Billions upon billions of tiny selfless organisms make the ultimate sacrifice every day to bring humankind delicious and healthful things to eat and drink, ranging from bread to beer to whiskey to that pinnacle of the fermentative arts, yogurt. (And cheese, but as always, the cheese stands alone.) I tip my hat to them in gratitude. Your sacrifice is not in vain.

(For those of you in the UK who are wondering, whiskey is almost the same as whisky, only better.)

I’ve made lots of bread. I haven’t ever made beer myself. I’ve made sima, a Finnish midsummer drink similar to beer, and I’ve made some truly terrible mead which I then distilled into a really good honey-flavored moonshine-like concoction that I occasionally pull out and put into a cocktail. I have to say distillation is also something to be grateful for, and despite how it’s portrayed in movies, it’s pretty easy to do with common kitchenware, as long as you aren’t trying to produce industrial quantities of liquor. Which would be illegal, so don’t do that. I strongly advise against it. In fact, forget I said anything about it.

If you want to make your own yogurt, the very same yogurt I make to feed my incredible body and make it feel good, here’s how.

You’ll need:

• A half gallon of organic milk (I use 2%, sometimes whole milk. Steer clear of skim.)
• A starter culture (after the first batch, this will be your own culture. I started my first batch with a 7 oz container of Fage 2% plain Greek yogurt. Whatever you use, make sure it says it has an active culture. Unlike Iowa City.)
• A 3-quart pot with a lid
• An instant-read thermometer (I have a nice digital one that my friend Gayle gave me, but the analog kind works, too)
• 2 1-quart mason jars
• 1 8-oz mason jar
• A small cooler that the 2 1-quart jars will fit into (See the picture.)
• A tea kettle
• A spoon

Pour the milk into the pot, clip the thermometer onto it (and if it’s a nice digital one, set the alert to 180 degrees F), put the lid on as best you can with the thermometer in there, and set it on low heat to warm up to 180 degrees F.

While that’s heating, put the kettle on to boil.

When the kettle boils, use the water to scald out the mason jars and sterilize the spoon.

Fill the cooler with hot water (as hot as you can get it) from the tap and set it aside.

Stir the milk occasionally with the sterilized spoon.

Fill the kitchen sink to a depth about half that of the 3-quart pot with cold water (as cold as you can get) from the tap.

When the milk gets to 180 degrees F, take the pot off the heat and move it into the cold water in the sink. Stir with the spoon until it cools to 120 degrees F.

Move the pot back to the stove top, no heat, and stir your starter culture into it thoroughly.

Pour the mixture into the mason jars and close them.

Dump almost all the water out of the cooler. You want enough left to immerse the mason jars into without it coming up to the lips of the jars (otherwise as they cool they may suck water into the yogurt. Yuck.)

Test the water temperature in the cooler. It should be 120 degrees F. Adjust by adding hot or cold from the tap and bailing out the extra until you have the right amount at the right temperature. (Here’s a tip: you can pre-measure and mark the desired water level on the inside of the cooler with a pencil. Bet you wish I’d mentioned that up above.)

Immerse the mason jars into the 120 degree water, close the cooler, and wait 24 hours. (Tip: you can wait in another room.)

After 24 hours, you technically have yogurt, but DON’T spoon any of it out yet!  For some reason, this breaks the yogurt and it doesn’t set up nicely or taste quite as yummy. Instead, move it to the refrigerator and wait another 24 hours.

Spoon 8 oz of the yogurt into the 8-oz mason jar (bet you forgot all about the 8-oz mason jar!) to be your next starter culture.

Now eat some yogurt! With granola, blueberries, sliced peaches, or whatever. Can also be mixed with horseradish, Coleman’s mustard, and cayenne to make an excellent sauce for roast beef. Or a dozen other uses you might not suspect if you haven’t made a habit of producing a half gallon of yogurt every week.

(Final tip: because I don’t have much patience for waiting to eat my yogurt while it cools down, I make a new batch as soon as I’m down to one 1-quart jar.)

I hope some of you are inspired by this to make some homemade yogurt. Let me know how it goes!

This is a big one, for me. My parents are both from Birmingham, Alabama, a city we visited every Christmas and most summers when I was a kid. Not like Birmingham today, which I understand is perfectly pleasant. This was the Birmingham where they lit the streetlights in the daytime because there was so much smoke in the air you couldn’t see, where a white shirt would turn grey in an hour outdoors, where the skies glowed like those of Mordor all night long. I might have been born and raised there. Or in Iowa City, where they later lived. The less said about that alternative reality the better.

But I wasn’t. So instead I grew up on a beautiful Uptown street lined with live oaks, watched (and occasionally, second-lined) jazz funerals going past on their way to the cemetery where I sometimes flew kites with my childhood buddy John (because there were no overhanging trees there to catch them), ate some of the world’s best fried food and heard some of the world’s best music. It was New Orleans that taught me the vital life lesson that if a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing later, preferably with a drink in your hand.

I go to the gym at least once a week, and sometimes I manage to go 2 or 3 times, which (not to harp on a theme or anything) is really good for my incredible body. The reason it’s always at least once a week is that we have a personal trainer we work with once a week, and that really makes you drag yourself out of bed in the morning, if you’re paying for a training session whether you show up or not.

Our trainer is this tiny lesbian Canadian firecracker who’s certainly stronger than I am on a proportionate-to-body-weight basis, and quite possibly on a much more straightforward absolute basis. I don’t know for sure: we haven’t arm wrestled or anything. Yet. She has me doing strength training these days, so it might just happen that I get stronger than her by the time we’re done. Stranger things have happened. But this isn’t about our trainer, it’s about the gym.

Cool thing about our gym: a lot of movies get made in Atlanta these days, and it seems like word is out on the movie-star circuit that our gym is the one to work out at when you have to be in Atlanta. Since shooting usually starts at some ungodly early hour, they work out at an even more ungodly early hour. This means we get to hear stuff like “Oh yeah, Hugh Jackman was in here earlier. You missed him.” How cool is that?

Another gym thing I’m grateful for is this: for a long time, there was this weird transdimensional collision thing going on where the men’s locker room and this one guy’s apartment would actually intersect each other in space and time. It was the craziest thing: you’d go into the locker room, and this guy’s clothes would be everywhere, and he’d be sitting on the bench in the decommissioned handicapped shower between the two working shower stalls, in his street clothes, just reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. We could see him, but it didn’t seem like he was aware of us at all. Wild, eh?

But that stopped happening. I haven’t seen that guy in a couple of months. So there’s that to be grateful for.

I have a new car–I got it this past summer. It’s still very new to me, though, because I don’t drive it much. I may have mentioned that I walk to my job every day, which means among other things I’m still figuring out how to work the audio system in my car. It has Pandora, though, which is cool: I can pair the car to my cellphone via Bluetooth, and control Pandora on my ‘phone via the car’s dashboard, so I always have music I like playing in the car.

My car has a backup camera with superimposed distance markers on it, so I can back right up to something without touching it. This is great for scaring the bejesus out of the person sitting in a parked car behind me when I’m parallel parking. And the camera also gives me a great view of the expression on their face!

There’s another camera in the right-hand rearview mirror that comes on when I signal for a right turn, that shows me everything along the right side of my car, also with distance markers on it. This is really good, because it means I don’t run over a woman with a baby in a jog stroller who’s overtaking me on the right. (If you’ve ever driven in Atlanta traffic, you know that it isn’t hard for a woman with a baby in a jog stroller to overtake you.) You can also turn on the right-hand rearview camera manually, if you’re going straight ahead but you want to check out the woman with a baby in a jog stroller anyway, without turning on the turn signal.

The camera view is displayed on a screen on the dashboard, and it’s full color and fairly high resolution. It’s a gorgeous picture, actually, especially around the magic hour right before and after sunset, but very attractive at other times of day. I could just drive around for hours looking at the dashboard display of the right-hand rearview camera. You’d be surprised how good you get at steering by watching the lane markers behind you.

There’s plenty of things about my job to be grateful for: it pays pretty well, it’s a fifteen minute walk from my house, so I walk to work almost every day, rain or shine, which is good for my incredible body. Particularly when Mr. Sun is up and about. The people I work with can be fun, too. My team and I have a weekly status meeting (called Story Time) where the final item on the standard agenda is Books & Movies, which leads to some interesting discussions.

I think the main thing to be grateful for, though, is that my days would be so empty if I didn’t have to get up every weekday and go to work for 8 hours. I would have to fill my time with pointless activities, like, I don’t know what! Writing another novel, or recovering my hard-won ability to draw, or learning to play a musical instrument (some day I vow I will learn to control a piano–I will!).

I might even have to resort to just lying naked on a beach somewhere letting Mr. Sun bake my incredible body.

Thank goodness I have a job!

That’s right, I’m grateful for the glowing ball of thermonuclear fire that hangs overhead drenching us with deadly rays for roughly half of every day. Sounds crazy, I know, but as Stephen Morillo once famously observed, all life and energy on our planet comes from Mr. Sun. So we really should be grateful. Plus, you don’t want to make him angry.

Actually, when you think about it, I should have made Mr. Sun Day One of the Hundred Days of Gratitude. But I didn’t think about it, so here he is, Day Two.

I’ve decided I’m going to try out this new thing I read about: I’m going to post 100 days of gratitude. For 100 days, every day, I’m going to write a brief little essay about something I’m grateful for.

This is going to make me a happier person. Or so I’m told. Not that I’m unhappy now. In fact, there’s some risk that this will make me insufferably happier than you. All I can say is, you have a hundred days, too. Get crackin’.

Here’s the essays. Naturally, the list will grow. Stay tuned!

 Day 1: My Incredible Body

Day 2: The Sun

Day 3: My Job

Day 4: My Car

Day 5: The Gym

Day 6: Growing Up in New Orleans

Day 7: The Miracle of Fermentation

Day 8: Lunch

Day 9: Time Off With My Sweetie

Day 10: Sex

Day 11: Urban Wildlife

Day 12: Science

Day 13: New Earth

Day 14: Constraints on Capitalism

Day 15: People (in General)

Day 16: Unfair Advantages

Day 17: Five Useful Things to Do Around the House With Unexploded Ordnance

Day 18: Colors

Day 19: The Big Game

Day 20: Oat Coocher

Day 21: Guinea Pigs

Day 22: Dreams

Day 23: Brevity

Day 24: Slack

Day 25: America

When I think about the things I take for granted that I ought to be grateful for, the first one that pops into my mind is my body. Probably because I tweaked my shoulder exercising last week, and today in the shower I noticed it wasn’t hurting anymore. It’s incredible, my body is actually self-healing! It’s like it’s a living thing!

I have a pretty good relationship with my body. I’m comfortable with it. Sometimes I feed it good things, like blueberries and home-made yogurt, even though I’m not really hungry, just because it feels good. And I admit, sometimes I take it out to a neighborhood emporium and dose it with colorful and delicious poisons, just to show it who’s boss. And then I stagger home going, whoo, I think I poisoned my incredible body a little too much! But hey, it’s self-healing, I’ll be OK!

I’d post a picture of my incredible body, but Facebook just takes those down when I try it. You have an incredible body, too, so look at that and you’ll get the general idea. Except mine is probably hairier. And if you’re female there are some significant structural differences.