the symptoms of Celiac Disease. It is interesting how often, when I write or read of something, that I apply the information directly to my own case.

This, of course, is natural. But I try not to be too effected by it. However, in this case there were too many ahaa’s going off in my brain. I wrote the article yesterday and decided to try to go gluten free this morning, at least for a few days to see how it makes me feel. So far, I have a frontal lobe headache, but that may simply be due to not having had enough caffein for the day.

I try to put all the essentials about Gluten and Celiac Sprue in my article, but it is impossible to cover everything. I found a great resource for links dealing with gluten free issues.

I am also toying with the notion of adding a whole gluten free section at the BreadInfo site.

I make periodic sweeps of my previous writing, webpages, etcetera. The oject is to improve the site structure or update some of the ideas or facts. For the last week I have been taking an hour per day out to work on my “best selling” Real Man’s Cookbook.

I hit one particular article about bean soup. It is loaded with thinly, very thinly, veiled references to a particular scatological subject variously known as tooting, beeking, and cutting the cheese. At the time I thought it quite comic. Now, I still find it mildly funny. But that is human nature.

I remember a long time ago, while I was in college. I received a letter (yes, it was that long ago) from my brother. The whole thing was about fishing and the various words and expressions available for “dropping a load”, “taking a dump”, “pinching a loaf” or what have you. At the time, I laughed until water came to my eyes. I laughed some more, until water spilled over. I laughed so much that my stomach hurt. I thought this missive such a classic bit of humor that I tucked it away the way and preserved it the way a monastery preserves the bones of a Saint.

About a year ago, I had leisure to dig up this epistle from my hallowed files. I reread it expecting the laughter to come again. Yet looking it over left me rather flat. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Perhaps my juvenile sense of humor has been left behind. I don’t know. I do know that my sensibilities have changed somewhat.

On rereading the article I had written for the Real Man’s Cookbook, I debated on whether I should remove it from the website. (I can’t remove it from the book, it is published.) Then I decided that even though the harsh winds of change may blow, that something should remain behind, a mere whiff of vital essence to remind us of those days gone by, ephemeral as the passing of gas.

I have some very old websites. Some were designed in the late 90′s. That seems like ancient history now. Most of them still do pretty well traffic-wise. Yet they seem to be drifting lower and lower in the search engines. To discover why this might be, I recently took a hard look at a couple of my sites. My, oh, my, what a mess!

When I first started out, I used a WYSIWYG editor from M-Soft that was an add-on to Word. “Holy Mixed Up Code Batman!” For some reason there are no header tags. Lots of center tags. All the code is in caps. No tags were closed unless absolutely necessary. AAAAAAghggh!

I decided to try to manually clean some of it up. I spent a day and a half on one site The Real Man’s Cookbook. Which is the online version of my best selling (for me) published work. I’m not sure if it’s worth slogging through. As it is the changes are not even cosmetic. That would take weeks.

What it really needs is a thorough re-design. But I have so many projects already in mind that this one will have to wait.