Official rules will be posted this afternoon, but no worries, this is for fun. No judging, no judgment. Just do it.
For anyone familiar with my yearly scavenger hunt traditionally run by actor and activist, Misha Collins, there is always a mascot, a hybrid of two animals creating a new one. I don’t have that kind of energy. The mascot for my last hunt was a beeline – a bumblebee/ cat hybrid.
Our first item is to create your own mascot for this week. Design them, draw them, photoshop them, name them. My first draft is below the cut. I’ll be back this afternoon with a new post containing the day’s second item.
On occasion, I will flash back to my childhood, and hear something that I haven’t heard or thought of in forever. One of these childhood phrases was “porkchops with applesauce.” I’m sure this is from The Brady Bunch, although I don’t recall if it was Greg or Peter who said it.
Applesauce was a favorite in our house. In fact, I’m sure we ate pork chops with applesauce. We also ate roast beef with applesauce. Nowadays, I usually make it with gravy, but recently, since my daughter doesn’t like beef gravy, I offered her applesauce. This is a roundabout way of inviting you into my thought process for a dinner I made this week that came together when I was visiting Cracker Barrel restaurant. They have fried apples on their menu, and they also sell them in cans with the recipe on the back. I bought one can to go with the on-sale center cut pork that I bought this week, and we had a lovely (even if we used way too much butter than is healthy) meal.
The fried apples recipe calls for two tablespoons of butter; I think I used twice that? I used half a stick. Melt the butter, add the entire can, sprinkle cinnamon, mix, heat, simmer.
After searing the pork on both sides, and adding a bit of adobo seasoning, I poured a helping of the fried apples on top of the pork, added a side of mixed vegetables, and buttered egg noodles, and voila, yummy dinner in no time. It was about half an hour, but that’s not long at all. No leftovers.
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
My view on July is that it’s too hot. It’s barely the first week, and it is already too hot. When will fall be here? However, we still need to get through July (and the rest of the months) as we do all the other days. Be in the present. At least, try to be. The photos I’ve shared on bright, colorful, and motivating. Especially the books. The books are my intentions for July: spiritual journaling (and other writing), continuing to read the daily Scriptures in the voice of the Indigenous Peoples of this land (Turtle Island), and participate in a four week personal retreat with the four female Doctors of the Church: Therese of Lisieux, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen. Each has a special meaning for me that I hope to share in the next four weeks as I go through the book.
What are your plans for July?
What inspired you this week?
What is making you determined?
My new spiritual journal. PS I found the lost one. 😦 (c)2023
While we were in Canada a couple of years ago, in the mall on the way to the food court, we came across a vending machine that sold and dispensed CAKE! I had never seen anything like it before. I thought it was amazing!
For the next four weeks, I’ll be posting some information, links, art, and photos for Pride and hopefully including some LGBT+ history. I’d like to start by saying that last week I heard some complaints by folks with nothing better to do asking why Pride gets a month and our veterans only get one day. This is obviously meant to create an issue where there is none. First, Memorial Day is not about veterans in that way; it’s about the war dead, which most people are glad to ignore until it suits their agenda. If they really felt this way, they’d spend Memorial Day at the cemetery, at a house of worship, volunteering instead of barbecuing and at baseball games and concerts. Second, there are many, many veterans (and war dead) who are in the LGBT+ community, and Pride is as much for them as any other person. Third, for those who declare that “pride” is a venal sin, I’d like to suggest that those divorced, adulterous, lying, hypocrites stay quiet and/or remove the log from their eye.
I wonder if, when these people see a rainbow in the sky if they shake a fist at it and complain loudly to the Creator about how woke He is.
Pride was born in revolution, even though LGBT+ people were around long before 1969. The ones who are out and open and celebrate Pride are not only celebrating themselves but are celebrating those of the community who are still not out, for personal reasons as well as safety ones.
My friend has a denim vest with the stenciled words: The first pride was a riot. I’ve used that to influence the art I created last night for this post. Sometimes the simplest designs tell a greater story.
For those who know, Wednesday is new comic day. It’s a weekly collaboration and celebration of reading and community tied together with a pull list and a handful of new issues. They range from black and white and vibrant color and everything in between, where words and pictures mesh to create something new that cannot be done with only one or the other.
Each local comic store has its own personality, and Earthworld Comics in Albany, NY’s personality was as big as the heart of its owner, JC Glindmyer. As the motto stated, they (and he with an assortment of helpers) had been rotting minds and seducing the innocent since 1983. We moved to the area in 1995 and had been visiting Earthworld whenever we were in Albany before that, well befoe our kids were born. My husband wouldn’t move to a place that didn’t have a comic store, and with Earthworld he found the best.
JC died this week.
We missed him on Free Comic Book Day due to a family obligation – it was the first one we’d ever missed, and this one really stings. Each first Saturday in May we’d get there early, waiting for the doors to open, hanging out with the costumed superheroes of the day that JC arranged to be there: Spider-man, Gamora, Batman, Supergirl, Wonder Woman. There were special days all through the year: Batman’s 75th anniversary, Halloweenfest, Fangirls Night Out, and while Free Comic Book Day was filled with free comic books and entertaining heroes, the biggest hero was JC, raising money each year for local charities.
I would also be remiss in not mentioning how often he helped us by floating our comics from payday to payday, knowing our struggle, but also knowing that we were regulars (for a couple of decades) and needed the respite of reading the new issues without the embarrassment of not being able to afford them. Kids don’t always understand the money aspect of life, and JC knew how important some of those books were to the little ones.
If Halloween was on a Wednesday, Earthworld would be our first stop before trick or treating. Below is a photo or our kids dressed up as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman – the one trio we couldn’t wait to dress them up as!
During the covid pandemic, I’m sure he was worried about business, but he pulled together a curbside delivery after one week or so, and we tried to get there each week. We didn’t necessarily need the comics, but supporting JC was something that we didn’t even have to discuss. He met us (and other customers) curbside in his Earthworld t-shirt, Superman cape, and of course, his mask and gloves. A real super-hero.
This is JC. My husband dressed as him for a recent Halloween.
We’ll be there today because it’s Wednesday, but the store will seem emptier, quieter, sadder.
If you’re visiting upstate New York, stop in at the Albany store, and see the magic for yourself. If you’re too far to appreciate our bounty, visit your local comic book store and see the magic there.
May your memory be an eternal blessing, JC. You will be sorely missed. ❤
I don’t know about you, but at the very end of Passover and Easter, I crash mentally. There is still so much to do, but it’s not scheduled between multiple church visits per day and cooking from scratch for Passover most nights, I still have to continue with life. And until this coming Thursday, everyone in the house is working, and we’re trying to save money by not eating out, even cheap fast food, which isn’t so cheap anymore.
I have returned to my lists (especially for today and the rest of this week), and on days like today, I needed a very specific list to make sure I hit every place I needed without too many, if any, U-turns.
The first thing I would recommend is a multi-level list when you’re beginning to get overwhelmed:
Draw a horizontal line across the middle of a piece of any-size paper, and then draw two columns from the top to that middle line.
Like this:
Fig. 1 (c)2023
The left is for the must-do’s, the right is for the would-like-to-do’s, and the bottom is for everything else. I’d also draw a line on the bottom right for a running shopping list.
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”
Winston Churchill
Let’s try that again. The entire essay is gone. No recovering it, and we’re off to the races again. It won’t be as witty or a breathtaking example of fine writing, but it is what it is.
I woke up this morning with a ton of stuff on my mind, and in my mind, and my mind would not settle down. I thought of a great story to write about the holidays, but it would also make a great blog post, and it might be a good memoir essay for the prompt of “details, details” that I’ve been struggling with, but it was also a good piece of family history, and it was probably prompted by a conversation I had with a friend about the balancing of Passover and Easter. As an aside, I happened to look at a calendar, and next year Easter is March 31, and Passover is near the end of April, so that should cause less balancing and juggling and stress, but of course, we’ll see how it goes. The best laid plans and all.
The thoughts and memories were coming fast and furious, one thing after the other, and I tried to filter out other unrelated memories that happened in the same space I was writing about. I had twenty minutes before I had to leave, and I could use that time to get it down before it was gone forever. I’ll remember it, I told myself. No, you won’t. You never do. And to make matters worse in my head, I knew that NO ONE in the history of writing remembers when they say they’ll remember and will jot the thought down later. No. One.
Passover, Easter, Spring Break, Prom Season. So much to do, including cooking. Holiday cooking plus the regular everyday cooking that we’re expected to do. These last few weeks had me teaching, my daughter working practically every day after school, my son trying to break the world’s record for most movies seen in a month (kidding), my husband’s job is one person short, and no one wants to cook dinner. They also don’t want to pay for take out or fast food, and frankly, I don’t blame them. I thought I would take this Friday Food to share some shortcuts and new things to try.
Everyone knows about cooking two meals on Sunday and then eating leftovers. I try to make one big meal a week, like a roast beef, a pork loin, or a whole chicken. They make a great meal, and then they make great leftovers. All of them can be eaten as sandwiches later in the week with a side of chips and cole slaw. If the first night is mashed potatoes, the next night can be rice. My daughter likes Minute Rice, but regular rice is very easy to make. I got the recipe from The Kitchen Survival Guide by Lora Brody and while I’ve changed some things, the gist of it is the same.
This is specific to a Texas school district, but challenges are happening across the country.
A federal judge has ruled that the books in question be returned to the library within twenty-four hours and left accessible while the case is ongoing. They are prohibited from removing any books while the case is in litigation.
According to this CNN article, while the Texas school said the books were removed as part of their normal weeding procedures it is clear that there were outside influences at play based on the subjects removed, including topics of race and LGBT+.
Disagreeing with the subject matter is not a reason to remove the books from the library. I also disagree with the comment in the article that pastors should be involved. Absolutely not. The separation of church and state is critically important both to the founding of this country and its ongoing evolution of welcoming all, despite the recent contradictions to that.
Part of the problem is the ignorance of those complaining about the books. They call many LGBT+ books pornographic when they are not sexual in nature and simply talk about feelings and gender as any adolescent character in a book would do. They are also trying to restrict CRT (critical race theory) which none of these books teach despite perhaps being written by a person of color or are about a person of color. As has been explained over and over again, CRT is not something that is taught in the schools, not even at a high school level. It is typically a subject in post-graduate and law schools.
As a writer, I understand that not all books are for everyone, and I agree that parents can determine the appropriateness of books for their children within reason (as I have done for my children without banning books for everyone), but I expect that we should trust in the schooling and expertise of librarians and teachers who have studied this field for a number of years.
I am also concerned about a random group of uneducated people coming in and removing books rather than letting individual parents and children make the determinations for their families on what is age-appropriate.
I hope the country steps back from the abyss; we are well beyond the slippery slope, and we need to offer modern books with timely subject matter while also encouraging the reading of classics while explaining the reasons that some of the material isn’t appropriate, and maybe never was.
Griffins and Ginger Snaps 