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“A Letter To My Sad, Skinny Single Self” is up today.  Boy, that was a harder assignment than I expected it to be.  What advice would you give to your pre-relationship self?

I don’t know about you, but I had quite a weekend.  How about a stupid little game, to ease ourselves into another stupid week?

Just open up a comment and press ctrl + V.  Whatever you copied last will get pasted in.  Then we’ll see who we’re dealing with here.

Here’s mine:

hid his eyes behind his wing) Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Don’t that make me sound smarty and arty?  It’s from Eliot’s The Wasteland, asMelanie Bettinelli surely knows.  But the truth is, someone quoted this line on Facebook, and it sounded vaguely familiar, like maybe Shakespeare or the Bible or one o’ them thick books.  I had to Google it to find out who said it.  Oh, well.  College was a long time ago.

Okay, now yours!  Fun!  Fun!

Voting opened yesterday at BrandonVogt.com!  He’s collected the names of 250 Catholic speakers, and is asking people to vote for their favorites — or for lesser-known names who deserve more recognition.  You can choose 15 names.

You may notice my name is on the list  — thanks, Brandon!  I am now booking speaking engagements, mostly in the New England area for now, because Benny is only 8 months old and she wuvs her muvver.

I am especially interested in finding a reason to be in the D.C. area around November 11.  I’ve been invited to join a panel of U.S. Bishops and Catholic bloggers to discuss Catholicism and social media.  I really want to go, but D.C. is a little further than I want to travel at the moment — but if I could combine trips, it would make more sense to attend.  (Anyone else going to be there?)

Ms. Brown tried to walk forward to greet him, but she started tottering. Archbishop Dolan spotted her and jogged up the steps to help. Meanwhile, the school’s marching band burst into the Cardinal Hayes marching song, inspiring the archbishop to take Ms. Brown in his arms and twirl her around.

The dancing lasted only for a minute or so, Mr. Meenan said, but he will not soon forget the image of the bearlike archbishop squiring Ms. Brown. He wore his black bishop’s garment and a pink cap; she wore a drop-waist dress, black fur and lace-topped stockings.

(full story here)

Dostoevsky and Dumbo.

Here, by the way, are some links to the books and movies I recommend.  Buying anything through these links will contribute to the “Don’t Make Simcha’s Children Wear Discarded Newspaper For Their Back-To-School Outfits” Fund.  Thanks!

Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fairy Tales (including “The Selfish Giant”) by Oscar Wilde

Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobel

Fiddler on the Roof (DVD)

The Iron Giant (DVD)

Dumbo (DVD)

 

Yay, a book post!  I decided to go with this instead of my original topic, which was wifely obedience, because I’m only 37 and I’m not ready to have my first stroke.

As always, if you are inclined to buy any of the books I recommend (or to buy anything from Amazon!), it would be wonderful if you could click through using the links below.  I get a small percentage of the sale.  Thank you so much to my readers who have been clicking through!  It really ads up, and is a huge help.

One Potato, Two Potato By Cynthia DeFelice and Andrea U’ren

The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen

Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss

Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop, illustrated by Kurt Weise

The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, illustrated by Robert Lawson

There used to be a TV commercial that asked, “If your house could speak, what would it say?”  I think they were selling exterior stain, or a home security system or something.  Everyone’s houses were saying things like, “This family understands love” or “Security happens under this roof.”

Well, this is what I found in my bathroom yesterday:

I think my house is saying, in a sort of pleading whisper,

” . . . Truce?”

If your house could speak, what would it say?

 

Here is my review of the book The Pope and I at Our Sunday Visitor.  It’s an account of lifelong friendship with Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II, and Jerzy Kluger, a Polish Jewish engineer who, even when he’s influencing international policy and Church and state relations, can’t stop talking about food.

If you are thinking of buying this book (or any other item from Amazon!), I would appreciate it if you would do so through this link:

The Pope and I:  How the Lifelong Friendship between a Polish Jew and John Paul II Advanced Jewish-Christian Relations

I get a small percentage of sales through Amazon if you click through from my blog.  Unless maybe you want the little Fishers to have to have another Imagination Christmas this year.  Heh.  No, but really, I know it’s an inconvenience, so I appreciate it when people use my links!  Thank you.

Oh, and Brandon Vogt is on the job with the social media meme!  Love it.

SEVEN GENUINELY QUICK TAKES!

1.  If you were planning to spend the day with nine children at an art museum a few hours away, but decide, when the three-year-old throws up all over you TWICE before you’ve even had your coffee, that you’d be a fool to take her to the art museum, you’d be right.

But if you think that that would be the worst way you could spend your day, you’d be wrong.  (See here.)

2.  If you are going to keep all of your nails, screws, bottles of paint, billions of plastic beads, nuts, bolts, bottles of glue, grout sealant, screwdrivers, paintbrushes, pipe cleaners, bits of felt, googly eyes, sequins, wrenches, pencil sharpeners, bouncy balls, clothespins, curtain rods, broken picture frames,  dried up Play Doh, broken tape measures, and flattened coffee filters that will probably be useful for something some day in two rickety cabinets stacked one on top of the other, it is probably best not — NOT, I repeat — to keep several gallons of loosely closed paint on top of those cabinets.

3.  Or at least, holy crap, why would you keep it so close to the computer?  (Yes, what I learned is “holy crap.”)

4.  Sobbing.*

5.  I always think my husband is going to yell at me and make me feel bad when I do something incredibly stupid, but I learned again today that he never does.  Instead he reassured me that he knows I didn’t do it on purpose, and that he would find a way to retrieve all the photo files from the last seven years somehow, and that we didn’t really need electricity in that part of the house anyway (I actually just silently said that part to myself, and assumed that he would agree, but just thought it too obvious to mention).

7.  A computer that will not turn on is not a computer that will never turn on!  Sometimes it just needs to have each of its 427 individual bits cleaned out so there’s not so much paint on them anymore, and then your husband will devote a mere five hours of his only day off this week to setting up the wireless milgram remote connectivity port mesodrive modulator.

Happy Friday!

*This is not actually something new I learned today.  I was just brushing up.