Have been furiously designing and programming the IfHI 2005 conference website.

I happen to like programming in a furious manner. For example, I have developed the ability (at the expense of creeping myopia) to read code very fast, usually accomplished by holding down 'down arrow' on the scroll bar and letting the program just roll the code faster and faster until I find something I'm looking for.

This also works for screening research on MEDLINE. Set the results to say, 200 titles per page, then just scroll and scroll, faster and faster. I read somewhere that the mind is better able to 'see' things in movement, perhaps a leftover from when seeing moving things was a survival advantage. I also think it is a bit easier on the eye muscles to let the type move, rather than keep scanning back and forth with my increasingly senescent occulii.

The social downside of all this is that after a while you can get a bit trite with people, but that is another blog.

Went with Martha to a 'sparring clinic' last night. Well over 150 people of all belt ranks.

Guess who didn't pack his belt?

Anyway, since it wasn't a formal class, they let me stay, but strangely enough, not having that belt on left a weird 'open' feeling, sort of like my pants kept wanting to fall down, although they had their own draw-strings. Learned a few cool things.

Working on IfHI 2005 is getting me back into almost daily contact with Laura Mittman, IfHI's executive director, which is always a pleasure. Laura and Paul Mittman are two of our closest 'naturopathic type' friends, and as the years progress, they've just become great friends. Memories of the great IfHI 2003 conference are making me nostalgic for the future.

Paul, as the president of Southwest Naturopathic College, has given the Blood Type Diet a true home, unlike my alma mater Bastyr College, which has clearly lost its way.

Bastyr is locked in the one-size fits all, whole-grain/Ornish world that didn't work when I was a student there twenty years ago. Sadly, as they have become more 'accepted' (aka 'scientific') they have become less naturopathic, although there is certainly no reason why the two cannot coexist. They did there once a very long time ago.

Well, off the the cottage. Winter frost blew out an outdown water spigot I want to replace, and my daughter Emily, who apparently has no temperature receptors in her skin, wants to jump in the lake.

Guess who didn't turn off the inside valve to the outside water spigot?