Is My Phylactery Showing?

I'll be scarce this week. We're making final preparations for our move this weekend. It'll be nice to live in our own home again, but we have A LOT of work to do.

We watched some shorts of Wallace and Gromit last night with our Friday evening dinner. We typically have a substantial vegetarian or seafood dinner on Fridays because Gina and I fast until the evening, so Friday dinner is always a family event. Anyway, as we watched, I recalled the first person who ever brought Wallace and Gromit to my attention. Her name was Kelli, and she worked with me at a technical communications/localization company here in Boise.

I can always count on Maureen Martin to have the scoop on this administration.

Bless you, dear lady.

I'm in San Diego for some analysis work this week, so blogging will be light. I've been reading Brideshead Revisited and am thoroughly enjoying it. I think I prefer Waugh to Chesterton. However, there's a line that Cordelia mentions from Father Brown that I find an apt description of God's mercy and grace:

with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with the twitch upon the thread.

If you haven't yet visited Jenn's blog, Confessions of a Wayward Catholic, do check it out. She describes her journey through atheism, paganism, prostitution, and finally back to the arms of Our Lord and Savior.

Had a moment today as I was running around doing errands. It was a busy Saturday. I had a special class in hsing i, then had to go tear the carpet out of the new house (closed yesterday, moving in two weeks). Anyhoo, I went to Home Depot to pick up some additional supplies, "accidentally" wandered into CompUSA and wound up with a copy of Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood in my hands as I walked out, and I drove back to finish up some work at the new place.

Enbrethiliel has posted this excellent reflection using the conceit of the Reformation as theological shipwreck.

Donnah, an old friend of my ex-wife, is an anaesthesiologist back in West Virginia or Ohio. She visited us once with her husband, and we had some interesting conversations. At some point, she mentioned that the hardest thing for her in her profession was when she had to anaesthetize diabetic seniors for amputation. Donnah didn't strike me as a particularly emotional person, but her comments that night did reveal a heart that she didn't open up often for people to see.

I seem to have broken out of my self-imposed silence since I wrote Why I Don't Write over the weekend. I won't be renaming the blog anytime soon, although I probably will change the layout at some point.

You're not likely to get a lot of political commentary or current news from me. So many others do a better job at that (Amy W., Mark S., the Anchoress).

I'm surprised at how few stories I've found in the blogosphere detailing the workings of the Catholic child's mind. I hear a lot about people's kids—which is great, not complaining—but I don't see a lot of stories by bloggers about how their faith came out when they were kids.

Heck, my ex-wife wasn't even Catholic, and she made habits, wimples, and scapulars for her Barbies.

So I guess since I've opened my big virtual mouth, I get to go first.