Hold Me Like Holy Water

Whilst surfing YouTube out of boredom, I ran across these...

This person is brilliant!

Vocations Crisis

Sunday Kind of Love

Papa Ratzi (at first I was weirded out by the song...but then it hit me...16...Benedict XVI...oookay)

Orthodox Catholic
I think the last one is my favorite. The song is great (for obvious reasons...um, hello?), Sister Joseph Andrew makes an appearance, and the last slide basically says everything I want my life to say.
Heh.
I love it.


Oh man. Good times.

So yesterday, I got a weird phone call at work. This lady was asking if we sell books about St. Anne, because she got one in Quebec 20 years ago and she wants another. Hmm. Well, no, we don't have that book. Actually, we don't have any about St. Anne. She's mentioned in books with lots of lives of the saints, but we don't have any books that are about her in particular.
I explain this to the lady.
Then...the unthinkable.
She asked for the number of the Catholic . bookstore in town.
ouch.
Did I just get called a Protestant?
Yeah, I sulked for a long time. I think I'm still in mourning. :(

However, this makes me smile.

And this too.
Except, that's not the St. Elizabeth or St. Francis I pictured when I heard this litany. But the St. Cecilia picture is beautiful. Actually, a lot of these are quite unusual depictions of the saints. I love it.

And sometimes I just miss him.

Okay. Legos. Catholic. WHAT?

I was listening to the CD that has this song on it when it was announced that he had died.
Anyway, the pronunciation part is pretty sweet, for the Latin-impaired.

I love this song. And the WYD stuff! Super cool!

I know these people! That's Fr. Aaron! And the bishop! And Sister Maria Jacinta! And...ah! I love this conference! And Chris Padgett! And...!

Everybody Got 2 Suffer music video (Fr. Stan, what what!) - it's pretty awesome, except the random tourists in the end sort of threw me off...hmmm...

Okay, enough for tonight.

Seriously, watch them all. I guarantee they're sweet.

Just when I thought I knew my chocolate...I find this:

TRANQUILITY CHOCOLATE

It was quite mysteriously placed on the shelf at the store. No price tag, no other products from the same company...just the Tranquility Chocolate.
So I picked it up. I said that it had Lavender in it. Um, hello? I love lavender. I like, have lavender issues. My body spray is lavender. I have tried umpteen times to grow lavender (I'm like the plague...I touch it...it dies). I have lavender car air freshener. The list goes on. I am ALL ABOUT LAVENDER. So, I nearly had an episode in the candy aisle at Woodman's grocery store when I discovered CHOCOLATE + LAVENDER in a bar.
So I bought it. It's ridiculous, but the selling point is that one bar = 3 cups of lime blossom tea.
Um, I've never had lime blossom tea. But equivalencies make me giddy. And lime blossom tea seems like it's probably good for you, ergo, this candy bar is GOOD FOR YOU. :)

Soooo, I just decided to open the candy bar. It comes in a little box. So you open the box, and it's wrapped in foil. I unwrapped it all Willy Wonka style, slowly and carefully. Then I broke off a piece, and...oh my gosh...I swear...it's like, I ate a hunk of chocolate whilst chewing on lavender leaves. This stuff is nutso. It's crazy delicious.
Yet so calming. Soothing, if you will.

I think I may have fallen in love. <3LavenderChocolate<3

Um, is summer over yet?
I miss my roommates.

I seriously can't stop thinking about brownie batter parties and dancing "Bye, Bye, Bye" and 80's dance parties and laundry basket crusades and...oh! is it time to go back to Loras...yet??

As for the summer as it is, things are hunky-dory, really. I'm lucky to have a job I enjoy. I haven't traveled as much as I'd like to, nor have I read as much as I'd like to, but hey, we can only do so much. I have been to Nashville and Chicago so far this summer...not too shabby. And I'm still plugging through the Nicomachean Ethics (which I love, don't get me wrong). It's going quite slow, though, because I read it to analyze, and I highlight, and the whole bit. I need to read something that I don't need to think about so much...a good kid's book or biography or something. Hmm.

Okay, I don't really have anything to say - just wanted to update a bit.

And the message from inside my Dove dark chocolate goodness -
"There's a time for compromise - it's called 'later'."
Whatever that means. ;)

"It might be hot in hell, but it just cannot be this humid."
- a direct quote from Msgr. Traitor, who went to St. Ambrose (the pastor of my parish)

It's HOT outside! I mean, it's not so bad when you have air conditioning (which actually, we do), but hell, it's still hot! And I have a new car, so it's nice and cool in there, too. (which is new for me...the Corsica was h-o-t)

Today my dog and I watched "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and sipped iced tea (well, it was special iced tea) to cool off. I absolutely love Bing Crosby. He's the best.

And just so everyone knows - I'm brilliant.

Also, today I was wearing my I <3 OZ shirt around (um, I'm extremely proud of it), and everyone who commented on it was a MAN. Do you find that interesting? Because I did. I had two MEN say "Hey...nice shirt!" or "Hey...did you like that play?" or something of the like. Very interesting. I think it's great, actually.

And as a newsflash - I think Danica Patrick is overrated.
And her house is brick. I saw it yesterday.


Also, all Keira Knightley movies are not created equal. Don't watch Domino. Besides having to fast-forward through the lewd portions, it was just a weird movie, overall.
If you want a Keira Knightley movie, watch Pride and Prejudice. Or Pirates. But not Domino. Or Love, Actually. There's ickiness in there too.

Um, I need to go rescue the dog. She's trapped under a chair, writhing in confusion.
Oh puppies.

Wicked was absolutely amazing. I loved every minute of it. I want to see it over and over again. It seriously was so much better than I expected it to be. I'd heard about how awesome it is over and over from everyone who had seen it, but still...wow.


So something strange happened to me this morning (I know it's technically Saturday, since it's after midnight, but I'm writing this as if it were Friday, because it still feels like it to me). I was sleeping with my puppy, Liberty, in my bed. And at 8:28 a.m. my TV turned itself on (it's not programmed to do this, nor is the remote near my bed, nor could the dog have gotten to it because she was with me). And it was on EWTN. And Mother Angelica was talking about the Eucharist and what an amazing gift it is to us as Catholics. She went on for about 2 minutes about the importance of going to Mass and receiving the Eucharist. Then the TV turned itself off, at 8:30 a.m., which is when daily Mass starts at my home parish. I'm not kidding you about this. I woke up to her voice, looked over at the TV, saw her talking, listened to her (because I enjoy her, and because I was too lazy to get out of bed to turn the TV off), and then was absolutely shocked after the TV turned itself off. I don't know how to explain this situation. I mean, there's really no other explanation than it's a sign I need to stop being such a pagan and get myself to Mass more often. I used to go every day, but this summer I've really been struggling, and haven't made it to daily Mass much (not at all, really). Talk about a sign from God.
I guess I should probably go to Mass tomorrow morning...

Well, that's really all I know right now. I'm kind of wound up from tonight still. I went to the Beloit (WI) Riverfest and saw Loverboy and REO Speedwagon with my aunt, uncle and cousin Clare. It was fun. Clare's random like me, so we have fun together. :) We rode a ride (it was called Freak Out!), ate gelato, and danced with the middle-aged drunk folks at the concert. Woot. What better way to spend the evening? :)

Tomorrow my mom and I go see WICKED!!! WOOT!


So tonight she and I were trying to decide the best way to get into Chicago. Normally it's super easy. Jump on I-90 from Rockford, drive straight until you're downtown. Brainless, really. But they're doing major construction and it's absolutely ridiculous to drive in near Chicago. So, we were trying to decide between taking the commuter train from Harvard (where the only exciting thing to do is go see the statue of a cow) into Union Station and walk to the theatre, or drive into Cumberland and take the Blue Line right to the theatre. We decided on the train.
Then we turned on the news, and they were reporting about an explosion at the Blue Line CTA train today.
Umm....that's the one we were (just 5 minutes before) considering riding tomorrow.
Good thing we decided for Harvard...it's hard to ride an L train that exploded!! :-O

I'll tell you all about Wicked and my Chicago experience either tomorrow or in the near future...
get excited now! :)

She's beautiful! She's seriously the cutest and sweetest thing I've ever seen. I absolutely love her!!

Her name is Liberty, and sometimes we call her "Libby" for short. She's a Jack Russell Terrier, and she's 11 weeks old. She looks pretty much exactly like this picture. And she sleeps ALL THE TIME, so it's a pretty close depiction. It's not actually a picture of her - I don't have one yet. But once I do, you'll see my little Lady Liberty baby. :) She's seriously the most mellow dog ever - she is totally cool with just chillin' on your lap, sleeping for as long as you're willing to sit there and hold her. A dog after my own heart, really. ;) She does really cute things, too. Like she eats only one piece of dog food at a time. She'll grab it out of her bowl, then run away and chew it, then come back and grab another, then run away and chew it. It's cute. I think it's because she's probably used to fighting over food with her brothers and sisters. Her food bowl is on the opposite side of the kitchen as Ginger's (our 10-year-old Golden Retriever), but she'll make rounds, grabbing some of her food, then some of Ginger's, and back again. We're trying to break her of that. We sit there and we're like "Liberty! Your bowl is over here, darlin!" and she'll run over to it, all excited, grab a piece of food, run away, then run to Ginger's bowl. And then repeat cycle. She's hilarious. Also, we think she has ADD. Like, when you throw a frisbee or ball to her, she'll dart after it, running at full speed, then stop dead, and just look around like "hmm, what else is there to do?" without even finishing getting the frisbee or ball. She's quite possibly the coolest dog ever. We just got her yesterday, and already my heart is stolen by this little pup. I just absolutely love her!!