TGIF, people!

Shotgun Wedding

So we had to take Orca to the vet last night and both of us were a little freaked out.  You know how we get with the buns.  Anyway, it turns out that she's old and arthritic - nothing more serious than nature taking its course.  She'll be fine.

On our way out, as G was paying, I was holding Orca and mainly just reveling in the relief.  The receptionist was a nice young girl and was trying to make chit chat with us, asking all kinds of questions about bunnies.  So it came out that we have had bunnies for as long as we've been married, 10 years.  I jokingly said, "Can you believe it?  I don't look that old, do I?"  As in, hardy har.

The rest of the conversation went like this:

Girl:  No!  You must have gotten married really young!

Me:  Why yes!  Because here, 10 years later, I'm still so young!

G:  Sigh.  Well, we had to get married.  We had no choice.

Everyone stopped and stared at him.  Then at me.  He made it sound like I was barefoot and pregnant with quadruplets and thank God he stepped up and rescued me from that durn trailer park by marrying me.

Honest to God.

He spent the rest of the time stammering about how, no no, we were just so in love and living so far apart that the only choice we had was to get married!

But now everyone in the vet's office thinks I'm a you-know-what.

The Lamb Cake

Happy Easter!  I hope you had a good one.

When we got married, I was grafted into a vast extended family.  One branch that lives a couple of hours away from us are A Catholic Hoot.  We usually spend Easter with them and they have a tradition that I'd never heard of before.  I present to you:

The Cake of the Lord

Yes, apparently it has a necklace.

They just call it The Lamb Cake and when I asked if there was some story behind it, they looked at each other pointedly, then someone told me very delicately, "It's a lamb.  You know?  Like the lamb of God?"  I was like, "Well, YEAH.  I know THAT."  Maybe they should use white icing?  Anyway, it's worth the ridiculous drive to spend the day with them and the Lord's Dessert.

There was a grand feast:

Then there was dessert (I made the cupcakes, but how could they compete?):

Leading a lamb to slaughter:

It was actually nice enough to sit outside.

Break out pictures of the grandchild and everyone flocks around. 

I tell you, those Catholics do it right.  They were off last week and they're off tomorrow.  I WISH.

Good Friday, People!

Spared

My Gama (read:  Grandma.  Sorry, people, you're going to have to deal with some southern-isms.  You're lucky, as I tend to keep those to a minimum.  There will only be the occasional "ain't" and "y'all".  You'll get used to it.)...so my Gama called me today and told me about a bad storm that came through last night.  My family lives in a rural part of the south that gets its share of bad thunderstorms and tornados.

My Gama has only lived in her house for a few months; my Papa (pronounced Pap-ahh) died last summer, almost immediately after they moved in.  So she's been adjusting to:  living without her husband of 56 years, living alone for the first time in her 73 years, and...living close to my parents.  Trials, people.

Last night when the storm moved in, she heard a loud CRACK and the sound of a lot of smashing glass.  She felt the vibration in the floor and knew that a tree had fallen.  She ran all over the house to see if there was any damage, but couldn't find anything wrong.

This morning when she got up, she looked outside to find an enormous, old oak tree that had fallen onto her neighbor's truck.  The tree smashed it completely into the ground.  Thank God that tree didn't fall on her house; it would have fallen on her bedroom.  Thank God that the neighbors had, for whatever reason, not parked their good car in that particular spot, but had parked their old crappy truck there instead.  And of course, thank God that no one was in the truck!

As she was telling me the story, I freaked out a bit internally, thinking what could have happened.  But that didn't happen.  Thank God.

Broken

A secular quote that I think sums up all of us:

Ring the bells that can still ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in.

(Leonard Cohen)

Losing and Gaining

I had a special dentist appointment this afternoon.  A few times a year I undergo a gum cleaning that consists of about 4 Asian hygienists climbing into my mouth and using a small pick that shoots water and medicine in between my teeth and gum lines.  It sounds excruciating but it's not that bad; it's just a little humiliating.

One of my biggest fears is that my teeth will rot out of my mouth.  If you knew the genetics I inherited, you would be praying for me right now.  Plus, I'm from the south.  I'm dentally disadvantaged anyway you look at it.  All the good genes went to my brother, The Rat.

And with no segue:

I'm trying to meditate on Easter this week.  In spiritual terms, my mind tends to gravitate toward GOD the FATHER and the Holy Spirit.  Every now and then a voice inside my head clears its throat and says, "Um...Jesus."  It's not like I disregard Him or anything.  I can't explain it.

At the end of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talks about finding our true selves only in Christ.  I love this part in particular:

"Give up yourself and you will find your real self.  Lose your life and you will save it.  Submit to death, the death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and the death of your whole body in the end:  Submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life.

"Keep back nothing.  Nothing that you have not given away will really ever be yours.  Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.  Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay.  But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."

There are times that I feel like saying "Yes!  Amen to that!" and there are times that I know I'll go the rest of my life and never fully understand what he's saying.  But slowly I'm learning that I will only become myself, my glorious renewed self, if I lay it all down.

And none of us would ever have a shot at our new selves if Easter hadn't happened.

Palm Sunday

Some spring pics in honor of Palm Sunday:

My niece AJ.  It is indeed an Easter miracle that she stayed still enough to snap this.

The original one-eyed pirate bunny, in honor of springs past.

And some pics taken at my friend A-Dawg's house:

A Tisket, A Tasket...

...a Bun in Our Basket.

Literally.  We're not using witty code or anything.

Just a little something to usher us into the week before Easter.

Since your more traditional Easter rabbit is considered cannibalism in our house:

Stay tuned for more Easter posts...

TGIF, people!

108 Minutes of God

Yuri Gagarian (the star of yesterday's post) has become famous not only for setting a space record, but for then saying:

I looked and looked, but I didn't see God.

Many have speculated that he didn't really say this, but that the Soviet leaders at the time manufactured this quote to use in their various atheistic/communist propaganda.

I'm starting to wonder, because in looking at Yuri's other quotes, he doesn't sound like a scientist.  He sounds like...a psalmist.  Check it out:

"I see the earth!  It is so beautiful!"

"When I orbited the earth in a spaceship, I saw for the first time how beautiful our planet is.  Mankind, let us preserve and increase this beauty, and not destroy it!" 

[Um, am I the only one reaching for Genesis right now?]

"I could have gone on flying through space forever."

I bet he could.  I had planned to try and counter his purported denial of God, but in doing even the teensiest bit of research, all I could find were quotes of praise.  There was a psalmist inside of him somewhere (placed by his Maker?) that like the rocks, could not keep silent. 

By the word of the Lord were the heavens made,

their starry host by the breath of his mouth.

Psalm 33:6

Yuri says he didn't see God.  I say he did.



You learn something new every day

I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable about history, especially when it concerns topics that are of interest to me.  So imagine my surprise when I realized that today, 12 April, is the anniversary of 3 very important events concerning topics that I am quite interested in--but had no idea they all fell on this date:  1), the beginning of the American Civil War (1861); 2), the first human spaceflight (1961); and 3), the first flight of the space shuttle (1981).

Why are these things important?

I've always believed that you have to know the past to understand the present; this is not a novel or new concept, and certainly nothing that I thought of myself, but it is still true.  More Americans were killed in the Civil War than in any other armed conflict this nation has been involved in--620,000, with an untold number of civilians killed during the conflict.  To put this in perspective, approximately 400,000 Americans were killed in World War II.  On this date in 1861, the Confederacy opened fire on Ft. Sumter in South Carolina, beginning a struggle that could have (and should have) ended very quickly, but dragged on for 4 years.  In reading histories of the Civil War, it is frustrating to me to discover the mistakes and miscues on the battlefields of the 19th century.  We take it for granted today that our military units deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have access to communications and supply lines that make it possible for them to accomplish their missions; it can be frustrating to read about a Civil War battle where just one set of radios would have turned the tide for one side or the other.

As for the other two events, well, I believe that humans in general are born with an adventurous spirit; what's over the next rise, the next river, the horizon?  Yuri Gagarin was an incredibly intrepid individual to get into that rocket and leave Earth behind.  Imagine what he saw!  In the Information Age and with TV shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, not to mention all the real-space footage we can see from the space station and space shuttle flights, I think alot of us have started taking space flight for granted.  Put yourself in Gagarin's boots for a minute and think about the emotions he must have felt as the first person to see our planet from orbit!  What an experience.  And let's not forget the space shuttle--Columbia went into space on this date on 1981, heralding a new era in human spaceflight.  Endeavour will fly later this month (her last mission to space); prior to this launch, she has flown 24 missions, orbited the Earth 4,429 times, and traveled 103,149,636 miles.

Just some food for thought.  And now you've learned something today too.

Joining the 21st Century (kicking and screaming all the way)

Well here we are.  If your feet are cold it's because hell just froze over.  We finally succumbed to peer pressure a few months ago and bought a Kindle.  We took turns snatching it from each other and rapidly downloading books...and now I think it's somewhere in our library gathering dust.  Is it bad that I'm not exactly sure where it is right now?  Meanwhile we plow through our analogue books like they're going out of style. Pun intended. 

Who are we?  Two introverted, animal-loving adventurers who love our friends and our privacy.  Does that bode well for a blog?