My favorite story of St. Don Bosco–a story that shows how awesome the gifts God gives his saints can be!
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Why do Americans adopt babies from other countries–even as far away as China and Russia–instead of adopting babies here in the United States, especially when 3,000 babies are murdered through abortion everyday right here at home?
 
The fact that this riddle is a reality in our country tells you at the very least, that somethin’ just ain’t right.
 
I read with some astonishment this article in the Houston Chronicle online about 100+ families begging to adopt this poor baby who was abandoned by her mother (and presumably by her father as well at some point in the past). Hundreds of families are begging to adopt this one baby!
 
Back home in the United States, a family spends tens of thousands of dollars and flies half-way around the world to adopt a baby from a foreign country when a baby they should be able to adopt is aborted literally right down the street from their home.
 
What’s going on here? What is the explanation for such madness?

 
We have one recurring problem in adoration–not the most important one–but an annoying one nonetheless: People continually take the books that we, the adoration team, buy and make avaiable to the adorers for reading in adoration.
 
We have bought many, many books, clearly marked them as being “St. Louis property, please do not remove”, and yet, for unknown reasons, some people take the books home and never return them!
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I have learned about 2 of the 6 men who are selling the land to Alex Bahrami on which the strip club is to be built: Burt Pence and Charlie Teeple (Charles Teeple).
 
I sent them both an email asking them to not sell the land to this twisted man so that he would be prevented from building a place where our Lord’s daughters are degraded and His sons commit grave lustful sins, but they did not respond to me.
 
I informed them that if they did not respond, I would put their names on my blog site in connection with this topless bar, as they both know what is going to be built on this land they are selling, and they are not stopping it.
 
You can find our more information about these two men here, on the website dedicated to stopping Alex Bahrami’s (or Bharmi, he goes by other names it seems) strip club.
 
I am particularly grieved about Mr. Teeple, who, from what I have read, is an elder at Covenant Presbyterian Church. I do not think Mr. Teeple condones the evil that Alex Bahrami is doing, for from his activities with Boy Scouts and other organizations, especially this Christian church, I give him the benefit of the doubt of being a good man, striving to be like Christ.
 
Nonetheless, he has not responded to me and indicated what actions he has taken or is taking to stop the other developers from selling the land. I have heard that all 6 voted and that the majority won, though I don’t know if anyone, including Mr. Teeple, voted against it. Charles Teeple, if you are reading this message, please click on the Devman link above my picture on the right side of the page, and send me an email explaining your actions.
 
Until then, you both remain in my prayers, for Christ to enlighten your hearts in this horrible deal.

 
My lovely girlfriend introduced me to the idea of a “perpetual fast” whereby one fasts from something for a particular prayer intention.
 
So for example, I am hoping and praying our Lord will start perpetual adoration at St. Louis parish in Austin when our new chapel is completed (currently about 7 months away), so I decided to fast from desserts on all days but Sundays (which, as my girlfriend reminded me, is our Lord’s resurrection celebration and therefore not appropriate for fasting).
 
Thus, I am fasting from desserts until God brings perpetual adoration to our parish in 7 months. That is really cool in and of itself, and I recommend this good practice for whatever dream or hope you have that has not yet been fulfilled, but, being someone who loves desserts in a way that borders on inordinate, it has at times been a tough fast for me.
 
I have had to decide just what foods are and are not desserts, and I have come up with several sweet things to eat which I have deemed are not desserts but which certainly are borderline.
 
Here they are in order from least to most dessert-like:
1. Prunes
2. Peanut butter and jelly
3. Almond biscotti (in dried bread form intended for consumption with coffee)
4. Gingerbread from Souper Salads (this was a Kress-dispensation as it sure looked like cake to me, but Jeff assured me that his wife Sharon had made the definitive determination (probably at some Lent in the past when she took on a similar fast) that, indeed, and contrary to popular opinion, this gingerbread cake was not a dessert.)
 
Additionally, my girlfriend and I are offering up perpetual fasts for each other, that our Lord will protect us and our courtship from Satan and his demons, and that He will graciously lead us in His perfect will. I heartily recommend you try this noble practice out with your boyfriend or girlfriend or fiancee, and ultimately this sacrifice would be realized in a glorified way in marriage by fasting for your beloved spouse.

 
“Prepare ye the way, for the Lord,
Prepare ye the way, for the Kingdom!”
 
Our company smashed the earnings expectation for the last quarter of ‘05, and so today our stock skyrocketed up almost 12%. Blessed be God for the great jobs He has given us.
 
Whenever our stock goes up a lot like it did today, it makes for a festive atmosphere at work, as people are obviously excited about the good fortune, which is the fruition of lots of hard work that for long periods of time, sometimes years, seems to go unrewarded by Wall Street.
 
Every hour or so someone would come in and be like, “What’s our stock at now?” and it would provide a good break from work to open up the financial sites and see what we had risen to.

 
My intelligent and lovely girlfriend reminded me of something we talked about a few days ago that I could write about, and gave me the idea of generally posting about some things we talk about that are not personal in nature and can benefit others. Thanks be to God for our courtship!
 
I woke up the other morning and thought about God, asking Him to guide us in His will for us. I wondered what He had planned for my future, and since I don’t know what it is, I immediately had doubts that it was something good. But suddenly images flooded my mind of what it would be like if God does plan for us to be married: All the wonderful days and nights together, our beautiful family, the joy and love we will share.
 
And I realized that If this be the will of God, He sees all of these things right now and has dreams of us fulfilling them and enjoying our love together in Him, forever. Why do I go about my life as if God didn’t care for me?

 
I did Kress computer battle last night and tonight against the evil Morpheus program and various other evil programs it managed to snake onto the system.
 
Finally, right as I began to despair at 8:15 pm, I fixed the Kresses’ computer! Thank you, Jesus.
 
For posterity and future reference, Zone Alarm, a software firewall, was taking up 100% of the cpu (pegging the processor) for long periods of time and for no apparent reason. The process actually taking up the cpu is called vsmon.exe, which is the Zone Alarm process.
 
Morpheus 5.1 would not uninstall itself due to either incompetence on the part of its developers or their malice (take your pick), so I manually deleted the Program Files\Morpheus directory and the Program Files\Streamcast directory. Even after doing this, the vsmon.exe still hogged the cpu and made the computer virtually unusable. My only guess was that somehow the Kresses IP address had been registered with the evil Morpheus servers and so was made available to countless other computers running the program, and they were trying to download files from it.
 
But I inspected the system and the socket connections (using TCPView from sysinternals.com), and I couldn’t see anything suspect. As a last ditch effort, I uninstalled ZoneAlarm, then redownloaded the latest version and installed it, and it worked! Vsmon.exe quit taking up all the cpu.
 
Moral of the story: Don’t install peer-to-peer file-sharing software–it’s like installing a pipe directly from the sewer into your living room and pumping in raw sludge.

 
“Some sweet day!
Some sweet day…
I’m gonna find the way!”
 
Our gracious Lord has blessed me with the gift of courting one of His own daughters, and, needless to say, I am humbled and honored and so thankful.
 
One consequence of this new development in my life is that it is more difficult for me to make posts for the blog. It is hard because much of my time, thought, and energy is being devoted to our courtship, and so the natural thing for me to post on is things going on in our courtship, but because it is something very personal, it is not appropriate for me to share it with the world at large.
 
I think I can probably strike some happy medium between the two poles, but it will take me a while to find it, and in the meantime I am erring on the side of prudence in posting.

 
The G’s entire family came into town and visited for the weekend, and it was a blast! They speak Spanish half the time and English the other half, so I get to listen to Spanish and tried to understand it.
 
The blessings that God gives from having a loving family are amazing. Just being around a family that loves God makes me feel good. We all went to Mass together this morning and then they made “menudo”, which is a classic Mexican dish. I personally don’t like it because the texture of the meat is very chewy, but the G’s family likes it.
 
The G’s brother and sister-in-law have a 1.5 year old son and another little boy on the way in two months, so he is fun to watch and play with. His guardian angel tapped me on the shoulder one time when he picked up set of keys and almost got it inserted into the electrical socket! I continue to hope with renewed confidence in our Lord for a holy family of my own one day…