What a nimrod

Over the holidays Liz and I went to S. Georgia, where her extended family gathers every Christmas. Her dad is something of a hunter and I went out on horseback and in a wagon a couple times. I had shot skeet before, but never hunted anything real. I got one of these on my first hunt

I also went on a dove hunt, which was not as much fun as the quail hunt. On a quail hunt you get to ride in a wagon, watch the dogs point and creep up on the quail until they bust out of the brush. In a dove hunt, you basically wait in a field that doves like and then try to shoot them out of the sky when they come in to perch on a wire. (Liz says: Mercer shot two innocent blackbirds thinking they were doves. And then he didn't even deign to eat them.)

After I got my first quail, Liz's mom said something like, "Well, you're quite a Nimrod." At first I didn't know what to say. Later it was explained to me that Nimrod was a Biblical hunter. I googled it, etc., and other people have had this conversation. The theory that the word lost its Biblical meaning and gained its "you're a moron" meaning when Bugs Bunny evaded and taunted the inept E. Fudd is pretty pleasing to a writer, and probably, a host of lit critics.

We went to the midwife today. Liz and the boy are doing swimmingly, and we're really happy about the practice. Our midwife is wonderful and we all seem to be on the same page in re philosophy on childbirth, i.e., birth balls, walking around, showers a-ok etc. Then Liz received a promo gift for some reason, a book of "baby names and what they mean." How many of these can there be? A million.