I figured Dom Bettinelli would be sending Twitter text updates from the maternity ward. However, the B's have exceeded my expectations, with fresh photos and Melanie Bettinelli live blogging her own delivery as well as Dom's live blogging.
LOL.
Recently in Personal Category
Fr. Jeff Keyes of the Rifugio San Gaspare blog is vacationing in Connecticut this week, and Fr. Mark Kirby, author of Vultus Christi, is back in the States after his time in Rome, so we three met today for Mass at the Benedictine convent where Fr. Mark serves as chaplain.
We sang the Gregorian ordinary (Mass XII), and a couple of the propers for the martyrs SS. Pontian and Hippolytus: the beautiful introit Salus autem and the Alleluia Te martyrum. The Sisters and the lay congregation did a fine job of singing the ordinary parts and even the tune of the Alleluia -- a tune which you may hear for yourself this week, since it is also used in the Mass of Assumption Day.
Fr. Mark's homily reminded us of Pope Pontian and the priest Hippolytus, who became his opponent and even fell into schism; yet when the Empire swept both of them into exile and hard labor, Hippolytus was reconciled with the Church and died a martyr as did Pontian: it is an encouraging example of the triumph of Christ's love over division, and a proof that "even dissidents can be converted".
Here are a couple of snapshots from the Mass:
After Mass, we had lunch at an Italian caffe in New Haven, chatted there for most of the afternoon, and attended Vespers at the Dominican nuns' monastery in North Guilford.
As always, it was a joy to enter into the company of two such faithful men of God.
I'm starting to assemble the pictures from my 2007 "Summer Tour".
Starting out of sequence, here are the ones I took in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia along the Skyline Drive. These were made on Monday, 6/25, the day after the CMAA colloquium ended in Washington.
No bloggers were harmed in the process of taking this photo:
Despite being an indoor-geek kind of guy, I'm a fan of botanical gardens, so when I visited Hershey, PA on Monday, 6/18, it was an opportunity to see theirs, including the garden's butterfly house. Besides, it was too hot to buy chocolate.
More photos are on-line at the links above.
I'm not referring to G-d, but to gadolinium, the rare-earth element whose chemical symbol is Gd. Never did learn enough about those rare-earths in school. Somehow, I'd forgotten that Gd even exists, but was reminded of it today.
Apparently I'm going to get a shot of some Gd compound on Monday when I have a little MRI done on my head (...insert joke here...), as a followup to a hearing test I took this week. No biggie.
My daughter Molly, after getting into the drawer with all of the kids' rosaries. Note the contemplative look on her face as she begins the Apostles' Creed:
...and after praying:
We Boston bloggers have two out-of-town visitors at once: Fr. Keyes from Rifugio San Gaspare and my CL co-blogger Eric Johnson are in town, one for vacation and the other for an IT conference. We had supper together at an Italian place in Waltham, and were joined by Mark Sullivan and Eric Ewanco, for a very enjoyable meeting. Fr. Keyes took the photo of me yesterday while I was showing him around the New Hampshire seacoast.
My baby daughter Molly, at an Independence Day celebration yesterday:
Can anyone come up with a good caption?
As the parents of a very precocious six-year-old, my wife and I are naturally worried that eventually she will become precocious in other ways. So far, she hasn't shown any signs of a premature interest in romantic matters. Like all the other kids, she watches harmless PBS shows and G-rated movies, and has no trouble putting boys in their place, thanks to the presence of her two brothers. She's is full of spunky, good-natured, innocent exuberance, and we would like to keep it that way.
It's tough to do that when many older girls dress like trollops at Mass. We can shield our kids from "inappropriate" entertainment, and gently guide them toward good behavior, but we do have to go to church every Sunday. Now that the weather is warm, clothing standards completely fall apart.
This is true for both sexes, and all ages, since the ultra-casual Baby Boomers have begun their less-than-graceful slide into senility. In the future, I anticipate arguments with my sons that involve the line, "But plenty of people wear shorts and no socks to Mass!" Deliberately dressing badly is an affront to God, but dressing badly in a lascivious way is especially bad.
The most recent painful incident of this kind was a few weeks ago, when our parish had its spring carnival. At the Mass right before it started, there were plenty of people dressed down for the event. A couple of teenage girls were sitting two rows in front of me and my older three kids. One of the girls had on very short shorts, and at one point during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, I glanced up and saw that they didn't entirely cover her rear end.
Now, I know this girl and her family: she lives around the corner and babysits our kids. Her sister also babysits sometimes, her brother comes over occasionally and plays with my boys, and her mom is a family friend. But I didn't really need to see her butt crack (or anyone else's).
The bizarre thing is that she's a nice kid. During the Mass, she and her friend were completely reverent and prayerful. We were all sitting in the balcony, which has no kneelers, and they knelt the whole time on the hard floor. There weren't any adults making them behave, either -- they genuinely wanted to act correctly.
You may say that I have a weird Catholic aversion to anything sexual, but I don't think that's true. I am not a prude, at least not by the classic definition. It does not bother me to see the female form dressed in a way that flatters it, nor do I have any aversion to healthy sexuality. I simply do not wish to see young girls dressed in a way that invites men to look at them as flowers to be plucked, because I have daughters who will inevitably start to take their cues from what older girls are wearing and doing.
Once again, this shows the fallacy of our age's individualistic ethos, which is the idea that "I can do what I want, and it won't affect you." The way we dress and act has a profound affect on other people, especially impressionable young ones. What we do with our bodies speaks much louder than any words we say, and I wish more parents were mindful of that.
I'm going to be in Houston for work May 6-13; what should I visit, and where should I attend Mass?
Can anyone point me to a good Web site statistics tool? I've used the various free options out there, but they're not terribly impressive. Here's what I need it to do:
1. It should be able to filter out referrer spam from a hostname list that I specify.
2. It should do a reasonably solid job at Web analytics -- e.g., it should be able to tell a robot from a recurring user.
3. It should be free.
Any thoughts?
