Exercise: joy, not punishment

The New York Times has a splendid article about re-framing exercise as an activity of pleasure rather than work.  I confess I used to think of exercise as work, and still often do. So how can we make this change?

I used to hate running in particular. But very recently, only after reading "How to Run", and actually changing how I do run, I began to enjoy it much more. So getting our form right may be part of the battle.

Maybe we should quit using the word "exercise" to mean voluntary physical exertion.  "Sport" is a much more positive word, but suggests competition. Anyone have any suggestions?

Image from the NY Times

The lady who died from Coke?

From The Press, "Woman drank up to eight litres of Coke a day":

Natasha Marie Harris, 30, died suddenly on February 25, 2010. Her partner, Christopher Hodgkinson, had earlier claimed it was a result of drinking too much Coca-Cola...She had been drinking a lot of Coca-Cola for several years and Hodgkinson estimated between four-and-a-half and eight litres a day in the past seven or eight years.

My sincere sympathies, Mr. Hodgkinson.  I wonder if she died of malnutrition? Here is what 8 liters of Coke looks like nutritionally (based on a low 4864 kJ diet and 100g required Carbohydrate, for my personal settings from Wagmu).  

Wagmu Suggest is fixed!

After many months of being broken, the Suggest feature of www.Wagmu.com is now working again!

THANKS, DAVE!

Dieting: "Don't tell anyone"?

CNN has a typically chatty entry about a woman who lost a lot of weight.

Her doctor gave her these four tips:

1. Eat 8 ounces of food every 3 hours.
2. No sugary drinks.
3. Do not skip meals.
4. Do not tell anyone what you're doing.

The first three make sense, from what I've read of the scientific literature. But the last? How does not telling anyone help me stay on a diet?  Maybe this turns dieting into a personal vow?  It seems to contradict many reports that say having a buddy system and being accountable to someone else is effective. For myself, I've found it much easier to stay on task when I share the task with someone else.

I've designed Wagmu to be private information. You can't easily share what you're doing with other people, and neither can other people see what you're doing.  So it fits with not telling anyone, the personal vow approach.  But I'm not sure that's the right thing. Comments welcome.

Google's perfect translation

This YouTube page has Richie Valens with "La Bamba".



The user wrote the words to the song as:

Para bailar la bamba, Para bailar la bamba, Se necesita una poca de gracia. Una poca de gracia pa mi pa ti. Arriba y arriba Y arriba y arriba, por ti seré, Por ti? seré Por ti seré. Yo no soy marinero. Yo no soy marinero, soy capitan. Soy capitan. Soy capitan. Bamba bamba...

Just for fun, I put his text into Google Translate, and got back this, which I think is absolutely perfect:

Want to dance, To dance the Bamba, You need a little grace. A little grace pa mi pa ti. Up and up and up and up, for you will be, For you I will For you I will. I am not a sailor. I am not a sailor, I'm captain. I'm captain. I'm captain. Bamba bamba ...

If you love the earth, then kill your cat

An NY Times article re-iterates a conclusion I've heard before: cats are bad for the environment.

Ecological disaster.  Image from NY Times.

I dream of a future where we are all Japanese

Beautiful NY Times article

Chocolate and the PMS diet?

My good friend Maria asked whether chocolate is suggested for the PMS diet. She has a knack for this sort of straight-to-the-mark intuition.

As far as I can tell, based on the data from Wagmu and the Brazilian study, just 3 grams of 70% dark gets the oleic acid you need!  Add 15 grams of walnuts for your alpha-linolenic acid, and 45 grams of dry-roasted sunflower seeds for linoleic acid and vitamin E.  A teaspoon of cod liver oil supplies your omega-3 fatty acid.

To re-cap:
- 3 grams extra dark chocolate (that's just one little square),
- 15 grams of walnuts (a heaping tablespoon),
- 45 grams of dry-roasted sunflower seeds (3 tablespoons should do it),
- a teaspoon of cod liver oil.

The above list will go a long ways toward sorting out your essential fatty acids.  By the way, I eat all that every day.

However, the study also included omega-6 18:3 n6 ccc gamma-linolenic fatty acid (GAL).  Unfortunately, I can't find a good food source of  GAL, other than Canola Harvest brand margarine.  You would have to eat 5 tablespoons of the stuff to get what was in the study pills. And I can't figure out how that brand got so much of it in their product, because GAL does not seem to be in the separate ingredients.  They must have processed it somehow.

GAL is not widely available in foods, which implies we shouldn't need it. Indeed, your body produces GAL, but apparently not enough sometimes. If you really want to duplicate the study, I think you'll have to add  primrose oil or borage oil  (neither of which is in the USDA food database, and therefore not in Wagmu).

The PMS Diet?

Back when the Iraq war was beginning, Bush's aides gave him daily updates on the conflict. One time, they told him that two Brazilian soldiers had been killed.  "Oh, my God!!!" he exclaimed,  "That's horrible!!!"  His aides were taken aback.  "Yes, Mr. President, it is horrible. But why are you reacting so much more strongly than usual?"  He paused, then said, "Oh. Well, how many is a Brazilian?"

Quick segway to premenstrual syndrome.  I've never had it and won't ever get it, LOL!  However, four Brazilian researchers, a great many, recently wrote an article, "Essential fatty acids for premenstrual syndrome..."  They showed that consumption of several essential fatty acids probably helps reduce symptoms of PMS.

What did those women take, and how can you get it?  The key bit is this: "...each 1-gram capsule contained a mean of 210 mg of gamma linolenic acid, 175 mg of oleic acid, 345 mg of linoleic acid, 250 mg of other polyunsaturated acids and 20 mg of vitamin E."  The paper also says, "Improvement in symptoms was higher when the 2-gram dose was used." So as far as I can tell, here's what you need:

- 420 mg of gamma linolenic acid,
- 350 mg of oleic acid,
- 690 mg of linoleic acid,
- 40 mg of vitamin E.
- 500 mg of some other unspecified polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Now you could run out to your local pharmacy to seek a pill with those ingredients.  You may get lucky and find something from Hebron Farmaceutica.  You would pay a lot of money for it.

Or you could fire up Wagmu, and change your Nutrient Settings to include:
- Fatty acid ω6 18:3 n6 ccc γ-linolenic.  That's gamma-linolenic acid.
- Fatty acid 18:1c oleic. There's more than one isomer of oleic acid, and the Brazilian paper doesn't which say kind they used. But the USDA SR 22 database documentation, page 19, indicates "oleic" means the 18:1c isomer.
- Linoleic acid.  Watch those spellings, as linoleic acid is different from linolenic acid.

While you're at it, you may as well add 

- α-linolenic acid" (that's alpha-linolenic acid), and 

- "Fatty acid ω3 22:6 n3 DHA" (that's your omega-3 fatty acid).

Set the quantities as you please.  If you don't know what to enter, have a look at the official report, "Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, ...", maybe focusing on pages 1324-1325. (A gram is the same as a thousand milligrams, 1g=1000mg, which makes me think of my dad's MG sports car, which I cracked up into a 1000mg pieces when I was 16.)

Sorry, I can't make the quantities easy for you yet.  In the next month or so, I hope to load appropriate default values for some of these nutrients to all Wagmu members' Nutrient Settings.  The Wagmu disclaimer applies here.

Wagmu will already have vitamin E listed for your needs as recommended by the U.S. government, but you may wish to change the amount.

Then in the Food Plan, type in what you ate today.  You'll almost certainly see that you're short of many nutrients, not just these fatty acids.

Finally, you can use the Suggest button to help you adjust your food quantities, and add new foods, to get what you need.  Click the pumpkin!  You will have to change your diet!

Supposedly a Brazilian can improve your life.  I wouldn't know.  But maybe four Brazilians can improve your life.  Good job, Edilberto Filho, José Lima, João Neto and Ulisses Montarroyos.

Better Bittman Bars

I'm a fan of Mark Bittman.  Brilliant chef, a great writer, and even an entertaining actor in his videos.

As part of a string of articles, he recently gave a recipe for a Almond-Apricot Granola Bars.  In the comments section, I wrote:

I took the time to type this recipe into my nutrition website, www.wagmu.com. It is recipe #13592 Bittman's Almond-Apricot Granola Bars. Wagmu indicates that the recipe costs about $1.68/serving, when divided into 8 servings. That's a modestly-priced granola bar.

However, if you add this to a food plan in Wagmu, and click the "Suggest" button, Wagmu tries to take it out. That implies that this recipe, however yummy, is quite expensive relative to the nutrition it provides.

In contrast, Wagmu will encourage consumption of plain oats ("Cereal, oats, regular and quick and instant, not fortified, dry") and milk. It's all the embellishments which make the oats both yummy and expensive!

Perhaps a less expensive (for the nutrition) recipe could be had by trading the almond butter for peanut butter, using sunflower seeds and a few walnuts instead of almonds, trading the apricots for raisins or dried currants, and reducing the honey. It probably won't taste as good!

Here's an update on this.  I developed another recipe, #13593 Peanut Butter Granola Bars, specifically to find a recipe that was both cheaper and more nutritious. Today's experiment with this was quite successful. Yum!  (He says to wait 90 minutes 'til they cool, but I couldn't wait that long for mine.)  And only $0.62 per 71.7 g serving, versus $1.68 per his 73 g serving.  A dollar a bar less!  Next, compare the nutrients.  The Peanut Butter Granola bars have more of almost every nutrient.  Far more nutrient bang for your buck.

Nutrient profile for Bittman's almond apricot bars ($1.68 each), compared to Raffensperger's peanut butter bars ($0.62 each).

Wagmu's powerful optimizing Suggest function will rip the Bittman bars right out.  But add the substitute, and you can make a complete day's plan:

#7522 Coffee with milk, 3 servings.

#13593 Peanut Butter Granola Bars, 2 servings.

#7526 Egg on toast with herbs, 2 servings.

Spinach, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt, 190 grams.

Peppers, sweet, green, raw, 100 grams.

Fish oil, cod liver 4.3 grams.

Milk, reduced fat, fluid, 2% milkfat, with added vitamin A and vitamin D, two 300 gram servings.

Apples, raw, with skin medium (3" dia), one.

Here's the nutrients for this food plan. I rounded the food quantities, so the potassium is a bit short, and energy a bit high.  But just about perfect!

You can force Bittman's bars into a diet, but it will be more expensive.

Update, 25 Sep 2014. Okay, this is embarrassing.  I guess I was hoping to drive people to Wagmu to see the recipe.  Unfortunately, I wanted the recipe myself, without going to Wagmu! LOL! Okay, so here's the recipe (but please still try Wagmu, it's amazing).

Better Bittman Bars, Wagmu Recipe

1/2 cup wheat germ, toasted, plain.

1/3 cup currants, dried

1/3 cup Molasses

1/4 cup walnuts

1/2 cup, Oats 

1 tablespoon lecithin, 

2/3 cup, Peanut butter

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup sunflower seed kernels, dry roasted, without salt.

1. Put the peanut butter, molasses, salt, and lecithin in a small saucepan over medium heat for 2 to 3 minutes or until they melt together; whisk to combine.

2. Mix the remaining ingredients in a bowl. Pour this into the mixture of peanut butter and molasses; stir well to combine.

3. Grease a 7- or 8-inch-square baking dish with a little oil. Spread the mixture evenly into the dish, pressing down gently. Refrigerate if you like, but it's good already.

This is written in response to http://bittman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/three-follow-up-thoughts-and-one-recipe/, by Mark Bittman (listed in Wagmu as Recipe #13592), to improve the nutrition *and* lower the cost.

You can substitute raisins for the currants. You can omit the lecithin. Be sure to use roasted sunflower seeds - roasted taste better than raw.

Bittman recommends using a lot of plastic wrap.  You could use wax paper instead.

With a glass of milk (esp. if fortified with vitamins A & D), this would be a good breakfast.

Beauty in print

The NYT has an opinion article about peace in the Middle East.  It's beautiful.  Made me feel good.

Here's an NYT article on calcium and vitamin D. Well-done, but lacking the emotional bang of Mid-East peace.

It's not too late to start training

Another brilliant NY Times article, this one on exercise and the elderly.  Wanna live longer and be healthier?  Then exercise, and exercise hard!  The article admits that motivation is the big problem.

Motivation! Ugh.  I believe strongly in exercise.  I want to exercise.  I imagine my self as fit as my mountain-climbing colleague Paul.  Then when it actually comes time to go to the gym, I'm too tired, I've got finish this chore, it's raining,... LOL!

A modest suggestion for Ground Zero

The NY Times (my favorite paper, I guess) has an article about a proposed Muslim center at the foot of the new World Trade Center complex. I'm truly torn myself about the idea. On the one hand, terrorists might feel like they triumphed by replacing the WTC with a mosque. On the other hand, it would demonstrate America's tolerance.

My solution: put two mosques there, little tiny ones, one Sunni and one Shiite. I mean really tiny, like a good-sized closet. And put two tiny churches there as well, one Catholic and one Presbyterian. Add temples for Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Bahá'í. Make room for a few more, and even a couple of spaces that could rotate through the smaller religions on a monthly basis.

Put these mosques, churches, and temples in a circular courtyard, facing each other, with a shared entrance. Put in big clear windows on the courtyard side, so worshippers can see the people of other religions worshipping, too.

And on 11 September each year, let the WTC religious groups join together in offering each other and all passersby blessings and a modest free breakfast.

Announcing Wagmu 2.0!

Wagmu 2.0 is now online! Save your health, save your wealth, and save the world!

Wagmu is a powerful food planning system, designed to help you get 100% of your nutritional requirements while saving you money. Wagmu food plans naturally tend to use less meat, sugar, and processed foods, so your menu will be better for the environment, too.

We've just released a new version. The most exciting new feature is Wagmu Suggest. Wagmu Suggest will save you money and improve your diet. After logging your foods for a day, you'll probably see that you were short of some nutrients, and had too much of others. Click the pumpkin on the toolbar, and Wagmu Suggest adjusts your food quantities to get a better nutrient score.

Often, even with Suggest's power, the foods you've selected can't make a good food plan. So Suggest loads the Wagmu Suggest Dropdown, right on the existing food dropdown. The Wagmu Suggest Dropdown recommends foods which improve your nutrients and lower your costs. Pick a food you like, and click Suggest again. You can control how Wagmu Suggest behaves with radio buttons, such as to prevent Suggest from giving you too much broccoli, or not enough chocolate. I've found Wagmu Suggest to be a lot of fun, and I like creating food plans which are both nutritious and inexpensive.

We've added thousands of new foods, from the U.S. government's FNDDS database. Better still, Wagmu 2.0 knows about the cost of food in approximate U.S. dollars. While not perfect, no other diet website shows costs at all. (In Wagmu 3.0, we hope to let you customize your food costs, and Wagmu 3.0 will also have exercise planning and grocery lists.) Wagmu Suggest tries to help you lower the cost of your diet, while also improving your nutrient profile.

Wagmu 2.0 has search features. You can search for recipes, rate them, and see their cost. Even cooler, the new Food Plan Search lets you find entire food plans, and sort them. You can sort by Pumpkin Rating (everybody's rating of how good that plan is), by cost, and by % nutrients scaled to your own custom nutritional requirements. You can then copy those food plans to your own calendar, and edit them as you wish.

We've been playing with the website for a couple years now, moving slowly. The technical problem is to have you select one food at a time from a restricted set of 15,000, and that seems to require a somewhat complicated interface. Please be patient in getting started. We have posted some help pages, with more on the way. I'd be grateful for feedback. Just click on the Wagmu comment link.

I still haven't worked out a business model for this website, despite having spent a lot of money on it. I don't want ads, because the relevant ads are food and health related, and the point of the website is to short-circuit that marketing! Eventually, Wagmu will probably require a subscription, but until then, enjoy the powerful advice for free.

Wagmu 2.0 & Decisions on The Menu

We watched "Julie & Julia" on Friday night. It's a lovely cheerful film about Julia Child and gorgeous food. It reminded me of our fabulous meal over Easter weekend at the Quickenberry Lodge.

Attracted by Meryl Streep and her character's obvious delight in cooking and eating, I spent much of this weekend looking at Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Aside from being hopelessly intimidated, I see some discouraging issues with this kind of cooking.

First issue: this kind of cooking takes a lot of time. The top chefs think nothing of taking 20 minutes simply to carmelize the onions or reduce a sauce to concentrate the flavour. Don't get me wrong - I love fine food. But I can't fit that kind of prep time into my life 7 days a week.

Second issue: this kind of cooking has a lot of fat. What are the three ingredients to French food? Answer: butter, butter, and butter. The typical French recipe for a super-food like cauliflower, cheap and high nutrient, has a half cup of cream per serving, plus the butter and Parmesan cheese. I'd love it! But, despite Dr. Atkins, those of us who need to reduce our waistlines are not going to succeed very well on that much fat.

Third issue: this kind of cooking is expensive. The recipe for beef bourgignon, for example, calls a full bottle of wine. Yum! Bring it on! - just don't make me pay for it, at least not every day. A modest look at the forums and comments around the web show that people are worried about the cost of food, especially in the current economic slowdown. Not everybody can afford a lot of wine, cream, and Parmesan cheese.

But I'm so attracted to it, nonetheless! I wanna eat the good stuff! But these decisions have tradeoffs.

Here's a chart of the tradeoffs. I've put the good stuff, palatability and nutrition, on the vertical axes, and the bad stuff, prep time and $ cost, on the horizontal axes.

Our ideal diet should look like Meryl Streep - tall and thin. Wouldn't it be great to find a nutritious diet that tasted great, but was quick to make and cheap, too?

Unfortunately, our actual diets tend to look like Danny DeVito, short and with a big belly. Not really all that good, not really all that cheap, but fast. And not too nourishing.
On the bottom left, I put raw cabbage: not really all that tasty, but low cost, great nutrition profile, and no prep time. Just buy, pull off a piece, and stuff it in your mouth. I guess you can buy it organic if you're worried that it might need washing first. Let's call this the Linda Hunt profile. (Great actress, but still the wrong character for the boss on "NCIS LA", which is not nearly as good as the original "NCIS".)

Now look at the bottom right, the Cauliflower Gratin. Huge on prep time, huge on palatability, huge on cost, and pretty good nutrition. I gave it a slightly lower nutrition rank due to its fat. But this profile is a Julia Child profile. She was a huge woman, 6 feet, two inches. She loved cooking, and she loved eating. I'd love to eat like that, but I really shouldn't!

So there's this whole confusing issue of what we want to do, what we should do, what we are able to do, and what we actually do.

I want Cauliflower Gratin. I should probably eat plain blanched cauliflower. I'm not able to make Cauliflower Gratin, at least not very well, because the broiler on our ancient second-hand stove isn't working, and I don't have the cream and Parmesan cheese anyway. What will I actually do? Dunno yet. I was planning the Gratin for lunch, but ended up with toast. LOL!

Somewhere among the infinite set of recipes, surely one cauliflower recipe out there is reasonably easy to make, doesn't have too much fat, and tastes good.

What I really want is a system that helps me with the search. I want to find those Meryl Streep diets. Google's great, but not enough, as on-line recipes never cover all four of palatability, nutrition, prep time, and cost. Enter Wagmu 2.0! Stayed tuned for the big launch sometime this year.

Intel pinched my cool idea

I recently proposed the idea of a "consistency checker", a computer program to compare two sets of text (e.g., Sarah Palin quotes here and here, to the New York Times, or Bin Laden quotes to the Koran). The program would report the degree of agreement between the two texts.

Well, Intel and UC Berkeley have done a pretty close approximation with "Dispute Finder". While still early days for their code, it's a great start. It's an easy Firefox add-on. Then try a search for "global warming hoax", and see how much text turns up highlighted pink in your browser.

I'll tag this post under "corruption", as I think Dispute Finder, and a thousand similar programs to come, will bring a new level of transparency in governance. Watch out you Wachovian beauty queen!

Are we too far gone to save?

Just attended the beautiful Ellerslie Flower Show at Hagley Park, here in Christchurch. Pictured here is a a mask from one of the competitions.

Near the exit from the Countdown food tent, I saw a lady putting a plastic cup into the recycle bin.

"Are you sure that's recyclable?" I asked. Asking the question was my first mistake. I'm not the recycling cop.

She said, "It doesn't matter. Mankind is already too far gone. We may as well use up what we've got and get it over with."

My second mistake was trying to reason with an irrational person. "Hang on, don't spoil it for the rest of us. Better to work to keep things going."

Then she got annoyed. "Have you got a car? Huh!? Do you own a car!?" But by then, I'd caught on. I clammed up, not wanting to say I drive a Prius, that I'd taken the bike to the garden show, and I've committed a huge part of my energy to finding solutions to environmental problems. Whatever I do, she would see hypocrisy in it.

The world environment is in bad shape, and it's our fault. The solution, though, is to pull together, and tell our government to pull the big levers required to make the big changes. Fatalism is an excuse for a tragically depressed person to act stupid. Hope calls forth creativity and hard work.

Better balance in 3 months, no time per day

Feeling creaky? Feeling fragile? This tip won't make you infallible, but it'll reduce the chance of a fall, and you won't spend even an extra minute doing the exercise.

I thought I'd relay a successful experiment I did on myself. When I turned 50, I decided I wanted to improve my balance. I saw a web page somewhere which described three increasingly difficult balance exercises: standing on one foot, standing on one foot with your eyes shut, and standing on one foot with your eyes shut on a soft surface.

Step 1. All I did was to put my socks and shoes on while standing on one foot. Zero extra time per day. I couldn't do it very well at first, but after a few months, I could do it easily.

Step 2. Now I put my socks and shoes on, while standing on one foot, with my eyes shut. That's all! Zero extra time per day. This was harder than standing on one foot with eyes open, because sight gives a lot of balance cues. I had to pay a lot more attention to my legs and feet. But after a few more months, I could do it pretty well. Not perfectly ever day, and not very well if I'm feeling poorly. But this is such an easy exercise for the gains.

What next? I'll move on to Step 3, also standing on the bath mat.

Stay young with better nutrition?

Aksenov et al studied the effects of a well-rounded nutritional supplement in engineered mice. Helped 'em (the mice, that is) stay young. Your mileage may vary.

And Rucklidge et al found that a lot of nutritional supplements can help people with attention deficit disorder and severe mood dysregulation. Just to see how much extra was being given to people in her study, I did the sums:

               Dose     Max    Min  % Dose/Min
Vitamin B-12   902.4      -    2.4  37600%
Vitamin B-6     37.3    100    1.3   2869%
Vitamin E      320.4      -   15     2136%
Thiamin         19.2      -    1.2   1600%
Riboflavin      14.8      -    1.3   1138%
Copper, Cu       8.025   10    0.9    892%
Vitamin D     1640     2000  200      820%
Vitamin C      690     2000   90      767%
Zinc, Zn        59       40   11      536%
Pantot acid     26.75     -    5      535%
Selenium, Se   259      400   55      471%
Folate, total 1840     1000  400      460%
Iron, Fe        21.875   45    8      273%
Magnesium     1020      350  420     243%
Calcium, Ca   2320     2500 1000     232%
Phosphorus, P 1540     4000  700     220%
Niacin          35       35   16     219%
Vitamin A     1745     3000  900     194%
Manganese        2.42    11    2.3   105%
Potassium, K  4940        - 4700     105%

This is really a lot of extra nutrient! I'm inclined to believe that simply ensuring that you get 100% of what you need should do the trick. Trouble is, we don't.

If you wanted to find the lowest-cost diet that matched all that, it would look something like this:

• 341.2 grams, Cereals ready-to-eat, KELLOGG, KELLOGG'S ALL-BRAN COMPLETE Wheat Flakes,
• 351.1 grams, Cereals ready-to-eat, GENERAL MILLS, Whole Grain TOTAL,
• 1.8 grams, Tea, instant, unsweetened, powder,
• 923.8 grams, Beef liver, fried.

That's pretty much two boxes of fortified cereal and two pounds of liver. Oh, yeah, and a cuppa tea. Eeeeewwwwww! Again, your mileage may vary.

Christmas caroling experience

From time to time last year, my son Pete had been assisting with a little Sunday evening church service. Last night, he took us to the service to sing Christmas carols.

It was a twenty minute drive from our house to the country. We drove through the little town of Templeton, turned right off Main South Road, and went up Kirk Road, to The Chapel of the Holy Family. Sounds Catholic, I thought. Apparently, it's Presbyterian. It had a modern logo that looked to me like two lungs, a sternum, and a couple kidneys. Anyway, the Chapel was a small place off a small contry road, on the south island of a very small country at the bottom of the world.

In the parking lot, a woman was helping people in wheelchairs get out of a van. Inside, almost everyone was handicapped in some way, mainly intellectual disabilities. It dawned on me that this service was for handicapped people. Well, that was okay. Marilyn's spent a lot of time with people with disabilities, and she greeted some of them. I think there were thirty or forty people there.

A man named Allen lead the service. An older lady sat ready at an electric piano. After a few words from Allen, we began singing. I think the first song was "Oh Christmas Tree" . In between songs, Allen said some words. "What's the important part of Christmas?" The singing was uneven, with quite a few random noises and motions from the congregation. Peter, tall and beautiful, ran the PowerPoint slides.

I haven't been into church much of late, but for some reason, I found myself at ease. And with each passing song, I was having more fun.

After 35 minutes or so, Allen indicated that it was going to end. This was way too soon! Someone asked for "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer," so we did that. Then I asked for "Joy to the World," and we sang that. And for a few moments, the place became a King's front hall filled with a majestic choir.

Then it was over. The congregation slowly trickled out, a few with assistance, to get a piece of Christmas cake and a chocolate truffle (with rum essence) in the foyer. I asked Pete whether this was the same audience he had been serving all year, and he said yes.

I shook Allen's hand, and thanked him for the nicest caroling I'd done in at least a dozen years.

Here's the place on Google Maps.

To give you a sense of what the music felt like, try this:

Merry Christmas.