Giant Creature Sighted in the Alps!

This giant, hand-knit pink bunny was hand-knit by a group of artists and is an art installation in the Italian Alps. How incredibly cool!

Read the whole story and see more pictures at Inhabitots.

9/11/2001

This is a poem I wrote in the days following 9/11, about my experiences as a high school student whose father worked in the World Trade Center. He was alright, thank God.

This Dark Day

They made an announcement in Chemistry class.
A knot in my stomach,
Burned my finger with glass.
But denial overcame fear.
Two periods later, I’d not shed a tear.
It was pushed all the way to the back of my mind,
The only place I could deal with news of this kind.
Then I heard my name come on the PA,
One amongst dozens
Each alone
This dark day.
I avoided the office, going the long way.
Got hugs from my friends, a pinky swear that “He’ll be okay.”
The message said nothing but that we had to go
With relief or with grief
We still didn’t know.

7 Quick Takes Friday Part XXIX

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1. My (relatively) new cell phone has this little quirk that's been driving me crazy. Whenever I text anything at all, it capitalizes the word "That's." If I write "that" in the middle of a sentence, it's fine, but as soon as I add that "'s," the first letter immediately jumps into uppercase. Why oh why does it do this? I've become fairly well convinced that people who create technology add in things like this on purpose just to mess with us.

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2. I got an answer on one of my mystery saints last week (Bl. Miguel Pro!), so I'm making another plea: Please look at the pictures of saints I've posted here (some are new over the past week) and tell me if you recognize any of them! I'd really appreciate it!

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3. I've visited a famer's market each of the past two days, and I'm loving it. I so can't afford to buy my meat and produce from farmer's markets, but I love to do it. I love choosing foods outside - nothing seems natural in the artificial environment of a supermarket - I love knowing my food is fresh, I love that my business supports the little guy. I'd be at a different farmer's market each day if I could, but just two days in a row feels like it's going to break the bank.

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4. On that note - does anyone have any good recipes for tiny little eggplants, summer squash, or fingerling potatoes? Can't let these precious resources go to waste!

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5. My bed (see #6 here) finally arrived at the beginning of the week. So far, so good, and sleeping on an air mattress is just like sleeping on a regular bed, despite my worries. I did just today buy egg crate foam to put over it, in hopes that the slightly plastic-y sound and feel of it would diminish, but that plastic feel was the only (very minor) drawback.

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6. While at Bed, Bath, & Beyond this evening, I had the most lovely and pleasant conversation with the woman who was helping me. I'm not much of a talker, but for some reason she and I ended up talking about everything from school to career plans to names (mine and others', and I'm disappointed now to think that I never got her name.) It was one of those nice daily interactions with a stranger that reminds you that there are nice people out there who are worth getting to know, and it makes you think that all is right with the world.

I love nice people.

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7. I have an interview today - maybe as you're reading this - for an internship that I need to complete my degree. Wish me luck!

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Check out more Quick Takes at Conversion Diary!

Khede Kasra

Grammar, Social Issues, Language meet in a fascinating intersection. Things like this really make me regret not having pursued my linguistics minor!

Who is this saint? Pt. 4

Can you identify this saint?

Personally, my guess is St. Martin of Tours. He seems to be wearing armor of some type (St. Martin was a soldier and the patron saint of soldiers) and he's wearing a red cloak. I don't know, really, whether St. Martin's cloak is supposed to actually have been red, but is certainly is in most of the images I'm familiar with. Generally, I associate with St. Martin an armored soldier on horseback who is in the process of cutting his cloak in half to give to the [pictured] beggar. That he's standing, that there's no beggar in sight, and that he's holding a cross all gave me doubts. Is St. Martin often pictured with a cross? I thought, when I saw this, that that would have been a give-away attribute, but I'm still a little uncertain on this one. I'm willing to call him St. Martin, but I'm not sure that he is, in fact, St. Martin.

Please correct me if you know better!

Who is this saint? Pt. 3

Can you identify this saint?

I have no idea who this saint is. (My mom, convinced that she doesn't look particularly holy, has taken to calling her "Cousin Susie.") She's fairly modern looking, young, clearly not a nun or religious sister. My first thought was St. Maria Goretti, but the picture doesn't look much like the images I usually see of St. Maria Goretti. I had a brief thought of Bl. Kateri Tekakwitha, but a very quick Google revealed that she's always portrayed as looking much more obviously Native American than this saint does. Nonetheless, I think this young saint has something of an ethnic air to her, and I wonder if she might be a Central or South American saint I'm unaware of, especially as I'm told that bracelets of this type are particularly popular in places like Lima, Peru. (Meanwhile, St. Rose of Lima, my Confirmation saint, she quite clearly is not.)

The Saturday Evening Blog Post

Head over to ElizabethEsther.com for the first issue of the Saturday Evening Blog Post, inspired by the recent "defining post" carnival over at Conversion Diary. Submit your own favorite post of the past month, from your own blog!

I chose my post about the sunset I saw on the drive down to DC, even though it's a woefully inadequate post that doesn't come close to describing what I experienced. But, man, that sunset! It was life-changing. I've been looking at the sky for weeks now, and I'm amazed every single time. Clouds are always different! And gorgeous! And when there are no clouds? Still gorgeous!

Look up!

7 Quick Takes Friday Part XXVIII

1. I'd love it if everyone who reads this - but especially everyone who's Catholic - could take a look at the "Mystery Saints" I've been posting pictures of. I love wearing my bracelet with saints' pictures on it, but it's a little (read: very) embarrassing to not be able to identify half of them! More pictures will be added in the next weeks, so if you're any good at identifying saints, please check back and see if you know who any of them are!

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2. Classes started again this week, and I'll be back to work next week. I am so overwhelmed by the prospect of doing the work/school thing again. There's just so. much. work.

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3. On a related note, posts like this one about books over at Conversion Diary make me so jealous! The very prospect of reading for pleasure again seems so very far away. And when will I be able to do my genealogy?

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4. And on yet another related note, I've been torn this week. I have lots of free time, as I'm not back at work yet. Should I be spending that time getting ahead on school work, since I know I won't have much time to do my reading once I'm working? Or should I be taking advantage of this free time as my last opportunity, before several months of constant work, to not do work for quite some time? (Hint: So far, I've chosen Option B.)

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5. Have you ever tried searching "abortion" on google.com? I didn't even get so far as the results before noticing something curious: Google doesn't supply "abortion" as a search option in the menu that drops down. I'm sure people search for it often enough that it should be included, but it isn't. Even once you've typed so far as "abor," the only drop-down options are "aborigines," "aboriginal," "aboriginal art," and "aboriginal culture."

Why could that be?

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6. Speaking of which, Rhett and I strongly disagree on abortion. Any advice on how to talk about the subject when you're trying not only to spread and support the pro-life position but also to not introduce tension and discord into the relationship between you and the person with whom you're discussing it? I guess, how can I "tone down the rhetoric" on a personal level while still maintaining my convictions and acknowledge that the "rhetoric" is often accurate?

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7. And the only other thing that's on my mind right now is that I'm STARVING. I told Rhett to come over after his class and we'd have dinner together, but I wasn't thinking ahead to just how freakin' late his class is over. (It's 8:40 on Thursday as I type.) I've got at least another hour before he gets here, and I'll wait for him, of course, but it sure ain't fun.

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Check out more Quick Takes at Conversion Diary!

Who is this saint? Pt. 2

Can you identify this saint?

This saint at least convinced my mother she is a saint, but beyond that I have no idea as to her identity. Because there appear to be pyramids in the background, for a second I thought of St. Catherine of Alexandria, but that was very clearly incorrect. St. Catherine wasn't a nun (and this image doesn't include any of St. Catherine's attributes, not even her Catherine wheel).

I'm not familiar with any other Egyptian saints (a little googling showed me St. Mary of Egypt, but it's clearly not her, either). I'm not sure who else it could be, or if I'm even correct in thinking she must be Egyptian.

Who is this Saint?

Can you identify this saint?

About a year and a half ago, I bought one of those pretty bracelets with pictures of the saints on wooden beads. I wore it for a while and then stopped, but recently rediscovered it and have been wearing it often.

My somewhat embarrassing problem, though, is that I can't identify a good 50% of the saints pictured. My mom asked me who this particular saint was, and when I couldn't answer her, she took to calling him "Cousin Marty." Apparently, he doesn't quite look holy enough for her to believe that he might be Saint Cousin Marty.

My first inclination was that he might be Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati, but after googling him, I'm beginning to think it's not. He looks relatively similar to the pictures available of Bl. Pier Giorgio, but not so much so that I'm certain it's him. Given that photographs of Bl. Pier Giorgio abound, I would expect it would be obvious if it were.

Besides, do these bracelets even have beati on them, or should I expect that all the images are of canonized saints?

Congrats to the Duggars!

Rhett must know what a gigantic nerd I am (darn, I'd been trying to keep that quiet!), or he wouldn't have texted me from work this morning to make sure I knew that Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar are expecting their 19th child. I must confess, I love the Duggars. I don't quite want to follow in their footsteps, but I do admire a lot about them, and I'm happy for them and their new baby.

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