Somebody found my blog by googling “crazy old mom.”

Happy Monday!

I just love this article about the Tilma of Juan Diego. I didn’t know about the accident with nitric acid or the bomb blast.

You can have two reactions to this: either it’s a miracle, or it’s an unsolved mystery. If it’s a miracle, you can be at peace and let it go. If it’s an unsolved mystery, it will nag at you and drive you crazy.

On the way back from the pool the other day, Fritz and Billy were making Neighbor Girl crazy. Fritz was talking in an old man voice (he learned it from his father), and Billy was talking in his “Billy-Bob-Joe-Bob” country bumpkin voice (I do not know where he got the name or the voice…probably from his father). Neighbor Girl was actually offering them candy if they would stop it, but annoying her was worth so much more than a few lousy Smartees.

As they went back and forth, only a few times breaking character to laugh at how funny they found themselves, she finally pleaded, “Speak normally!”

From the front of the van, I couldn’t help myself and chimed in, “Oh, but they are speaking normally!”

Do not pick your nose after chopping a jalapeno pepper.

My favorite new resource:

The Founding Chapter of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails (LUPEC) welcomes you!

This site is dedicated to the Gin Fizz, the Widow’s Kiss, and the Singapore Sling – the drinks our mothers and grandmothers drank, the drinks we strive to save from extinction as a small measure of remembering those great women and their great cocktail parties.

Here you can find information about those cocktails, as well as their history and the rituals, barware and hors d’oeuvres that accompanied them.

So, remove the pineapple chunk from your cocktail, raise your glass, and drink to their memory! Up in ya!

H/T: The Pious Sodality of Church Ladies

When I get email, it has a tendency to sit in my inbox until I’m done with it. The junk gets deleted, unread. Other junk gets deleted, read. A few things might get “filed” in case I ever want to look at them again. And the rest sits and waits until I have time to deal with it appropriately.

Some things have been sitting for quite some time. For example, Jody Erickson emailed me last October about her hands-on sacrament preparation activities. I saw her table at the IHM Conference, and her products are very nice. I’ve also seen her book, Montessori on a Shoestring, and I wish I had had that about 5 or 6 years ago.

Back in June, I received an email telling me about Direct from Lourdes. If you want Lourdes water or a statue of St. Bernadette or anything else related to the apparitions there, including general (online and free) information about what happened, this is the place.

And also more than a month ago, I found out about Logos Bible Software. I definitely prefer a bound paper book to anything electronic (call me old-fashioned), but I do see the high value in having digital versions of texts. If you are studying theology, routinely writing articles or papers about certain topics or simply like to be able to find that passage or quote to bolster an after-dinner discussion with an argumentative spouse (not speaking from experience here at all), being able to search with a few key strokes and find your section within seconds as well as being able to cut and paste passages for your articles is convenient indeed. Logos Bible Software isn’t just the Bible. Their Catholic products include works of Augustine, Aquinas, Chesterton and others.

And lastly, I blogged about going to Williamsburg and mentioned that they have Homeschool days in the fall. I got another email telling me that the dates for this are September 12 – 27 (wow, two full weeks). If you pay in advance by 8/31, it is a mere $5.50 per ticket for one day with walk-in prices of $6.50. Two days are $8 in advance and $9 for walk-ins. Children 5 and under are free. The phone number given was 800-228-8878. Regular admission for an adult is $36, so this is quite a savings. I’m not feeling brave enough to do this without Bill, so it will have to be another time for us. But if you go, I highly recommend the Jamestown and Yorktown visitor’s centers as well.

Last fall, a friend of mine donated a kidney to a total stranger. Recently, she sent me this story about a man from her parish who had volunteered to donate for that same woman, but he wasn’t a match. He went on to donate to another stranger, and his generosity led to a chain-reaction of donations totalling EIGHT donated kidneys. It’s a neat story.

Done any good deeds lately?

Yesterday I tried to coordinate with a man who refitted my husband’s custom-fit knee brace (from ACL replacement surgery last fall) for pick-up or delivery. He is in Chevy Chase, MD which is a bit of a drive for me – an excruciating distance considering Mary does not like riding in the car.

He said he could drive it to my house, but in a way that made it seem like it was a sincere hardship for him. Since Bill had originally been fitted for this brace at his doctor’s office – local to me – I thought he must make routine drives out this way, but apparently not. Bill had driven to Chevy Chase for the refitting, and I guess the original salesman was gone. Maybe Bill had explained all this and I just didn’t listen…

So, I threw in my tale of woe – having to drive 6 little children all the way the Chevy Chase. Again, he said he could drive it out to me, he supposes, again with this begrudging attitude.

So I suggested he mail it. He seemed unsure about that. “It’s in a box,” he said. Well, good, I thought. The Post Office likes that. I suggested that First Class postage would be cheaper than gas. But he told me he would have to get approval from higher ups to do that. (Heaven forbid someone have to go through such red tape.) It would be better (easier) if he drove it over, but I would have to wait until he returned from his next week’s vacation.

Personally, I would have preferred that he get it in the mail today, instead of driving it over personally in two weeks, but since I’m putting the man out so much and I doubt he would have managed to secure approval in such a short amount of time to actually spend the $10 for postage (I think this thing weighs 8 ounces – it’s super high-tech), I felt like my only choices were to wait or to drive there myself.

So, sorry, honey, it’s going to be September before you get this thing.

Anybody stop by Adoremus Books during the IHM Conference and pick up a 10% off coupon for online orders using a discount code? I did, and used it, and threw it away. But now I’m placing another order and that 10% will pay for my shipping. Help!

I enjoy traveling, but I really enjoy coming home to my own bed and my own pillows.

Took the kids on The Loch Ness Monster and my first thought was, “Oh boy, I’m going to toss my breakfast,” and my immediate second thought was, “I am getting so old.” Later, I dragged Fritz on Alpengeist (he’s the only one of my kids tall enough to ride), and when it was over, so was he. For the rest of our day, he contented himself in taking Mary on the kiddie rides.

We’re at a point now where half the kids can ride most of the rides. They are also old enough to go on certain rides together, but without adult supervision – namely the ones involving centrifugal force. I stopped enjoying those a decade ago.

Side note: an overcast Tuesday in early June is the perfect time to go to Busch Gardens. The lines were short and the streets uncrowded. And there was no brutal sun beating down on us all day long.

We only had a few hours yesterday to go to Colonial Williamsburg. An adult ticket costs over $36! You can walk around for free, but there isn’t much you can go inside to see. Since we had so little time, we walked around for free. I considered it a scouting mission. Definitely worth returning to, but I think we’ll save it for the annual “Homeschool days” where all tickets are $5.

Besides Williamsburg, we went to Jamestown and Yorktown. On the way home, it happened to be Katie’s turn on the DVD, and she had happened to select Felicity – set in Colonial Williamsburg during the Revolution. “Wow, great karma,” I told Bill. He reminded me that in the West we call that “Providence.” Either way, it was a perfect cap to an educational and fun trip. Pictures and more details when I get to it.