I really enjoyed my monthly series of Inspire and Friday Food that appeared all through 2020, and I’m planning on continuing it into this year. Inspire will return next week as this week was too full of news to focus on it, although I did find some things in the past week to be inspired about.
Breakfast Casserole. (c)2021
This was a layered breakfast casserole I had at Cracker Barrel. The restaurant is back to a limited menu due to the uptick of covid cases but this is seriously easy to make at home, either from scratch or with a few boxed ingredients.
When I first saw it, I thought it was a too small portion, but its looks are deceiving – it was hot, filling, and the tastes were perfectly balanced.
It is simple, easy, and delicious and while I haven’t tried this at home myself, I have no doubt that I could put it together in short order.
The layers from bottom to top are:
Hashbrown Casserole base
Melted Colby cheese
Scrambled eggs
Bacon
Diced tomatoes
Crispy fried onions
Scallions
Buttermilk biscuit with butter and/or jam on the side
The breakfast of champions. Enjoy it and the beginning of this new year that I’m going to choose to look on with potential and optimism despite recent setbacks.
There are times when things don’t work that should and you more or less know that they don’t work even though you also know they should, but you can’t figure out why or what the problem is. Or how to make it better.
We know the opposite too.
This holds true for many things, both tangible and un- , but for me this week, it was a pair of pictures, both Mary, both by the same artist, my friend, Brother Mickey McGrath.
I had attended a weekend retreat under his direction in 2019. His retreats always include his artwork related to the weekend subject.
One of the pictures that I was drawn to was Mary, Queen of the Prophets. It was blue and yellow-gold and swirly and I was perfectly captivated by it.
Mary, Queen of the Prophets (c)2020 Bro. Mickey McGrath Trinity Stores Link attached to picture.
I ordered a print, framed it and hung it in its place.
Every time I looked at it I got a twinge of unease. Nothing specific. Nothing sinister. Just something not quite right.
The feelings I was getting made no sense.
I had wanted the picture for some time. I knew exactly where it would go when it came. But I don’t know. There was something undefined and uncomfortable when I looked at it despite its beauty.
And I lived with it even though I considered trading it back with the picture that originally hung in that space. I think I thought I would eventually change it.
Recently, Brother Mickey created a new Mary art. This one was Mary, Untier of Knots. Our Lady, Untier of Knots is my personal favorite of Marian devotions. I feel an overwhelming devotion to her. I have cards, coins, and medals of this devotion.
Mary, Our Lady, Untier of Knots (c)2020 Bro. Mickey McGrath Trinity Stores Link attached to picture.
For Christmas, I decided ot use a little of my gift money to order the print. I bought a frame and it arrived very quickly. Having nothing to do with the Queen of Prophets in particular, that spot was where it would hang – behind the chair in my corner office. It was time for change and Mary, Untier of Knots was *my* Mary.
As soon as it came I hung it on the wall.
The first time I looked at it from across the room, I felt a calmness wash over me.
There was serenity and feelings from deep within me.
I brought the other picture up to my bedroom. The walls are yellow and I thought it would fit with the blues and the yellow-gold and the swirls of the print. I propped it up against the wall on the floor beside my bed, intending to leave it until I could figure out where in the room exactly it would go.
Then something happened.
I looked at it – Mary’s face, Mary’s hands, the swirling of the background.
Even resting on the floor, it was home. I was full of emotion seeing it in this temporary place, but still…its place.
Wherever I would hang it in my bedroom it would fit; it would be perfect.
Things have a place and when they’re in the wrong one, you know it. Even if you don’t actively know it or the reasons for the discomfort, you feel something real, and eventually with a little nudge, these things can be righted.
Sitting in my living room trying to make a list of what snacks to buy for our “party’ tonight and I suddenly decided (after seeing David and Georgia Tennant’s silver linings video) to make a different sort of list and remember the good things that our family experienced in this year.
At the end of last year, we all looked forward to 2020, not the least of which was its looming roundness of numbers – Twenty Twenty. Barbara Walters, hindsight, leap year, THE election. It was going to be our year – all of our ours…
But it wasn’t quite, was it?
The perfect sentiment from a witch (Rowena on Supernatural) Pin from Ruth Connell’s design for Stands, Inc. (c)2020
Our biggest blessings were living in New York with a competent state government and a governor who cared about New Yorkers; my husband and oldest continued working, the younger kids continued school, albeit remotely, no one got sick other than a normal mild cold here or there, and for the most part spending all that extra time together, we managed to not want to strangle each other more than the usual amount.
I know that people often talk about the corruption of politicians and sometimes that can be an oversimplified catch-all and generalization and stereotype, but even I was surprised at the level of corruption of the Trump Administration, and I believe that the blatant corruption and lack of empathy towards the American people led to a much wider array of abuses.
Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are two of the most unethical and shady pols I have come across. To the point, that in the last debate Perdue had with challenger Jon Ossoff, he had no response to Ossoff calling him a crook right to his face.
He didn’t defend, he didn’t excuse, he stood silently by as if accepting the description. He has refused to debate in subsequent opportunities.
Loeffler debated her challenger Reverend Raphael Warnock, but instead of laying out her policy priorities and her ideals, she persisted in name-calling using “radical liberal Raphael Warnock” as if that false characterization was all that mattered, and perhaps to the GOP it is.
To Georgia voters, though, I hope that they can see through the dishonest shenanigans of both incumbents who have done nothing for their constituents and only worked to line their own pockets.
Both have sat in on classified briefings earlier in the year about the oncoming Covid pandemic, and instead of taking care of Georgians, they made sure their stock portfolios were in order, trading stocks they felt would fall when the pandemic reached the United States and become common knowledge, and buying stocks in the health care field that would surely grow as Americans became sicker and sicker.
In any other administration, there would be an ethics investigation into both of them.
We currently stand at just under 300,000 dead from the virus known as covid-19. They haven’t pressured Mitch McConnell to bring covid relief to the Senate floor, and have stood in line behind him as he ignores the ravages of the pandemic.
As long as they’re getting paid, I suppose.
Some links for you to see for yourselves what they’ve been doing for most of 2020:
Please give your support to Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock; vote for BOTH of them and bring integrity and purpose to the Senate in representing the people of Georgia.
Follow these accounts on Twitter and visit their websites to see what you can do to ensure a Democratic win in the Georgia Runoff!
Griffins and Ginger Snaps 