[Rant]

Three weeks. Three weeks. That's how long I've been waiting for my request for criminal record check to get back. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Whay? There's Nothing on it! I've not so much as been fined for littering, and it takes them three weeks to say that I've never done anything whatsoever.

And speaking of that, I hate today. This day is terrible. I hate it. You see, I had so much planned today, May 31st, the feast of the visitation. But hey, guess what!? Today is Memorial day. A National Holiday. A stupid national holiday. So the notary's office is closed, and the post office is closed,and the Health and Human Services office is closed. Basically, everything that I was going to do to finish my application by today is gone. Poof. Up in smoke. And why did the idiot at the doctor's office schedule my appointment for the 31st, when he had to have known that the 31st is a holiday, and the office would be closed? Why? Why do that to me? So I went down there for nothing. And now, I have to submit an unfinished application, thanks to the many idiots of Philadelphia. 

Thanks guys, you screwed me over.

In their defense though, I did think I had till the 2nd, so maybe I should have submitted it earlier.

At least the stupid Selective Service website finally accepted my social security number, after the umpteenth time submitting it

And you know what I expect? I expect that tomorrow morning, after they have left to present the applications, the criminal background check will come in the mail. [/Rant]

I am required by law,

to post the following song:

The God of Abraham Praise, which survived into my parish's hymnal unadulterated, but we've never used it since I've been there. C'mon guys, use it! You know you're in love with Leoni. I already know it's exactly the kind of hymn our organist would love. (He seems to like "Sing Alleluia! Praise the Lord!", which has a similar tune.

Trinity Sunday.

The Feast of the most Blessed Trinity.

Today, after the sung mass at Lourdes (Thanks to whoever decided to schedule 'Thou, whose almighty word' One of my favourites. <3)

Then, after a short break at home, off to S.Clem's for solemn vespers and benediction. I had planned to be earlier , but SEPTA, as usual, decided that today was a fine day for my train to be late. Still, I got there in time for a short time of prayer before it started. And, it wasn't until then that I realised that I have, in the entire two or so years that I've been regularly singing lauds and vespers (at home), I've been singing two wrong notes in the vesper hymn 'O lux beata Trinitas'.Darnit, and here I have been going on not realising that I've been making a note natural where there's nothing in the Liber that says to, or that I've been starting the second strophe on the wrong note. *Sigh*

Then home, and dinner to cook. And we have Athanasian creed at Prime today. Part of me of me only wanted to recite it because someone I know hates it. They say you can read it as requiring specific doctrines to be a member of the church, or to go to heaven. Duh, man. Welcome to obviousville, here's your tax forms and avoid Ms.Lorraine. She thinks her yogurt talks to her at night. 

Anyway, I was going to post some parts of St.Athanasius' Letters to Serapion of Thmus,  but I lost the think.

*Posts the following without comment*

This and This.

Before I post part III,

I just want to say thank my new best friend, Coconut Oil. You can use it to put a finish on the leather when you're done. You can use it as your liquid when you're blind-stamping designs. You can use it as a burn ointment when you've burned and scarred your forearm with a hot paring knife, in the midst of said blind-stamping.* It seals your gold leaf and your paint, and in large quantities, makes it easy to pare down the back of your leather.

*And have thus gotten yourself three cool-looking scars on your forearm, that you can say you got in a knife fight. Which is probably a better reason than "I was tooling leather, and I went to put the knife in a vat of water to cool, but it was hot enough to burn the rag to it's surface and stick to it, so it fell off and hit the arm three times."

Anyway,

Dahlia, my brother's cat, and Ginger, my cat, have been getting along better nowadays. When she was very young, Ginger hated other cats. We never had other cats in the house unless necessity forced us to. (Usually in the almost yearly case of a starving or sick cat showing up to the kitchen doorstep. Somehow, the neighborhood cats seem to know that this is a good place to crash for a few months or so.) But Ginger is 10 now, and she's more mellow.

When we first got Dahlia during the last of the three giant snowstorms we had during the winter, we kept her locked in my brother's room to keep Ginger from attacking her. She has free rein of the house now, but I still don't let her in my room. That's Ginger's inner sanctum, and she'd flip if she saw Dahlia in Her sunny windowsill, or on top of Her warm TV, or, God forbid, on Her long-held, never-given up* spot at the foot of my bed.

Ginger still wants Dahlia to give her space though. Even when they sleep near each other, like today, they must have space.Ginger sits on the dining room windowsill and Dahlia gets the floor**, about three feet away. But even then, They don't seem to mind sharing each other's food bowls***, though during feeding time, I think Ginger gets a little jealous If I don't feed her first. Usually when I feed her, she has me sit near her and pet her, but If I feed her second, she'll nip at me and growl till I leave. Weird.

*I was going to Rick-Roll you, but I didn't have the heart. But in the same vein: THIS, which is better.

**I've noticed that they, by some mysterious instinct, seem to know when to move to a different part of the house to follow the sun.I've seen them leave the dining room and beg to be let out to the enclosed porch in the late afternoon, to catch the last drops of sun from the west-facing window.

***Behind each other's backs. They're both too lazy to go up or down a floor to get water or to each any leftover bits from when I feed them in the morning,  so they eat from whoever's bowl is on the same floor as they are.

Book re-binding, part II

(My last 'beta' edition. You'll see the final edition later.)

I ended up finding a shop in Centre City that would fix my main breviary for about $60.Unlike most o their orders, mine was'nt a restoration. I just needed the covers repaired, some pages attached, and new endpapers added. Those they did well. The new leather binding was my own work. And you'll get to see it. 

I went through three 'beta' editions, to see what I wanted (The last one is pictured above.) The leather is real leather from an old, out of style jacket given to me for materials. I cut two large pieces and washed the leather. I removed the remains of the paper spine that were still attached to one of the covers, cleaned the covers, and added a piece of cardboard to serve as the backing for the new spine. (I know, I could have used a thick paper, but a good thin cardboard, besides being stronger, is less likely to warp after the glue is put on it and let to become tacky.That's what happened with my last beta edition.)I took five strips of leather from my second piece and glued them onto the cardboard , and left it to dry. 

I'll post part III (With the attaching of the leather,the tooling of the spine and the gilding) later.

*Sigh*

I should have seen this coming. So, I call to get my selective service number, and the phone-voice tells me that the information is invalid. They transfer me to a live person who tells me that I'm not registered. I distinctly remember signing up for it in school, but they tell me I'm not, and that I can go to the SSS website to sign up for it. So, I do. And the website tells me that my social security number is invalid. Really? The number that I Know is correct? It's wrong? Really? 

So I re-submitted the application, only to be told that I had exceeded the number of applications allowed in a day.

*Sigh* 

Allright guys, put on your Thinking Caps,

And help Joe solve his gigantic dilemma. You see, after I got back from my weekend away at the friary during the Octave of Easter, I found that besides the blessings of the Resurrection, we had received another blessing: Our/my brother's cat, Dahlia, had given birth to five kittens. Which was okay while they were small, but now, nearly two months later, they can walk, they can meow quite loudly, and today, they started eating solid food. 

Now, I can't have seven cats. It's out of the question. To tell the truth, we haven't even told my mother that there are five kittens in the house, and now they're growing up. I never planned to keep them, but now I've got to start making some sort of move.

The problem is this: The PSPCA doesn't seem to take strays, and the Morris animal shelter will 'humanely destroy'. as they put it, any cats that don't get adopted. And the animal surrender form makes you promise not to come back to get your cat. So I'm screwed there. And I don't know of any other place.

So guys, your mission is this: Help Joe to find a shelter for the kittens that will either:

A) Not kill them

B) Allow me to take them back if no one adopts them.

In the unlikely event that you find one that does both, that's even better. But yeah, please help.

Another preview.

For some reason,when I scan it, the contrast between the light and dark colors of the skin is much sharper than it is in real life. I'll have to edit the scanner settings. Other than that, I have to belnd some of the colors on the skin, color the fruits on the Tree, and do the sky and halos. Then it'll be pretty much finished, unless I fan find a way to fix Eve's right arm. (I trying to get her skin to be dark and tanned, you know, "I am black but comely, etc, etc, as a prefigurement of Mary.) The arm is the worst part of the figure, though really, If I blend it and go over it with Light Peach a few times, it ought to look good. I'm just happy that for the first time, the colors came out as bright as they really are. Usually when I color my inked worked, the lineart bleeds into whatever I'm coloring, and I get black smudges that darken my colors when I try to even it out.

More on how I fixed that later.

Whaaa......????

I was randomly looking for the propers for Ember Wednesday in the octave of Pentecost, so I went to this famous site. And what do you think I found?

"Introduction to the Breviary.........

REV. WILLIAM J. LALLOU 
Taken from the "Roman Breviary In English"
published by Benziger Brothers, Inc. in 195o"

Hmm...William J. Lallou...now where have I heard that name?Oh now I remember! He was one of the former pastors of my own parish! 

Small world. <3

Interesting.

Look at This, 

and then look at This.

This is about the third time that I found that the fabric of a set of vestments at my parish was also used in vestments for another rite.More specifically, the last two were Russian, and the other one Ukrainian. 

This week in stupid,

This.

What is wrong with the hierarchy? They're done dismantling the liturgical and theological tradition of the Latin rite, so now they're moving on to dismantling  the tradition of the Eastern rites? Are these guy completely and totally BLIND? Have they NOT seen the adverse results that said liturgical 'renewal' brought on their own church? And I find it very much condescending. Even to this day, far too many Latin rite bishops are upholding the notion that Eastern Catholics need to conform themselves the Latin rite practice, that their own traditions are not worthy of being kept. Hence you see the depths of 'reform' that have overtaken Maronite and Ukrainian Catholic parishes. (Female servers and lectors,modern ICEL-style liturgy, overly casual or irreverent servers/priests, some Maronite parishes even have guitars in them.)

And I don't think that there's any evidence that the terrible Latinisations that have already been forced on the faithful of these other rites has done them or their jurisdictions any good, but just like Vatican II, the hierarchy forces them through anyway with little to no care about what the faithful want, or about respecting the tradition of the rites. 

In my opinion, what I think Eastern Catholics ought to do is the very same thing that Pope Benedict XVI is advocating for the Latin church: Return to their own tradition.Give up the modern accretions and return to their own rites, and the full rites, not abbreviated ones, or rites edited for comfortability with the modern mind.Eastern Catholics are in a kind a limbo now, because many of them have become so latinised that they only very vaguely resemble anything other than the Latin rite. They seem a bit lost, and I suppose it's because discarding those traditions was discarding a part of their very selves. A recovery of their true liturgical and theological tradition seems better in my opinion, than becoming glorified Roman Catholics. 

*Sigh* It's this blatant disregard and disrespect for tradition in deference to modern thought and modern practice that makes me so embarrassed to be called "Roman Catholic."

Melodic Deth Metal.

A friend and I had a disagreement over it. See, he says it's not Real Metal™. Real Metal™, or Manly Metal™ is thrash metal. According to him, that is. I've moved past my ninth grade obsession with thrash metal, which can be exemplified by such stellar bands as Dragonforce.* Of course, once I started getting interested in classical music theory, thrash metal no longer cut it for me. I slowly realised that if you listen quite carefully, some bands actually do use some music theory in their compositions (Think middle-late Metallica, for example, or Black Sabbath's Children of the Sea, for a more specific example.) A good melodic riff has to be carefully written, not just 'hammered in'** kind of randomly. That's probably part of the reason I never developed an interest in pop music, but secretly kinda like metal before it even developed into an actual love of it. But I expect at least someone to come and call me a typical music snob and that I don't know what I'm talking about/reference the wrong band/doesn't know anything about writing guitar music, etc. etc, etc.

*Youtube a certain interveiw of theirs for a specific example.
** or "H-H-h-hamma it it", as Dragonforce put it. You should be noticing a pattern here.

*Saws off a limb*

*Re attaches it with duct tape and Gorilla glue.*

Yours truly is working on a little project. See, I need a new prie-Dieu for my home oratory. I already have one, but it's not made for people my size. Yes, even someone short like me. You see, I got it form a local Episcopal church that was restoring their children's chapel (It was 'refurbished' in the 50's in some really gawdawful colors and furniture.) The one I got is only about two and a half feet tall, which means that If I use it,It's only waist high, and it kills my back to use it.

Anyway, I'm making my own. I already have the bare bones of it done.Unfortunately, the shelf I made to hold books, I cut too short.I have to make another trip to Lowe's to buy some moulding for it, and the actually thing that you kneel on hasn't been upholstered. And I need to find a nice dark stain to match the table and bench that I already have in there. (They're very dark cherry; almost black.) There are one or two nice little things I'd like to add to it, but you'll see it later.