*Today is the feast of the Archangels Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel. It's also my brother's birthday! He's living in Virginia right now but we made sure we sent him cards and presents. This year he got a pepper mill, cupcake pan, cupcake liners, and one other gift from my mom. We usually buy for him together and then ship it to him.
(https://www.iconograms.org/sig.php?eid=279)
* I did finally finish my Tea Shop mystery, so I'm finishing up three magazines that my parents loaned to me before I go to the library again. I'm hoping to go sometime next week, as I should finish the magazines this weekend.
*Sunday we went to Homegrown for lunch and got Chinese for supper. For having food poisoning the day before, my stomach has done really well.
*Monday was red pepper soup, about a half batch, made with roasted red peppers from two jars. This was fine, pretty good, but not amazing--and that's okay!
*Tuesday I made mini meatloaves with brown butter mashed potatoes and a bag of green beans. These are quite good, better for us made with milk instead of buttermilk. Next time I need to cut down on the mustard in the meatloaves as it's a little too much for us.
*Last night I made a lentil salad with carrots and cilantro that was quite yummy. We ate almost all of it; there's a little bit left, just a half serving. The sweetness of the carrots is nice against the earthiness of the lentils. The Son made some apricot muffins all by himself; they were not the most evenly mixed but were still tasty.
*Tonight we are grabbing fast food, but on Friday we are going to make Pasta Caprese for the first time.
We selected a new, different all choir piece this week. The previous piece was a little more syncopated and thus a little too hard for all our choirs; instead, we're going to to "I Want To Be Ready" arranged by Moses Hogan, and I think this will be a great fit for our choirs.
We've been slowly working on purging, and about a month ago started going through pictures. I found this one of my favorite Bauer, Marie, holding my son. She died not too long after this photo, so I really appreciate that she got to meet him at least a little bit before going to her eternal reward.
The Bauers were actually friends of my parents, four sisters and a brother who lived together and never married. They belonged to the parish my dad joined when he moved to Omaha, and my mother met and then joined the Catholic Church there. They babysat us growing up and served as godparents and surrogate grandparents for us. Their love and dignity was astounding.
Padre Pio or St. Pio of Pietrelcina was an Italian Capuchin who lived from 1887 to 1968. I first attended school at St. Frances Cabrini in Omaha, and we had parishioners who had known him. A modern saint but one with documented stigmata, bilocation, and mysterious odor of sanctity, he has a lot to commend us to him today and to help us wonder about the value of these "old-timey" signs of sanctity. The following prayer was one he wrote for after communion.
Stay with
me, Lord, for it is necessary to have You present so that I do not forget You.
You know how easily I abandon You.
Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Your strength, that I may not
fall so often.
Stay with me, Lord, for You are my life and without You I am without fervor.
Stay with me, Lord, for You are my light and without You I am in darkness.
Stay with me, Lord, to show me Your will.
Stay with me, Lord, so that I hear Your voice and follow You.
Stay with me, Lord, for I desire to love You very much and alway be in Your
company.
Stay with me, Lord, if You wish me to be faithful to You.
Stay with me, Lord, as poor as my soul is I want it to be a place of
consolation for You, a nest of Love.
Stay with me, Jesus, for it is getting late and the day is coming to a close
and life passes, death, judgment and eternity approaches. It is necessary to
renew my strength, so that I will not stop along the way and for that, I need
You. It is getting late and death approaches, I fear the darkness, the
temptations, the dryness, the cross, the sorrows. O how I need You, my Jesus,
in this night of exile!
Stay with me tonight, Jesus, in life with all its dangers, I need You.
Let me recognize You as Your disciples did at the breaking of the bread, so
that the Eucharistic Communion be the Light which disperses the
darkness, the force which sustains me, the unique joy of my heart.
Stay with me, Lord, because at the hour of my death, I want to remain united to
You, if not by Communion, at least by grace and love.
Stay with me, Lord, for it is You alone I look for, Your Love, Your Grace, Your
Will, Your Heart, Your Spirit, because I love You and ask no other reward but
to love You more and more.
With a firm love, I will love You with all my heart while on earth and continue
to love You perfectly during all eternity. Amen. --
Found at catholicsaints.info
*Sunday we had a mini Thanksgiving dinner. The husband grilled a boneless turkey breast (we took out the bones and used them for broth), and then son made stovetop stuffing, gravy from a packet, and a can of cranberry sauce. We roasted some potatoes and then mashed them. It was a very satisfying meal.
In the afternoon I made turkey/chicken broth with all my bones and various aromatics. I made lots and lots, so I will need to freeze some later this week.
*Monday we had turkey soup with rice, turkey, the broth, and celery/carrots/onion/garlic.
*Tuesday we had loaded potato fans; the Son loves these, but we do have to work harder to get the filling down between each layer; otherwise, you end up with flavorless pieces.
*Wednesday we had skillet chicken fajitas with bell peppers instead of the spicier poblano. We browned our own tortillas from Costco; this recipe is delicious but does take a solid 90 minutes of work to pull together.
*Tonight we're hopefully going to Moonlight Madness and eating from food trucks.
*I think the boys are having red pepper soup with panini; I will be eating Valentino's on my way to a Nebraska game.
Blogger is not working with me on resizing pictures so here it is. We got our all-choir piece for the October concert on Monday, so I'm working this week on getting it up to speed in my fingers.
Underneath our TV we keep a drona box from IKEA to store items to go to Wichita, where my parents and one sibling live. This month we sent down some nail polish I bought and promptly disliked, but I had to show the replacement color that was much better. I also found some hair pins for my sister that I hadn't used in forever but that she needed for her hair needs at her current length.
*There are again a bunch of saints this week, but today is the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. This feast was instituted by the Servites in 1667 and put on the universal calendar in 1814, so a more recent Marian day. The gospel is often the Presentation in the Temple, specifically when Simeon tells Mary that a sword will pierce her heart. This memorial is the day after The Exaltation of the Holy Cross and a week after Mary's Birthday feast.
This day also has an optional sequence (poem before the Alleluia), the Stabat Mater, which is the hymn "At the Cross Her Station Keeping."
Quote from a homily of St. Bernard: Do not be surprised that Mary is said to have been a martyr in spirit. Why are you more surprised to see Mary suffering with her Son than to see Mary's Son suffering? He, it is true, was able to die in body; could not she die with Him in spirit?
(Picture traced from Pinterest to https://patchodirtfarm.blogspot.com/2010/09/our-lady-of-sorrows.html)
*Still no updates. I'm really going to try to finish the Tea Shop Mystery this weekend.
*On Sunday we had burgers, frozen fries. and then I made peanut butter with dried cherry cookies dough to make the cookies on Monday. For good burgers I used 85% beef with a small panade.
*Monday I made the stuffed acorn squash pictured below. They were delicious as always, and I find acorn squash easier to split and clean than butternut squash.
*Tuesday I made pasta with roasted cauliflower, roasted garlic sauce, and walnuts. It's a little fussy but actually all the steps overlap which makes it go faster than expected--you're just working the whole time.
*Last night I made Easy Cream Biscuits along with frozen chicken strips for a quick chicken and biscuits. I felt like we needed one more thing with the meal: maybe a veg? Maybe I should have put jam on my biscuit instead of syrup?
*Tonight we're having hamburger stew with leftover buns repurposed as croutons. I've made this before and it's always surprisingly tasty.
*The Husband gets to have leftovers tomorrow while I head to Nebraska with the Son for a football game. We're leaving him plenty of options.
*Tomorrow is actually my first day of school for the week, so music has just been practicing. I have two Masses on Sunday but they are both using the same Mass of Renewal mass parts, so that cuts down a little bit. I'm working on 3 pages at a time of my Widor's Toccata along with building up stamina for the musical and for our concert. I do need to ask him about two pieces that I need a break between to make sure my hands don't wear out, one for the women's choir and one for Freshmen choir.
*We followed a recipe and made our own beef, salsa, and guacamole and assembled a massive pan of nachos...and then ate 5/6 of the pan between the 3 of us. They were lovely.
*Today is the Feast of the Birth of the Virgin Mary. We celebrate only 3 birth days over the course of the liturgical year: Mary, Jesus, and John the Baptist. Everyone else is only celebrated on the day of their death, their "birthday" into heaven as it were. Mary is believed to have been conceived without original sin, thus born without original sin. What would this have changed about her as a baby? We don't really know; one theory is that it would have been easier for her to be virtuous, and that her intellect would not have been clouded so it would also be easier for her to learn. She still had free will, so it's not impossible that she sinned, only easier for her not to sin than it is for us with concupiscence even after baptism.
(Found on Pinterest: detail from birth of the virgin mary, workshop of Michael Pacher, c. 1498, Austria (castle Rychnov, Czech Republic))
No new picture because I haven't added any books to my pile this week. Maybe I can finish my tea shop mystery before next Friday...
*We've added a few new songs to flesh out some of the choirs, and our all-choir piece was finally shipped today so I should have that in my hands tomorrow or the next day.
*I have two Masses this weekend but they are both using the same Mass parts, so this should be easy.
*Sunday we had a Steak Salad for lunch. We adapted it; we used the dressing also as a marinade and added olive oil to it. We also grilled the bell pepper and added an onion. Finally, we grilled two leftover pitas and tore them up to use for croutons. I made zucchini bread for our dessert and lunch for the week. We had also bought a tahini-chocolate coffee cake from Zingerman's; it's not amazing but it is quite good for snack/breakfast.
*Monday we made meatballs and had them with sauce and rigatoni. The Son and I made some chickpea mac and cheese for supper because the Husband left on a work trip to West Plains and won't be home until Thursday.
*Tuesday I made Spanish Tortilla. This is always tasty and not too hard to put together as long as I am reconciled to a few extra dishes and peeling and thinly slicing potatoes to start. I also put roasted red peppers in the fridge to realize I already had some, so I now have two partial jars of roasted red peppers to use up.
*Tonight is going to be leftovers or food from somewhere. When the boy gets to choose that usually means some kind of chicken. Thursday will be tacos with ground beef and corn and potatoes and the good Costco tortillas. Friday the Son is going to make French Toast Supreme, two pieces of cinnamon bread with cream cheese in between and battered and pan fried.
I loved this puzzle so much I finished it in about 4 days. It also was only 500 pieces so maybe that helped? The geometric shapes were very satisfying to finish.
*We've gone from a very very active saint season to one a little quieter. The only saint this week is Gregory the Great, one of the four Latin Doctors of the Church and the "Father of the Fathers." He lived from approximately 540 to 604 and was pope for 14 years. During the breakdown of Rome he cared for the poor and protected the Romans during the Lombard invasions.
Picture is from Pinterest but source is unknown.
A quote found on catholicsaints.info: “Whatever is vicious must be utterly eradicated, wrenched away not merely from being put into act, but even from being so much as thought of….No matter what obstacles we encounter, we must not allow them to turn us aside from the joy of the heavenly feast…Nor must we allow the charm of success to seduce us….We make use of temporal things, but our hearts are set on what is eternal.”
