Whispers

I do usually read all the e-mail forwards I get from my sometimes-crazy relatives, but I usually delete them right afterward. I kinda liked this one, though, mainly the end. Laugh at me for being sappy, but don't worry, I'm editing out all the Precious Moments graphics wherein chubby blond angels on clouds blow heart-shaped bubbles.

The man whispered, "God, speak to me" and a meadowlark sang.
But, the man did not hear.

So the man yelled, "God, speak to me" and the thunder rolled across the sky.
But, the man did not listen.

The man looked around and said, "God let me see you." And a star shined brightly.
But the man did not see.

And, the man shouted, "God show me a miracle." And, a life was born.
But, the man did not notice.

So, the man cried out in despair, "Touch me God, and let me know you are here."

Whereupon, God reached down and touched the man. But, the man brushed the butterfly away and walked on.


I found this to be a great reminder that God is always around us in the little and simple things that we take for granted ... even in our electronic age.

So I would like to add one more:

The man cried, "God, I need your help!" And an e-mail arrived reaching out with good news and encouragement.

But, the man deleted it and continued crying .

Don't miss out on a blessing because it isn't packaged the way that you expect.

The Screwtape Letters

I started reading The Screwtape Letters this week. I've gotten about halfway through - I don't have much time for reading lately; I try on the train, and then I fall asleep - and I realized I should be reading this with a pen in hand. There's plenty in there that needs highlighting - and remembering. Maybe when I'm done, I'll be able to write an interesting post with a theological bent, like all the real writers in the Catholic blogosphere.

The downside of reading The Screwtape Letters on the train when you know you're going to fall asleep? Dreaming about demons on NJTransit. Not my favorite way to commute.

7 Quick Takes Friday Part XIV

1. I've missed the past couple weeks worth of Quick Takes. I have a lot less free time in front of the computer lately, and, as you may have noticed, most of my posts are either very short or not exactly composed by me. Writing a blog is hard work! But I really do miss Quick Takes when I miss Quick Takes, so I'm trying to scrape something together now.

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2. Reflections on traveling back from DC: It's a sad commentary on the state of northern New Jersey when you think, "Ah, almost home!" upon seeing the countryside turn into industrial wasteland.

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3. Also a sad commentary, on the state of my biceps: when going bowling leaves you thinking, "Man, I'd better start working out more." I'm a really good bowler (well, relatively speaking, but I did take lessons when I was 7) at the beginning of each bowling experience I have, but then by the end my arms are tired and I'm bowling gutter balls at every turn. (I still came in second.) Time to start working out again?

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4. Project for the summer: learn to drive a stick shift. It's so much more legit than a wimpy automatic transmission, but it really seems like a lot of effort to put into something that isn't actually necessary for any reason. How much work should I put into my street cred?

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5. Something I've been wondering about for a while: How on Earth is the name Kmiec pronounced?

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6. I was on the train to work earlier this week, crocheting, when a guy sat down next to me. He looked at my hook, and joked, "Just don't stab me with that thing." It's clear that he didn't know the difference between knitting and crocheting, since everybody knows that only knitting needles are used to stab people. Crochet hooks are never weapons. That's why I added the Crochet Liberation Front (CLF) blog to the sidebar.

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7. And after I spent all week - more, really - trying to compose quick takes, I've still reached Friday morning without 7. So I'm making myself late to work to write up this little quick take about how writing 7 quick takes - over *3* weeks, wow, my life must be boring - is *really* hard.

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Check out more Quick Takes at Conversion Diary!

Christian the Lion

I'm sure everyone's seen this a dozen times by now, but I can't help posting it again. I cry every time.

Safety First

I noticed that someone actually reached this blog by googling "how to clean up red wine off white walls." Let me make it clear, again, in case it wasn't clear in the first post, that the method we used to clean red wine off of white walls is not a recommended method.

"The hippo kills more humans in Africa than any other wild animal"

Jessica the Hippo:



Hippo opens doors, drinks coffee, hangs out in the kitchen, sleeps under pink sheets.

How do you get red wine stains off of a white wall?

By using poison.

Curious about what we did in the hours between 9:30 pm and 2:30 am when I was staying at my sister's?

No, I was not such an old fogey that I went to bed at 10 pm like I wanted to. (I'm 15 mos older than my sister and a full 2 mos older than my cousin, which is what I'm using to justify the fact that I look at the hours they keep and start muttering under my breath about kids these days.)

A few of my cousin's friends came over, and brought beer and wine. We sat around for several hours, talking, drinking, listening to music, watching YouTube videos. (Prepare yourselves for a-dorable animal videos in the coming days.) We really had a very nice time, and I'm glad I didn't poop out early in the evening.

By their standards, though, I may have been pooping out early when, at 1 am, I demanded to know where I was going to be sleeping so I could go to bed.

We start working out sleeping arrangements.

The friends start gathering their things to leave.

My cousin starts playing catch across the kitchen with a big inflatable bouncy ball.

(Huh?)

Things are pleasant and funny at first, until the bouncy ball knocks an open beer bottle off the counter, and it spills all over the place. One of the friends and I start cleaning it up. They keep playing.

(Huh?)

My sister's boyfriend observes, "That wine glass on the table is going to spill before the night's over."

[Crash! Splat! Shatter!]

Wine glass is destroyed, as are the tablecloth and placemats, and it looks like someone took the wine and threw it at the wall.

Friends peace out, we start cleaning up. Red wine, we discover, does not come off of white paint easily, even after just moments. We're wiping and scrubbing, using paper towels and a sink scrubber and Clorox Greenworks with bleach, and we're getting nowhere.

And then my cousin starts spraying with Lysol on top of the Clorox. "No! No!" we yell. "You can't mix bleach and Lysol! It's toxic! It's dangerous! That's the cardinal rule of bathroom cleaning! Our mother taught us when we were 7!"

I was the one who had my face by the wall scrubbing when she started spraying, so I was the one who soon started coughing and choking. It did feel like my nose was burning on the inside. Eventually, we started getting a little light-headed. No explosions, thank God.

Then. . .then, we noticed it had worked. Not perfectly, but the Lysol cleaner plus the Clorox cleaner had worked better than the Clorox alone. And so we decided to keep going. (That might have been the beer deciding.) We opened all the windows and the door, and would periodically go out into the hall to breathe clean air before returning to work creating toxic fumes. We got about halfway done before we gave up and went to bed.

Would I reccomend this method for your red wine stains? I suppose it really depends on whether you value your paint job or your life more highly.

These darn kids!

Last night, I went into Manhattan to see my cousin's band play. They were wonderful, as always. After the show, I went back to the apartment she shares with my sister Suellen, because it seemed silly to take the ride all the way back out to the suburbs just to go to bed and wake up and take a train all the way back into the city. I imagined myself perky and well-rested, since having a 30-minute commute would mean I could wake up at 7:15 am instead 5:30 am. That's a lot of sleep!

When my cousin and I walk into the apartment, around 9:30, my Suellen and her boyfriend are looking at menus online.

"Oh, are you ordering food?" I ask.

I was hungry, I could have used a little pre-bedtime snack.

"We're thinking about going out for dinner."

"This late?" I'm incredulous. "It's a weeknight!"

"I know!" my cousin agrees. "I probably won't stay up past 2 or 2:30 tonight, since I have to be at work at 8."

I waited for her to laugh at her own joke, to at least crack a smile. Nothing. She was serious.

I'm sorry, can anyone else count how few hours of sleep that allows?

God Texts the 10 Commandments

1. no1 b4 me. srsly.

2. dnt wrshp pix/idols

3. no omg's

4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)

5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool

6. dnt kill ppl

7. :-X only w/ m8

8. dnt steal

9. dnt lie re: bf

10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl.
ttyl, JHWH.
ps. wwjd?

From McSweeney's

(A Protestant 10 Commandments, but I'll take it.)

Dig Kabri

Just added a new blog to the sidebar, which is supposed to begin chronicling an archeological dig taking place at the Tel Kabri site in Israel this summer. Should be interesting. Check it out!

It's a Jolly Holiday with Mary

I love watching Disney as an adult. (Sometimes, in the context of Disney, I think of myself as an adult.) Watch this video.



Seriously. Did you ever realize Bert was hitting on Mary? And that she totally shoots him down? I mean, really, "You'd never think of pressing your advantage/Forbearance is the hallmark of your creed/A lady needn't fear when you are near/Your sweet gentility is crystal clear." In modern parlance, that's "Don't even try it." Ouch.

Benedictine monk copies manuscripts: Slow news day, or super-exciting?

A Benedictine monk, inspired by his order's long history of copying manuscripts, is at the head of an effort to digitize rare and priceless manuscripts. The Wall Street Journal reports:

One of the most ambitious digital preservation projects is being led, fittingly, by a Benedictine monk. Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's Abbey and University in Minnesota, cites his monastic order's long tradition of copying texts to ensure their survival as inspiration.

His mission: digitizing some 30,000 endangered manuscripts within the Eastern Christian traditions, a canon that includes liturgical texts, Biblical commentaries and historical accounts in half a dozen languages, including Arabic, Coptic and Syriac, the written form of Aramaic. Rev. Stewart has expanded the library's work to 23 sites, including collections in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, up from two in 2003. He has overseen the digital preservation of some 16,500 manuscripts, some of which date to the 10th and 11th centuries. Some works photographed by the monastery have since turned up on the black market or eBay, he says.

I think this is an amazingly cool story. It lumps together a lot of digital preservation projects, though, some being much more exciting and much more important than others. The slide show includes, next to images of deteriorating priceless manuscripts being preserved by digitization like a 17th-century Book of Hours in Arabic from a Lebanese manuscript, the UN's World Digital Library image of Einstein's naturalization papers. I'd guarantee that Einstein's Declaration of Intent has been scanned multiple times and exists in digital copies in several places. It's often seen in National Archives brochures. I mean, it's well-known, it's safe and well-cared for, I'm sure it's location is meticulously documented (especially if the article is accurate in saying it's housed in College Park, as I think that, as Einstein was from NJ, his papers would be housed in NY if they weren't taking particular care of them because they're special), and it appears to be in very good condition. It's available digitally on NARA's website. Maybe I'm jaded by constant exposure to "normal" archival materials, but being able to see Einstein's declaration online in another place just seems plain old boring compared to modern day monks crusading for the preservation of otherwise unknown, unavailable, inaccessible, and often unprotected priceless manuscripts.

Crusader monks and archival preservation. What's not to love?


H/T Jennifer's Favorite Links