kindred spirits

Finally, someone else who loves Mason jars as much as I do! So many uses, so little time...

http://thepleatedpoppy.com/2011/01/i-heartmason-jars/

nerd alert

Who wants to join my husband and me on our Shakespeare Reading Challenge?? We've been trying to read more, and read more of the same things at the same time so we can have nerdy book discussions, and it seems like we need the internet to hold us accountable. Who's brave enough to join us?

all my poor, tired brain can do is copy down stuff other people have said

 thanks to abigail's alcove for this quote. i realize that recently all i do is quote things, and i even have some posts planned (!), but i wanted to pass this along before i forgot:

"Maybe the greatest threat to the Church is not heresy, not dissent, not secularism, not even moral relativism, but this sanitized, feel-good, boutique, therapeutic spirituality, that makes no demands, calls for no sacrifice, asks for no conversion, entails no battle against sin, but only soothes and affirms." -- Archbishop Timothy Dolan (2007)

quotes from stuff I'm reading

Our nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them. On the one hand you have the farmer who never looked at America's trees, fields, and streams with a romantic eye. The trees are to be felled, to make clearings, build houses and heat them; the fields are to be tilled to produce more food, or mined for whatever is necessary to make machines run; the streams are there to be used as waterways for transporting food, or as sources of power. On the other hand there is the Sierra Club, which is dedicated to preventing such violations of nature from going any further, and certainly seems to regret what was already done. More interesting is the coexistence of these opposing sentiments in the most advanced minds of our day. Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature - whichever is convenient. The principle of contradiction has been repealed.

Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind

quotes from stuff I'm reading

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with a jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. "You're completely crazy," he said.

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.

The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain pieces of information - 

 That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -

That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase - 

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers - 

That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia - 

That is the closes I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time... Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself - will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows - some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history - 

But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, "This fact I can do without."

 Vonnegut's Mother Night

Does a Baby Who Never Sleeps Qualify as an Impossible Case?

Jen over at Conversion Diary created a saint name generator -- give it a whirl and get a patron saint for 2011. Mine is St. Rita.....hmmmmm......

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas....

...every time I open the mailbox. I just love getting Christmas cards! And my favorites are the ones with pictures of family and friends, which is why we are sending out a photo card this year. It may or may not have a picture of all three of us (I vote just Baby D, Husband votes all of us), but we are definitely going with Shutterfly . They have so many beautiful cards that I am truly having a difficult time narrowing it down! Things will ultimately be decided by the picture we decide to use, but I have a few favorites that are major contenders:
Classic Modern Wreath                     

Holly Frame

 

Snowflake Sprinkles

Oh Holy Night

Pine Cone Toile

  

Feel free to cast some votes as to your favorite....I'm leaning toward the second and fourth ones, but I am open to suggestions. It would also be nice to have a Bible verse on there, too. 

I love Shutterfly products. I've purchased custom stationary and calendars for myself and lots of family members, and they are always beautiful. They even have some great new backgrounds and designs for calendars this year. I'm definitely excited to see what our cards turn out like!