Post Randomizer

I blog over at Take Up and Read now, but I found this post randomizer and thought I would put it up here. It makes it more fun for me when I occasionally browse through my old posts (which I do) and if you happen to visit this blog maybe you will want to try it too.

I like randomizers! ::puts on geek glasses::

Blessings! Willa
(Note: I put the randomizer on the sidebar to make it easier to use)

Catholic Media Awards

Just one more post in which I shall mention that this blog has been nominated for a Catholic Media Award in the category of Best Written Blog. I will not and in my opinion OUGHT not win when pitted against the likes of Jen of Conversion Diary, Elizabeth of In the Heart of My Home, and my own daughter (just to name a few!) but it still makes me feel really good.

Thank you most heartily, whoever nominated me.

I would like to point out that Anne of Under Her Starry Mantle was nominated for Best Blog by a Woman (my daughter's blog has been nominated in that category too) -- it was Anne's blog that gave me the tip-off about my own nomination. Thank you, Anne!

Being nominated gives me the right to post a cool graphic:









and gives me a warm happy feeling as I post what I really intend to be the last post on here! (If you happen to be curious and want to check out my new blog, it is here: Quotidian)

Moving....

I'm going to move to a new blog address. It's still on blogger, just a different blog and different name. Why? Maybe you caught my post before I deleted it trying to work out why and if. I'm still not exactly sure. But in moving blogs once in a while, I'm in some good company : ).

Bluejay Babies

The Steller Jay eggs in our garage hatched while I was in Alaska. Here's a couple of pictures I took today, so they would be what? a week and a half old? The pictures are dark because I didn't want to blind them with the flash:



They are very silent considering how loud their parents are. When we go out through the garage the parents fly out to the nearest tree and squawk abrasively, but you would never guess that the babies have this potential. A book I read recently, called "Mind of the Raven", makes the point that the loudness of the babies, or lack of it, depends upon nesting conditions. Baby ravens are very loud, because their nests are in inaccessible places. I conclude that corvids who nest in places like boxes on top of garage shelves, or on porch lights, will tend to have silent babies. I wonder when they get their voices?

Hatcher's Pass in May

I didn't take very many pictures in Alaska but here are a few, mostly of Hatcher's Pass and my mother and daughter:

I love the way the mountains looked.

Requiem for Friendship

The link to the First Things article by Anthony Esolen I posted last time doesn't work any more, more's the pity. If you happen to read this and know of a substitute link please comment and I'll put up a replacement. It was a good article.

While I was googling for that one, I found this interesting article also by Anthony Esolen called A Requiem for Friendship. ...Why Boys Will Not Be Boys. Basically it's about the loss of the concept of true friendship and the presently fashionable lit-ana tendency to recast legendary friendships in terms of homosexuality. Using Frodo and Sam's friendship as an example of the modern tendency to cast deep friendships as perverse and odd, the article goes on to make points about the value of language to express concepts and how the language of friendship and the concept of it have become attenuated these days, to our loss:

It is one thing to say that it has made friendships among boys more distant and difficult, and to suppose that that is a bad thing for the emotional lives of those boys. It is quite another—and it takes someone willing to see through our jaded dalliance with androgyny—to see that the loss of such friendships stunts the boys intellectually and goes a long way towards depriving everybody of the benefits that such intellectual development used to provide....

Our boys are failing in school. Has it occurred to no one that we have checked them at every turn, perversely insisting that they must not form brotherhoods, that they must not identify their manhood with practical and intellectual skills that transform the world, and that they must not ever have the opportunity, apart from girls, to attach themselves in friendship to men who could teach them?

For good reason boys used to build tree houses and hang signs barring girls. They know, if only instinctively, that the fire of the friendship cannot subsist otherwise. If the company of girls is made possible, then the company of girls becomes a necessity, if only to avoid having to explain to others and to oneself why one would ever prefer the company of one’s own sex. Thus what is perfectly natural and healthy, indeed very much needed, is cast as irrational and bigoted, or dubious and weak; and thus some boys will cobble together their own brotherhoods that eschew tenderness altogether—criminal brotherhoods that land them in prison. This is all right by us, it seems.

Freedom and Giving

The subject of freedom and self-donation has been coming up in my life recently, so I want to link to this article at the First Things site that someone sent to the Unschooling Catholics list. The Freedom of Heaven and the Freedom of Hell. A quote:

the community of the blessed saints, for whom freedom means the grace-filled incapacity to will anything but the good for themselves and for one another. Thomas Aquinas steps forth from the constellation of the wise to express this freedom as the now utterly natural and supernatural virtue of love.

Aquinas says to Dante (in the Divine Comedy)

When the radiance
of the Lord’s grace, which lights the flames of true
love and by love still grows in eminence,
With such multiplication shines in you
it leads you up these stairs no man may take
descending, without climbing up anew,
He who’d deny his flask of wine to slake
your thirst would not be free, would have such power
as rivers not returning to the sea!

Baby Faith Hope went to be with God on May 23rd, the day of my Dad's funeral service. I only just found out now, since I haven't been checking blogs regularly. Faith's mother writes:

And I can't wait to see her again... I don't know how she could get any cuter but I'm sure she is even more beautiful now that she is living it up in Heaven.

I am grateful to Faith's mama Myah for sharing her daughter's short, beautiful life through story, video and photo.

Utrum Siestae Necessae sunt pro salute...

and cute Paddy pic, too.