Category: Catholic Families

3.5 Time Outs: Family Life

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who is nothing if not a family kinda guy.

Click and be amazed.

1.

This weekend I met a couple of the ladies from the Society of Joyful Hope.  I’d never heard of such a thing!  A real-life support group for families that use NFP!  A true support group, btw, not just your NFP instructor checking in to remind you what Acheiving-Related Behavior tends to achieve.  The group prays together, and then kids do activities and the parents talk about parenting.  Very cool.

1.A You can see their website here, and though the events page is a running behind on updates, they are an active organization.  I’m in that blissful state where I am not the least bothered by people who are running a tiny bit behind on website maintenance.  Ahem.

1.B The nice thing about openness-to-life is that eventually you don’t need to go visit the NFP instructor to be reminded what Achieving-Related Behavior acheives.  Your children are there to remind you.  All the time.

1.C  I was showing around Sarah’s new pregnancy book, and the Joyful Hope lady exclaimed when she saw Hallie Lord’s endorsement on the cover.  Solving the mystery of what it was that had caused Betty Beguiles to pick up and move south.  Wow.  I had no idea.

1.D More cool: Fr. Kirby at Charleston Vocations gave us a bunch of t-shirts to give away for prizes at our Family Life reception.

1.E Triple Cool: Eldest daughter has been reading assorted fiction and lives of saints from Pauline Media, causing her to ask all kinds of questions about the Daughters of St. Paul.  Mostly: What do they wear?  So it was neato to walk into the Doughnut Room and, surprise!, there was Sister Francis, whom I’d never met before, but it turns out is very good at chatting with girls interested in all things Nuns Who Publish Books.  Less cool: I had no money with me for book-buying.  Because of course the girls found something they liked.

2.

Coolness aside, here’s the real topic: How Good is Your Parish at Doing Family-Friendly Ministries?

I had a conversation with a young mom, not at my parish, who had moved up from Florida (St. Agnes’s in Naples, I think?), and she really missed the number of family events and activities at her former parish.  I got to thinking about it, and realized that one of the things sabotaging some of my own parish’s ministries is a lack of Stuff for the Whole Family to Do.

It’s not like families with young children are really going to turn out for ministries five nights a week, don’t mistake me.  There’s only so much a person with humans for children can do, time-and-energy-wise.  But in order for a family with young children to do anything. at. all., there has to be provision for the whole family.  The crying people.  The climbing-the-curtains people.  The elementary-aged people.  The teen people.  The female people.  The male people.  All of them.  And if we’re feeling broad-minded, how about the elderly-relative-living-with-you people?  Or the not-so-polished-in-the-social-skills-for-reasons-beyond-their-control people?

–> Because otherwise, church stuff breaks apart the family.  Oh it’s all lovely to get together with just the girls, or just the fathers-n-sons, or whatever it is.  We do that here and there.  Sunday afternoon our girls met for Little Flowers while our boys went mountain biking.  It was good.  But there are only seven nights in a week, and people keep insisting we eat dinner together at least a few of those.

[Without wishing to pull out the Evangelicals Are Smarter Than Us card, I will point out that on Wednesday nights around my town, most of the other churches are hosting an evening of this-n-that, in which you can bring your whole family, and all y’all get your faith-formation or ministering-to-people fix in one fell swoop.  It’s only one night a week.  But it’s one night a week.  Some of the churches do the same thing Sunday nights too.  Or Fridays.  Or whatever.]

So anyhow, that’s my question: If your parish is successful at getting families involved in the life of the church, what is it that works so well?

3.

Happiness is agreeing with your editor.

3.5

fairy wings and magic wands.  Works great.

***

Well, that’s all for this week.  Tuesday’s Link Day, which is when instead of e-mailing fun things I ought to post but forget to, you just tell the world all by yourself.  Entirely optional.

Catholic Mother’s Companion to Pregnancy – Book Tour & Giveaways

Welcome to Sarah R.’s stop at my place on her book tour!

Click to Enter the Nook Giveaway

We’ll start with some info from the publisher and from Sarah:

To celebrate the launch of her new book, A Catholic Mother’s Companion to Pregnancy: Walking with Mary from Conception to Baptism, Sarah Reinhard invites all of us to spend her blog book tour praying the rosary together. Today, she shares this reflection on the Nativity:

The cave in Bethlehem probably isn’t what Mary had in mind for her Son’s birth. Straw as bedding and oxen as companions, with shepherds and townsfolk dropping in to wish her well?

Maybe it wasn’t so shocking to her, after being told she would be the Mother of God, that it didn’t go at all how anyone would picture it. Even so, I’m sure it wasn’t that comfortable even by standards of the day. She gave birth with animals all around, in the chill of winter, in a town far away from home.

So often, things don’t go the way I plan. I struggle with my knee-jerk reaction to the wrenches in life, to the natural temper tantrum I want to give in and throw. It’s hard to see God at work in the up-close of a situation turned differently than I think it should be.

But he is at work. Jesus being born in the most humble of circumstances made him accessible to all of us. It also makes Mary someone we can all turn to for comfort: if anyone knows what it’s like to go with the flow, it’s Mary.

As we pray this decade of the rosary, let’s hold all those brave women who have said yes to difficult and challenging motherhood in our intentions in a special way. Don’t forget, too, that we are praying for an increase in all respect life intentions as part of our rosary together this month. (If you’re not familiar with how to pray the rosary, you can find great resources at Rosary Army.)

Our Father . . . 

10 – Hail Mary . . .

Glory Be . . . 

O My Jesus . . . 

You can find a complete listing of the tour stops over at Snoring Scholar. Be sure to enter to win a Nook (and any number of other goodies) each day of the tour over at Ave Maria Press.

***

And a few quick comments from me:

  • This is an excellent book.   (Yes, I wrote five paragraphs of it.  But all the paragraphs are good, not just mine.)
  • When you’re pregnant, you naturally turn towards spiritual things.  This is the book that meets that need for Catholic moms.
  • It’s absolutely devoid of the drivel-n-feel-good nonsense of other pregnancy books.  Tackles the hard topics with maturity and clear thinking.
  • From here on out, it’s my go-to book any time I know a mom who could use it.

And for those of you local to the Diocese of Charleston, SC, we’re up to four copies for the giveaway from the Office of Family Life this coming Sunday, October 14th, at the Blessing of the Unborn Mass in Columbia, SC. See you there!

(For internet friends, check out the other stops on the book tour, there will be giveaways all over the place.)

 

3.5 Time Outs: The Distracted Life

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, who has exceeded himself once again.  Go look!

Click and be amazed.

1.

On Tuesday mornings we’ve been watching Fr. Barron’s Catholicism DVD’s at the nearby parish (not ours) that has the most convenient times.  Excellent.  BUT, episode three is a little a lot abstract for the kids.  I’m hoping it goes back to more concrete story-telling type episodes in the weeks ahead.  

2.

I could tell my 3rd-grader was not fully paying attention, because her feet were in the air.  You know how you raise your hand to ask a question in class?  Or you raise two hands in air to communicate secret messages from referee to fans, or from evangelical praise-and-worshiper to God?  It was just like that, only with feet.

3.

I’d told the group leader we’d be slipping out right after the DVD, and not staying for the group discussion, so that we could get home and get started on school work.  Kids and I discussed the Problem of Evil (subject of episode 3) on the way, and curiously, the boy proposed “God testing us” as one of the possible explanations for evil things in the world.

I challenged that notion, but I’ll tell you I do think it’s one of the explanations for good things in the world.  Because as we pulled in, our shy-but-friendly bachelor neighbor, who never comes over, was poking around our entry way, looking for us.  Because he’d found this:

New Kitten

3.5

The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.

True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth.

In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them.

But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop.

(Paragraph breaks added for legibility in blog format. See the source here.)

***

I see that I’ve hit my deadline for sidebar updating, so I guess I’ll officially slide that onto my to-do list.  But I’m open to suggestions as long as the work in is progress.  And of course, Tuesday’s Link Day, which is when instead of e-mailing fun things I ought to post but forget to, you just tell the world all by yourself.  Entirely optional.

Book Giveaway – Catholic Mother’s Companion to Pregnancy

 

Look what just came in the mail for me:

Two copies.  Free from Ave Maria, as a tie-in to Sarah’s virtual book tour, which will be stopping at this blog on Monday October 8th.  So how do you win a free copy?

Well, it doesn’t involve me mailing you things, that’s for sure.  I got a call last week from the Office of Family Life at the Diocese of Charleston, saying, “Would you please help serve cookies after the Mass for Expectant Parents on October 14th in Columbia, SC?”

And I said, “Yes, I’ll be happy to do that, but only if you agree to give these books away, because it is much easier for me to turn up for mass someplace than for me to go to the post office.”

We think there might be pregnant people coming to that mass.  Because the bishop will be giving the exceedingly cool Blessing for the Child in the Womb.  But you can come put your name in the hat for the drawing, even if your plan is to win it for some other person who is pregnant, or who hopes to be, or who just likes to read fantabulous devotionals for Catholic pregnant ladies.

Also there’ll be an NFP table.  And cookies.  Did I mention cookies?

The Kolbe Reviews: Religion

Freedom’s just another word for “knowing what to do.” And then doing it.

I’ve been using the Faith and Life textbook series for homeschool religion since the boy was in first grade.  I loved it then, and still love it now.

 

What you get: Each book in the series has approximately 30 chapters, designed to be read one a week throughout the school year.  (Some years there are more chapters, some years less).  The reading is on grade-level, but the first grade book is designed to be a read-aloud, and the second grade book will be a read-aloud for some students.  Each chapter might be ten minutes worth of reading?  One day’s assignment. At the end of the chapter there are usually some vocabulary words, a scripture or prayer, and some catechism questions and answers.

All except the 2nd grade book feature gorgeous traditional artwork for the illustrations.  The second grade book uses contemporary-school-book genre stuff, but you’ll get over that insult when you get back to 3rd grade and the serious art resumes for the remainder of the series.

Each book has a theme — first grade covers Salvation 101, 2nd grade prepares students for the sacraments of reconciliation and communion, fourth grade is a survey of the Bible, sixth grade is heavy on the moral life.  Along the way you spiral through the essentials of the faith at an age-appropriate level, so it’s possible to jump right in at grade-level even if you haven’t used the texts before, or even ever studied the faith before.

The accompanying Activity Book is a consumable workbook with a combination of study questions and fun activities like coloring pages and crossword puzzles.  Together the two make a complete package for home use — the student does the reading, completes the study questions, and does any of the extra workbook pages as desired.  I let my kids write in the book, but if you did only the study questions on a separate paper, and no fun-and-games, you could pass the book down.

I have looked through the expansive (and expensive) teacher’s manuals, and they do contain a lot of helpful information for the catechist.  But for home use, I think these are not needed.  My advice for a parent who is not very knowledgeable of the faith would be to do the student reading along with the child, and then to learn more about the faith in general by picking out other good Catholic books on topics of interest.

UPDATED: Tara in the combox observes, and I would take her advice over mine:

I find them really really useful because I am not a catechist and I cannot make this stuff up. They have the answers for the activity book pages and have a test / quiz for each chapter and each section (again, answers supplied too). Unless you’re very confident and very experienced, I think they’re well worth the money.

FYI the teachers manuals are huge.  So priced comparably (even favorably) to other works offering similar amounts of info.

I’ve never used Faith and Life in the classroom.  My parish has always used some-other-brand.  I have talked to several catechists from other parishes who didn’t care for F&L, because of the strongly academic focus (a selling point for me — I love it), and because the style of the lessons didn’t call for crafts and activities and so forth.  We did do one test section of F&L for 8th grade last year, and the feedback I received at mid-year from the catechist teaching that class was very good.  Feedback from a 2nd-grade catechist at another parish was that course material was good, but the lessons worked best if the teacher had free reign to present the topics the way she thought the students would learn them best.   I think a lot depends on whether the parish in fact wants students to learn the faith with the rigor expected in other academic subjects, and whether the teacher has the experience and confidence to teach the material effectively.

What you don’t get in F&L:  There’s very little in the way of multicultural imagery, church geography, or even much for lives of saints.  This is a theology course, and you need to plan to fill out your students’ religious education with all the other stuff that makes up our faith and heritage.  If you are going to Mass, observing the feast days, living out in the wider world, praying as a family, and reading lives of saints as part of your literature curriculum, you’re in good shape.  Otherwise, plan to pick up some supplemental materials that will fill in your gaps.

About the Three Editions:  There’s original, revised, and 3rd edition to match the new mass translation.  Don’t worry about it.  If someone gives you an older edition, it’ll work fine. Every now and then one of the assignments won’t line up, but it’s not a big deal.  On the other hand, the books are fairly affordable new.  My personal approach is if I’m going to buy, I buy new, but I’m not upgrading my older stock.

Kolbe also uses the St. Jospeh Baltimore Catechism series.  These are retro-style catechisms, complete with an English translation of the mass that sounds almost like our new mass translation, because, get this: it’s translated straight from the Latin.  Because the books are that old.  The language is frank, the drawings are 1950’s-chic, and yes, I love this one too.  Great discovery.  If you want to justify mowing the lawn on Sundays, don’t let your kids read this book.  No toe left un-stomped.

The course plans.  For me as a catechist who happens to be a parent, the course plans primarily save me the work of writing up my own.  But I think they’d be one of the sets of plans worth purchasing if you aren’t registered with Kolbe, because each day’s and week’s assignments include a summary of the lesson topic, and points to clarify as you teach your student.  Lots of material in the plans.

The planned assignments do call for a lot of memorization and recitation.  Recall that as the teaching parent, you’re free to decide just how much of that memory work your student needs to do.

FYI: The Kolbe plans run on a four-day schedule, and are built around a tutoring-type environment, so they can’t be peeled off the page and inserted into a parish religious education program as-written.   That said, if I were Queen of Religious Ed (I’m not) and had the budget to match my imperial fantasy life, I’d want something like this to give to new and struggling catechists, because the plans to do a good job distilling the faith into the essentials.

***

Questions?  Comments?

My vote for Most Important Book of 2012

I just spent 3 days in the largest Catholic bookstore in the world.  I bought one book.  This is it:

Then I was stuck in an airport for five hours.  Perfect timing.

What it is:  Tiến Dương is a real guy about your age (born 1963) who is now a priest in the diocese of Charlotte, NC.  Deanna Klingel persuaded him to let her tell his story, and she worked with him over I-don’t-know-how-long to get it right.  Fr. Tien is a bit embarrassed to be singled out this way, because his story is no different from that of thousands upon thousands of his countryman.  But as Deanna pointed out, if you write, “X,000 people endured blah blah blah . . .” it’s boring.  Tell one story well, and you see by extension the story of 10,000 others.

The book is told like historical fiction, except that it’s non-fiction verified by the subject — unlike posthumous saints’ biographies, there’s no conjecture here.  It’s what happened.  The reading level is middle-grades and up, though some of the topics may be too mature for your middle-schooler.  (Among others, there is a passing reference to a rape/suicide.)  The drama is riveting, but the violence is told with just enough distance that you won’t have nightmares, but you will understand what happened — Deanna has a real talent for telling a bigger story by honing in on powerful but less-disturbing details.  Like, say, nearly drowning, twice; or crawling out of a refugee camp, and up the hill to the medical clinic.

–>  I’m going to talk about the writing style once, right now: There are about seven to ten paragraphs interspersed through the book that I think are not the strongest style the author could have chosen.  If I were the editor, I would have used a different expository method for those few.  Otherwise, the writing gets my 100% stamp of approval — clear, solid prose, page-turning action sequences, deft handling of a zillion difficult or personal topics.

Why “Most Important Book?”

This is a story that needs to be known.  It is the story of people in your town and in your parish, living with you, today.  And of course I’m an easy sell, because the books touches on some of my favorite topics, including but not limited to:

  • Economics
  • Politics
  • Diplomacy
  • Poverty
  • Immigration
  • Freedom of Religion
  • Freedom, Period
  • Refugee Camps
  • Cultural Clashes
  • Corruption
  • Goodness and Virtue
  • Faith
  • Priestly Vocations
  • Religious Vocations
  • Marriage and Family Life as a Vocation
  • Lying
  • Rape
  • Suicide
  • Generosity
  • Orphans
  • Welfare
  • Stinky Mud
  • Used Cars
  • Huggy vs. Not-Huggy

You get the idea.  There’s more.  Without a single moment of preaching.  Just an action-packed, readable story, well told.

Buy Bread Upon the Water by Deanna K. Klingel, published by St. Rafka press.

What to Read.

I’m here in Dallas (no one told me it was beautiful!) with a slooooow internet connection, so you’ll have to read somewhere else this week. No shortage of options.

Two brand new homeschooling blogs, written by internet friends of mine, that I think are worth a look:

Home Grown is by a Catholic mom of 1, and for all everyone sighs and moans at the sight of large homeschooling families, 1-child families have a dynamic that can be quite challenging for the stay-at-home parent.  I love how Susan is up front about the problems she works through.  Also, I wish I could write as beautifully as her 4th grader. There’s a reason this blog doesn’t include penmanship samples.

[And so that you’re warned, any snide comments about family size, and I’ll scratch your eyes out. You have no idea.  No. idea.]

180 Days of Homeschool is by Amy, a mom of eight, ages baby to senior in high school.  She’s been at this homeschooling thing for a while, and the day-by-day approach gives a nice realistic look at what it is homeschoolers really do all day.  The other interesting thing for non-homeschoolers to note: by “homeschooling” what we often mean is “sending the kids to school, just not all day every day”.  Amy has a few kids taking classes at a home-school school — think private Catholic school, but courses ordered a la carte, much more like college.

On education: If you aren’t already reading Bearing’s tremendously thorough series on the goals of Catholic education, per the Church, check it out.

***

On the plane I started reading Grace in the Shadows by Denise Jackson.  I read a lot of self-published books for the Catholic Writers’ Guild Seal of Approval process, so I am fully aware of the trepidation one feels in picking such a work.  The content on this one is excellent.  It’s part-memoir, part no-nonsense talk about the reality of sexual abuse, and how to move forward despite a miserable past.  It has a very personal style (there’s poetry, for one thing) that you wouldn’t see in many traditionally-published books, so I’m glad Denise chose to stick to her guns and write it the way she thought it needed to be told.

At the halfway point, I’m giving it a ‘buy’ recommend for anyone who has the job of creating a safe environment for preventing abuse, or has the vocation of being the friend of a sexual abuse survivor.  Denise Jackson has a very mature, well-balanced Christian spirituality, and what has fascinated me as I read is seeing how many of the patterns of behavior and emotion surrounding sexual abuse are in fact the same patterns you see in many other situations.  Great book.  I can’t wait to finish it.

3.5 Time Outs: Real Things

Thanks once again to our host, the very patient Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy.

Click and be amazed.

1.

Really Real:

I was going to continue my slacker non-blogging, but Potty Race pushed me over the edge.  I had no idea video games could be so . . . realistic. First time I’ve ever said that about something Barbie.

2.

Really useful:

Chickens eat fire ants and highway grass.  So basically, as long as they keep that up, the new arrivals have a home for life.

Dogs eat chicken feed.  Luckily, there’s plenty of highway grass and fire ants, so the chickens won’t starve.

3.

Really cool:

Grayson Highlands State Park is air-conditioned.  The entire mountain.   Truly wonderful — so pleasant I didn’t mind camping in the rain, because at least it wasn’t hot.   The ductwork must run underneath North Carolina, because I’m pretty sure the actual air-conditioning unit is located here in central SC, where it’s pumping a reliable jet of hot air, especially during peak hours.  It would be pretty easy to disguise a giant heat pump as an office building.  They look about the same.

3.5

Really interested in the will of God:

Please pray for a special intention, writing edition.  You’ll get the other half of this take as soon as I have good news to report.  Which there will be, the big question your prayers are directed towards are the who and the when.  Thanks!

***

And with that, I’m back to regular life.  Have a great week!

(And yes, you can post links.  I am, by the way, reading comments.  Oh, about once a week, but I am.  And trying to reply as well.)

4 Takes, 2.5 Time-Outs . . .

Most weeks, I really like the Tuesday / Friday method of staying on track.  It helps me remember to post stuff.  This is not that week.  I say that during the Wed-Thurs interregnum, Jen F. and Larry D. can split the difference.  In castle news this week:

1.  Child Vomits At Church.

Thank you Mrs. S. for cleaning the front pew while one parent whisked sick child home and the other disinfected the sacristy bathroom.  Thank you, Lord, that:

  1. The other two altar servers had already left the pew to go do whatever it is they do during the offering.
  2. Mrs. S, veteran mom, had chosen to sit next to Mt. Splashmore.
  3. Mr. O., who himself had blessed the altar-area in the same manner during his days as an altar boy, was sitting behind us and volunteered to watch two little girls while parents did more pressing parent jobs.
  4. No one else has gotten sick.

Nice usher guy was helpful, too.  He showed us the plastic toolbox in the usher’s closet labeled “Vomit Kit” — apparently this is all part of the life of an usher.  Though by that time I’d already snagged disinfectant and paper towels from the kitchen, and begged extra trash bags from the nursery.  Mothers don’t think the way ushers think.

2. Sandra’s Married!

And she told me I should wedding-blog. Which I will.  A different day.   Teaser:

  • Lovely, lovely ceremony.
  • Historic location + period dress = coolest combo ever.
  • Halloween-themed reception . . . oh I know you crabby apples are raising an eyebrow at that, ’cause I did too.  But it was just perfect for the couple, and not at all like you think.

More later.

3. Exciting writing news, almost ready to be announced.  If I seem like I’ve wandered off the edge of the earth, um, yes, I have.

3.5.  McKissick Museum.  For all your glow-in-the-dark geology needs.

4.  Check out the Catholic Writers’ Guild blog this coming Sunday, Christian LeBlanc has a cool post scheduled.  And Julie Davis writes on Saturday, I think, and she’s no slouch either.  It’s a good CWG weekend.

5.  Latin.  I think we’ve found a solution.  I’ll let you know in two months.

6.  And with that, I’m going to sneak back into hiding, and leave the internet to you.  If I’m lucky I might get a backlog of assorted posts run, but I’m not placing any bets. Have a great weekend.

3.5 Time Outs: Surprisingly Good

Thanks once again to our host, Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy, always good, sometimes surprising.

Click and be amazed.

1.

My niece is here this week, so the topic ought to be Teenage Girls, but there’s not much to say.  Other than: They’re fun and interesting and get along great with younger cousins, and also they sleep late.  Which I don’t mind.

2.

But look, two good magazines:

One is the magazine of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, and this was a pleasant surprise – sort of a Catholic National Geographic with a bit of the best of The Economist mixed in.  The articles are substantial, and cover the history and contemporary issues in the regions CENWA serves.  Not a light read — one of the articles this month is a history of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, starting in the middle ages and detailing, regime by regime, the power plays and organizational shifts ever since.

PG warning: Though there are no graphic descriptions of the horrendous things that go on in these lands far away, difficult topics are named by name, no glossing over or glamorizing.

Highly recommended.*

Liguorian is the other end, intellectually, of Center-Catholic reading spectrum.  Like Reader’s Digest for Catholics, only without the edge.  Good all-purpose, inoffensive but unapologetically Catholic magazine, targeted towards your average man in the pew.  Encouraging and inspiring without being too in-your-face.   Gentle.  For your parishioners who aren’t quite ready for The Register or Catholic Answers.

3.

We brought home from the library the season one DVD’s of the HBO-BBC series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.  I haven’t read the books.  But hey, what a cool show!  Yes it runs sappy, and yes, I think you ought to watch along with your kids and provide a little parental guidance on the moral issues.   But here’s what I love: Africa seen through the lense of the African middle class.  How refreshing to see AIDS, or the ivory trade, or child sacrifice and witchcraft, or polygamy, or marital infidelity — through the eyes of someone other than PBS, NPR, Bill Gates or George Bush.  And religion! Ha!  People who can be overtly Christian on TV!  Love it.

Moral note: The No. 1 Detective does not always resort to the police and the law for resolution to crimes uncovered.  The Anglo-Saxon concept of Weregild comes in handy.

3.5

Glow in the dark rocks. I’m not sure whether I’m succeeding as hostess to the 17-year-old.  I tried to explain that we don’t really do anything fun here, so it’s hard to think up activities.  But listen, no visit to the inferno is complete without a trip to the third floor of the

***

Well that’s all for today.  Tuesday is Link Day for all topics, help yourself if you are so inclined.  Limit yourself to one link per comment in order to avoid the spam dragon.  Have a great week!

*FYI – CENWA itself is a bit of a disaster to deal with for the small-time donor.  Nothing egregious, just your normal incompetence in the administrative offices in New York; the flurry of solicitations, set aside and kept dry for use in the paper-stove, could keep a small house warm all winter.  But the magazine is great.