Advent and Christmas aren’t meant to be only for children. Here are some ways adults can participate in the season of preparation.
Tag: national catholic register
At the Register: I’m Making a List
At the Register: Evil Isn’t Private (And Neither Is Good)
Like it or not, we are all part of that family — as we see in the story of a drug addict who infected dozens of patients in the hospital where he worked, and the young judge who thought hard about his sentence.
At the Register: The Stupids Get a Dog
And this is the expurgated version.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to crap up the Register even further with personal pictures, but I can bring myself to do it here!
Here is our first look at the puppy, who is eight weeks old, and his name is Shane (yes, as in “Shane! Shane! Come back!”):
Here he is in the back seat, wondering who the hell we are, where his mommy went, and why we didn’t think to borrow a cage or crate for a three-hour ride, especially if the car is going to make horrible jerking movements and a grinding noise and smoke is going to billow out from the hood:
and here is my husband and the puppy on the side of the road, thinking about transmissions, and life and stuff:
Here I am after our thunderstormery walk down the highway, just starting to realize the gravity of our situation:
And here is the inside of my brain when my husband told me how much transmissions cost:
and here we are having a slightly illegal public aperitif before I sent him back for some food that was not corn nuts:
and here is how things stood the very next day:
Sunny and happy, more or less. Nobody has slept in four days and our house smells like pee, but PUPPYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!
At the Register: the Earth Is a Nursery
How lunch with friends turned a little bit Children of Men-ish.
And that’s all for me today, folks! I got home from the ER at 3:30 this morning with a baby with bronchiolitis. Never had to deal with that before. Baby is doing much, much better today, but I think my husband and I are going to need some oxygen to get through the day. My hat is off to all the parents who deal with medical emergencies — asthma, diabetes, CP — as a routine thing. I don’t know how you do it. I’m feeling so grateful for my normally healthy kids.
Also, it would be nice if you could spare a prayer for the man in the hospital room next to ours last night. He had lost an eye and was having some kind of crisis with his remaining eye. I heard the nurse talking about morphine and hospice. He was so gentle and patient, trying not to put anyone out of their way. Other people’s fortitude just blows me away.
Seven Quick Takes, In Which I May Be a Bit Dehydrated
1. Yay, Patheos tech team! They brought my archives over from my old blog. My pages, too, which I’ll be updating soon. Stay tuned for a list of top ten favorite posts, or at least top posts which seem entertaining without triggering any calls to child protective services.
2. My Register post is up: The Happiest Voice. Last week I had The Saddest Voice. I think I’m onto something here. Stay tuned next Friday for The Voice Which Best Exemplifies Perfect Indifference.
3. In a recent bout of economizing, I told my husband I was ready to downgrade on gin. I am now the proud owner of a nice, big bottle of something called New Amsterdam, and for all I know it does taste exactly like New Amsterdam.
But more importantly, stone cheap.
(My husband, being a gentleman, did tap on it before he bought it, to make sure the bottle was actually glass.) It’s not quite as smooth as my favorite Tanqueray, but it tastes fine. But the next day, I remembered something I used to know: when you buy liquor, what you’re really paying for is the next day.
(Sorry, I just realized this is the second time this week I’ve used an adorable animal to express my inner disposition. This stops now.)
4. Speaking of thrift, my son recently showed me his toes. He was wearing sneakers at the time. So I had a free moment and headed to the Salvation Army to look for some replacement shoes. They didn’t have anything for him, but they did have these for $5:
which I had no choice but to buy for my 7-year-old daughter. They have little disks built into the sole, so you can spin around like a beeeutiful spinning ballerina princess ballerina. Now obviously, a seven-year-old girl is capable of spinning around without the aid of a special shoes; but then you don’t get to be the greatest mother in the world for ten minutes until you say no to a third ice pop.
5. 100 years ago, Igor “Why You Do Me That Way” Stravinsky premiered his insane, herky jerky, dissonant Rite of Spring
It doesn’t get really nutso until about the 3:33 mark. People were so upset by what they heard and saw that there was a riot. A RIOT, because the music wasn’t beautiful, and people still wanted and expected art and music to be beautiful.
Now, I’m of two minds here. I like Stravinsky, and I’m not one of those people who insists on all harmony all the time. I’ve sat through John Cage concerts, and I listened hard. I went to Die Alte Pinakothek and did not skip the abstract expressionists, but lavished my eyeballs all over them all afternoon long. On the other hand, I want to give those concert rioters a medal, because first there was the Rite of Spring, and now there’s this. Where were the rioters when these folks
took the stage? To poop on stage? Because art, that’s why? I would make some puns about the heavy load that an artist bears, but I’m too busy weeping until I’m dead.
6. If you hear anything about whether or not print newspapers can survive, here’s something to keep in mind: my husband is a reporter, and the other night he emailed me to let me know that he was running late, and that he would be bringing home some cheese. He said that a cheesemaker owed the paper some money for advertising, and that they had persuaded the ad guy to let them pay their bill in cheese. So, there you are. Buy newspapers when you can, before the business acumen leads them to trade in the good camera for a sack full of magic beans and five shares of Enron.
7. And here is a common potoo:
You may think the photographer just caught him at a bad moment, but no — that’swhat the common potoo always looks like. This particular potoo is named Igor Stravinsky, and he looks like his week has been about as much fun as mine.
Hey, happy Friday! And happy summer, dammit! Finally.