Linkity Links

Today I will share with you some miscellaneous web sites I've encountered lately. Enjoy your surf!

If you ever doubted that a television ad could make you think about something important (and I certainly would have scoffed at such an idea), this awesome commercial might very well change your mind. So, what's your excuse?

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks shows everyday examples of overuse of this punctuation mark. Some of the captions are quite humorous.

Celestial Seasons Coloring Pages are line drawings of the illustrations on their boxes of tea. You can print them out to color or whatever. It's ostensibly for kids, but only a big "kid" would probably get into coloring these.

I'm not a math type. I thought this math game would stress me out, but I had to try it anyway -- if only to prove how unmathly I am. Surprise! It was fun, and apparently I'm not as dumb as I used to be.

The Life Expectancy Calculator will estimate the age you will live to, based on your answers to questions about your habits, etc.

At Haagen Dazs's Help the Honeybees you can learn about the honeybee crisis (happening now in the USA) as well as create and send your own animated bee.

and

The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time has a description of exactly what the name says. Just in time for tomorrow!

He is risen!

Happy Easter!

In the Eastern church, the traditional greeting during the Easter season is "Christ is risen!" To which the other person replies, "He is risen indeed!" Wouldn't it be fabulous if people would respond in that way when they hear that greeting today?


The original of this image (sans text) came from www.reelworship.com .

I found a couple of pages of lists of this Paschal greeting in many different languages; look here and here.

And look here for my post on Easter two years ago. I'd forgotten all about that beautiful Via Matrix service.

Good Friday

In honor of this day, a couple of shots I took a few years ago of the famous (at least locally) and very traditional Good Friday events in Iztapalapa, a section of Mexico City.






And this is the link to my Good Friday post two years ago.

Palm Sunday 2008

Happy Palm Sunday! Dh Eddie and I went to church this morning, of course, and are ready for all the special events of Holy Week. I love this time of year! One of the things I really, really love about being Catholic is the wonderful build-up to Easter, beginning with Ash Wednesday, all through Lent, intensifying during Holy Week and peaking at the Triduum. Christmas is, of course, a larger commercial and folk festival, but I thoroughly enjoy the solemnity and devotions of Holy Week and Easter, the most important time, liturgically, in the Church.

I wrote and posted pictures about this day a couple of years ago, too. We were living in Mexico City at the time. Have a look:

Palm Sunday 2006

Eclipse

The night before last I stood out in the parking lot of our apartment building and marveled at the moon: a total lunar eclipse. The temperatures were in the single digits, and dh Eddie went inside before it got to the totality stage, but I hung around until the eclipse was complete. It was beautiful!

I saw a total eclipse of the sun once, in Mexico City in 1991. It was so gorgeous it actually made me gasp. This lunar eclipse was much less flashy, but equally lovely in a low key, heartwarming sort of way. It made me reflect on how our ancestors must have felt about the heavenly bodies. They had no way of knowing, like we do today, that the moon is basically a big, floating rock. How mysterious and awe-inspiring it must have been to see round objects in the sky

I noticed that the moon looks quite two-dimensional to my naked eye, but seen through binoculars it is much more spherical -- and more real. How much closer can a pair of cheap binoculars actually get you to the moon? Not much -- and yet, even that small amount makes a big difference in perception. That was something I wasn't expecting at all

And the eclipse, like many natural events, made me think once again about the endlessness of God's imagination. Ladybugs and lilies, DNA and diamonds, chlorophyll and caverns and cats' whiskers ... and satellites that turn blood red when eclipsed by the earth; and to think we haven't even scratched the surface of what exists in the universe.

Wow.

God, you seriously rock!

[The following are some good photos of the eclipse I found on the web.]

One photo of eclipse / Several photos of eclipse / More photos of eclipse

Vote Early, Vote Often

I'm afraid I didn't. Vote early, I mean, or often. Which I guess makes me a breaker of Chicagoland tradition. I am a disgrace to Cook County, Illinois! LOL

I did vote, though -- just once, and at about 3:3o p.m My assigned polling place, a building currently used as a church for the deaf, is only about 50 yards away from home. One other man was there voting at the time. I was offered a choice between a paper ballot and voting by touchscreen; I chose the computer. It was all very easy and over in less than 5 minutes.


Click to enlarge photo.

Dh Eddie went with me to take the photos. Hey, this is only the second time I have voted and the first time that I've done it in person, so it was a big deal! The only other time I had exercised this civic duty was in the 2004 presidential election, where I participated by a mail-in absentee ballot, as I lived in Mexico at the time.

The object I am holding in my hand in the picture below is a sticker that says "I voted!" I have my head covered because it was raining, lightly, at the time.

Click to enlarge photo.

So who did I vote for in this 2008 Primary? I chose to participate using the Republican ballot-- a fact, I understand, which is a matter of public record. More specific than that, I'm not tellin'!

Least Wanted

Yesterday dh Eddie and I visited one of my favorite museums, Intuit. One of the current exhibits (they change what they are showing about 3 times a year) is entitled Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots, The Mark Michaelson Collection, and consists of old photographs taken of people "booked" at police stations across the country.



( enlarge)

These are unknown, everyday folks; no big criminals or other celebrities are shown. Some are funny looking, a few are kind of pathetic, and many, many of them are, well, ordinary-looking enough that they could be me ...


( enlarge)

The most recent photos in the exhibit date back to the 1960s, and as I looked I began wondering what had happened to these people after they were booked. Where did they end up? What became of their lives? Are any of them still living? Did they have children? What happened to their children and grandchildren? Alas, we will never know. But each one of those people, just like each and every person we come into contact with in our daily lives, has a story, regardless of whether we ever hear it or not -- which, while an obvious fact, can be quite startling to remember.


( enlarge)

If you have a chance to see the exhibit, do so. I highly recommend this museum in general: it's very small, highly funky, and appealing to both high brows and low. Every time I have visited the place I have come away delighted, enchanted, refreshed. [End of testimonial]

We couldn't use flash on the photos we took there, so the pictures didn't turn out as sharp as we wanted -- but I think that somehow the slight fuzziness adds interest to these photos.

( enlarge)

Reindeer Car

Okay, so one of my plans for 2008 is to update this blog at least twice a week. Here it is January 5th already, and this is just my first post ... buy hey, I'm here! Huffing and puffing and coming in the door at the very last minute, but I am here.

Beginning about a month before Christmas, dh Eddie and I started seeing a car that had little reindeer antlers and a bright red nose affixed to it. We figured its owners must live around here, since we saw it several times. It was the only car like that that we'd ever seen. The originality and whimsy of the thing gave me joy, but I didn't really think too much about the reindeer car until ...

... one day, about a week before Christmas, I was in Walgreen's and found they had some of these "car costumes" (as I later learned they are called) for sale -- and they were 50% off! They must not have been selling like hot cakes if they were on sale, but I snatched one up immediately, literally clasping it to my breast like a treasure while I waited in the check-out line. We put the antlers and red nose on the car a couple of days later and drove around like that until after New Year's. Call me silly, call me goofy, call me tacky, call me over the intercom, but riding in The Reindeer Car was exhiliarating. I feel very lucky to have a husband who not only isn't too embarrassed to have such a thing on the car, but actually enjoys it.

Here's a picture. The antlers would have shown up better against a less-busy background, but hey. (That's Eddie on the right.)

Do You Bake?

So yesterday I was in the supermarket in the baking aisle, looking at food coloring. Another lady, about my age, in the same aisle was looking at boxed cake mixes. Somehow I must have looked like I knew what I was doing, because she came over to me with a pretty standard cake mix in her hand and said, timidly, "Excuse me, do you bake?"

I answered, "Yeeeesssss ..." (reservedly, because I am far from an expert baker -- heck, I don't even make pie crust! and I wondered, during this split second between my answer and her next question, if she was going to ask me something really, really hard). She asked, "Can I use this mix to make cupcakes?"

Whew! I knew that one. I told her that yes, she could, but the baking time would be less than for a layer cake, and that she should check the instructions on the box because many times they tell you how long to bake it according to pan size or whatever and the time for cupcakes may very well be on the box. She look relieved, thanked me, and walked away.

Wow. I guess a lot of people really don't bake nowadays. At ALL. I envision the poor lady picking her child up from school and learning she has to take two dozen cupcakes to school the next day and being at a total loss, not knowing quite what to do ...

Mini-stones

So I was thinking today about different things that have happened in my life in the last year and how many months it has been since each one ... these are kind of like milestones but on such a small scale that the term "mini-stones" came to me.

One year ago my Dear Hubby and I were up here in the Chicago area scouting out a place to live, a job, etc. I moved permanently back to the U.S.A. on November 2nd, so the 9-month anniversary of that is coming up very soon. Nine months already? Time sure flies.

I sprained my left ankle very badly on February 23rd of this year, so the 5-month mark for that has just passed. The last time I got a similarly bad sprain (on the same ankle, 12 or 13 years ago), it was at least 6 months before I got back to normal, so I wasn't expecting a particularly swift recovery this time, either. I am happy to report that although I'm still not fully recuperated, I am defininitely out of the woods with my ankle. Yay!

I've been at my current job (cashier at The Home Depot) for nearly 4 months now. I no longer feel stressed out because of not knowing what I'm doing. (Whether that is because I now know what I am doing or because I just learned not to stress about it remains to be seen. :-P)

DH and I got a car nearly a month ago. We'd lived so long without one (decades, in my case) that getting our own little private means of transportion was life-changing. Tomorrow will mark the mini-stone of our return home after the first road trip in this car -- which went wonderfully, thanks be to God.

And so on.

I have much to be thankful for.