Yet Another Test

Photography, World Youth Day

Yet Another Test
Okay, so I got how to upload pictures to my Flickr account; and I got how to post blog entries; but I couldn’t find a way from the Flickr site to post pictures to the blog as I do from my desktop. I would imagine that I would mostly be keeping things separate, but I might occasionally want to post about a photo.

So, here I go again, trying more things to beat my electronics into doing my will. 🙂

Good thing I am a Nuke, trained for this frustration…. 🙂

 Update:  If you get a message where the photo should be saying that the picture is unavailable, don’t worry — I got that too.  The problem being is that I just couldn’t let things be and I had to monkey with them.  Since the photo that I uploaded was a vertical image, I went onto the Flickr site and rotated it, and wanted to see if it would auto-update the photo on the blog….  Maybe there’s just a time lag…  We shall see….   Of course, this all just applies to the photos edited from a computer to rotate them.  I haven’t yet figured out how to rotate things as I post them — to either site.  So, you may have to tilt your head/monitor….  Sorry!  🙂

Power Outage

Of Trials Opportunities and Gifts

While I was safely tucked away at work in Ann Arbor, apparently a storm came through Troy — knocking out a lot of the power in the area, including mine. I just wanted to let you all know. It’s kinda nice, being able to still be connected, but I think I’m going to use this time not to play with my Crackberry, but to enjoy my candlelight dinner and read a good book, before taking my (hopefully not cold) shower and heading to bed. 🙂

WHAT IS IT??!?!?!?!

Of Trials Opportunities and Gifts, Photography


WHAT IS IT??!?!?!?!Originally uploaded by CadyLy

 This may say a lot about me.  I am getting ready to go to bed, since I have to get up freakishly early in the morning (even for me, who normally sets the alarm for 4:30 am).  I step out of my bedroom for a minute and happen to catch site of this…is it a bug?  On the door.

Eyes get huge.  What is the first thing I do?

Grab my camera.

That’s right, folks.  I need a picture of this sucker.  Because if it manages to kill me, at least someone will be able to download my picture and see the culprit.

 I come back with the camera — and he’s gone!  Aaaahhh!  Monster bug on the loose!!  Oh no!  Oh no!  Panic sets in.

Then, I see him running across the floor.  Aaaaahhhhh!  He’s faster than a cockroach — and *those* suckers can move!  Finally, he ends up on the wall in the living room.  I swap the camera for the Lysol/Windex.  He’s too fast to risk having him on the loose where he might decide to eat me.

I squirt him repeatedly.  He seems to not move for a little while.  Oh, good.  This stuff can kill cockroaches, but sometimes it takes a bit of time.  THEN….  HE STARTS MOVING!  Like a bad horror flick, the monster has come back to life — and just when you were beginning to catch your breath.

He runs again and for a moment I have lost him.  Oh, no.  Oh, no.  In my head, I am screaming.  I pull out the couch, trying to see if he escaped under there.


The Bug That WOULD NOT DIE
 Finally, I catch up to him on the wall again.  Thank You, Jesus, for Niki, who kept an eye on the Evil Bug and let me know where he was lurking.  I am so glad that I bought new shoes recently, because I could grab my *old* shoe and crack the sucker with it.  I may have dented the wall…but I wanted to make certain that the little beastie was dead.

So, now the bug guts are in the trash.  I have been sanitized.  And, the couch is back where it should be.  And it’s time again for me to try and go to bed.  I’m almost over my panic.  Not quite, so don’t sneak up on me just yet.

Have a good night!  And please pray for me that he doesn’t have any relatives!

What was that thing???

Why Do I Do These Things??

Meme

You Are a Caramel Crunch Donut


You’re a complex creature, and you’re guilty of complicating things for fun.
You’ve been known to sit around pondering the meaning of life…
Or at times, pondering the meaning of your doughnut.
To frost or not to frost? To fill or not to fill? These are your eternal questions.

What Donut Are You?

I do beg to differ. After all, my favorite donut is a *plain* donut. The cake kind…I think they are called. Not raised, glazed, etc. The kind you can get at the cider mill with a crunchy outside and a soft inside. And, for variety, in the fall, I will pick up some pumpkin-flavored ones, but that’s about as exotic as my donuts get. No filling, no frosting, no powdered sugar.

Gardening Issues

Humor of the Day, Of Trials Opportunities and Gifts, Photography

Does anyone have any idea how to deal with this???

Welcome to the Jungle!

Because I’m a little at a loss. Except for sitting down and weeding them all out, which would take days….

Welcome to the Jungle!

Has more appeared, just in the past minute?!? Aaaah! 🙂

GPS

Of Trials Opportunities and Gifts

Yet another reason why I love my Crackberry.

After much debate, I decided to go to OLGC for morning Mass this morning.  Why was it a debate?  Well, after being laid off from my job in Ann Arbor on Saturdays, I didn’t really have a good justification to spend the $12 in gas to get there and back.  Surely, there had to be a church closer to home that offered Saturday Mass.  There are a few, but I have never been to them before, and I really am apprehensive about going to places like that for the first time, alone.  A couple of friends had offered to go with me, but we had not made plans the night before, and I didn’t want to wake them up this early if they hadn’t already planned on going.

Plus, this is the last weekend for Fr. Steve, before he heads off to Rome for vacation and then his reassignment to seminary.  So, if I went, there was a possibility that I would be able to say “Hi” and “Have fun” before he left.

After all this debate, if I was going to go to OLGC (where Mass begins at 7:15 am — I don’t know why the 15 minutes, it used to be 7:30 am….), I was running late for getting on the road to head over.  As I jumped into the car, I saw that I only barely had enough gas to make it there, but I figured that there was a gas station on the way between church and where I usually go to for coffee after Mass, so I should be okay.

I get to church, and it is not Fr. Steve, but Fr. John, so I asked Fr. John to give my card to Fr. Steve when he saw him.  I forgot about my gas situation until after Mass.  My car was telling me that I had about 8 miles until empty.  Granted, this is never *actually* 8 full miles, but I thought that the gas station was only 2 miles away. 

Um, no.

What I had thought was a gas station was, in fact, a bank.  And, now, my car said that I had about 5 miles until empty, and I realized that I had no clue where the nearest gas station was.  Oh, boy.  But!  I pulled out my little Crackberry and opened the GPS program and had it search for “GAS” from my current location.  It found one 1.9 miles away and took me there.  I could start to smell the your-tank-is-empty-and-you-are-literally-running-on-fumes smell from the car.  This gas station I would have never found on my own in a million years (well, maybe a million, but not before my tank ran dry).

So, Thank You, Lord, for providing for me and looking after me (even when I am a stupid sheep and should have filled up on the way to Mass).  And thanks for using my Crackberry to do so.  That just makes me smile.  🙂  And, additionally, I am glad that Fr. John has GPS, too, so that he will not be in a situation where he needs something or needs help and doesn’t know where to go.  🙂  Thank You again, Lord, for looking after my people.  🙂

Notes on “Crossing the Threshold of Love” — III

Neat Things I Didn't Author, Theology of the Body

“In this regard Wojtyla notes that an experience of values that comes about through feelings must always be subordinated to the truth.” (61)

How true is this? Certainly, feelings can color our experiences to a great degree and even sway our preferences and our decisions. However, our feelings are fleeting and change based on a whole slew of factors, some of which are of no more weight than whether or not I’ve had something to eat in the past several hours. And that’s not a good basis for decision-making. Truth, if it is indeed truth, cannot change. One of my favorite arguments to bring up when people start complaining that this or that is “behind the times” in the Catholic church. For example, if it is wrong to kill children in the womb because their life is just as sacred as those people who have already been born, then it could not be the case that all of a sudden it becomes okay to kill them just because society has deemed this not just a tolerable thing, but actually a preference to the “imposition” of an unwanted pregnancy. So too with many other things do we have to really think about what it is that we are deciding and make choices based on what we know and not on what we feel.

“Feelings are intentionally directed to values, but to rely solely on feelings to lead means to surrender self-determination.” (65)

At the moment, this speaks to me as representative of taking the easy way out. It is always so much easier for me to make a decision or a choice based on some arbitrary value, rather than on any trait of actual substance. An example here would be choosing — oh, say a car — based on how cute it looks or what color it is, rather than on something more important like fuel economy. A lot of this, particularly for me is a combination of mental laziness, coupled with the sense that I am too busy to do the necessary research, or that the choice isn’t that big of a deal. It becomes very easy to fall into a pattern of non-thinking in this manner, and have it extend into all aspects of my life, so that I’m not even making informed, carefully thought out decisions at the voting polls or in my day-to-day interactions with other people.

“In their proper place feelings greatly enrich the human person.” (65)

Not to say that feelings are not important! When rooted in an environment of truth, feelings enhance our experiences and help us to communicate and have empathy with others. They can help knit us together as the Body of Christ in our compassion and understanding.

EMG

Health and Medicine


EMG Marked Forearm

Originally uploaded by CadyLy

So, after several months of progressive, intermittent episodes of paralysis of my wrist/forearm, I get sent to Ortho, which does not appreciate any obvious mechanical defect, and who sends me to have an EMG.

EMG = electromyogram AKA they will electrocute you and see how you respond to that. 🙂

Before the procedure, I get some opinions of the test:
Doctor 1: “Oh, they just use really little skin needles, you’ll be fine.”
Nurse 1: “Are you kidding? I took my husband in for one a month and a half ago, and he cried.”
Nurse 2: Made fish flopping out of water motions at my zapping. Quite amusing, thanks. 🙂
Check-in girl at EMG: “Well, have you ever stuck your finger into a light socket? No? Well, if you’ve ever given birth — if you’ve survived that pain, you’ll survive this. *pause* Don’t worry, most people psyche themselves up for it to be really bad, then say it’s not as bad as they thought.”

Just before testing started:
EMG doctor: “So, what have you heard about the test?”
Me: “That you use tazers and cattle prods?”
EMG doc: “Exactly!”

(To be continued…)

At the end of my testing period, he didn’t have a clear explanation for my symptoms. Basically, my nerves and muscles appeared to be healthy and undamaged, which is good. However, the underlying cause could be a problem with my spinal cord or my brain — both of which sound like excellent options. 🙂

For Argument’s Sake…

Of Vice and Virtue, Sacraments, Theology of the Body

I found this article linked from Ironic Catholic’s blog:

ROME (Reuters) – An Italian couple who were caught having sex in a church confessional box while morning Mass was being said have repented and made peace with the local bishop.

The couple, in their early 30s, were detained by police earlier this month after they had made love in the confessional box in the cathedral in northern Cesena. They were cautioned for obscene acts in public and disturbing a religious function.Their lawyer said they had been drinking all night and realised they had gone too far.

The lawyer told the area’s local newspaper on Wednesday the couple met with the local bishop on Tuesday night, asked for his forgiveness and that he had given it.

Last week the bishop celebrated a “Mass of reparation” in the cathedral where the confessional box incident took place to make up for the sacrilege.

Okay, now calling all canon lawyers, etc., who may come across my blog — kindly pick this apart for me, the almost-still-a-neophyte Catholic and explain all the ways in which this was wrong, and in what ways might it be in very poor taste, but not technically wrong.

I suppose first, we should determine whether the act itself was a sin.  Was this a married couple or not?  Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that they are married.

During Mass.  Obviously, really poor timing.  I mean, it’s great to give yourself to your partner and renew with your bodies the vows that you made at your wedding, but how does that compare to actually taking the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ into oneself?  If people (including me sometimes, eh) really got it, what was taking place during the Mass, they would be lining up for miles, prostrating themselves in front of the Lord and going out into the world and shouting from the rooftops that they received the Creator of the Universe into their very person.  I have heard of other things (most notably, confession) taking place during Mass, so other things can kind of be there, but Reconciliation is another sacrament, which is to say another encounter with Jesus.  Sex with your spouse — not a sacrament.

Point two:  the article states that the couple had been drinking all night.  I think that an inordinate consumption of alcoholic beverages is a sin, and more to the point, how can you truly make a sincere gift of yourself if you are plastered out of your gourd?  I would think that that would interfere with your will, and cheapen the encounter to a pleasure-only experience.

Point three:  we are not really loving our neighbor, are we?  I mean, it might be fine and all for a married couple to have sex, but there is a huge ICK factor for the people who need to use that room following them.  I would hope that they were quiet, but there is the possibility that they, um, disturbed people attending Mass.  Again, not loving your neighbor there.

What does this say about people’s understanding of the Theology of the Body? 

Okay, I’ve given up the first three points that crossed my mind.  Now, it’s your turn!

Crackberry

Humor of the Day, Of Vice and Virtue

I think it’s highly amusing the length to which I will go to justify my toys. Take this Blackberry for example, I got it for a variety of reasons, but really it’s not essential to life. Hopefully, I will use it in a positive manner and be able to do things like post from WYD, etc.

So now I will have GPS and stuff and actually know what’s on my calendar.

Still a Crackberry though — I’ve gone Evil Empire!