I have been very remiss in not posting about a wonderful online store for St. Therese holy cards and books [http://www.thelittleway.com/].

The woman who runs the website, Cynthia, also owns a brick-and-mortar store in Salinas, California: Corpus Christi Book+Store, and she is a secular Carmelite!

St. Therese continues to rock the casbah like no one’s business.

Danielle Rose, Katie’s good friend who took our wedding photos, has completed them and sent them to us!  I will be uploading them to this site and to snapfish or a similar site so that you can see them sometime this weekend.

The proofs that Danielle sent to us along with the CDs looked amazing, thanks be to God.   She did a fantastic job on them.

Whew!  Katie and I have “been busy” to say the least.  We have been volunteering for the Diocesan capital campaign calling parishioners and asking for donations, planning Perpetual Adoration at St. Louis to begin early next year, composting (and our compost heap has been getting hotter, hopefully indicating that it is starting to get going), and doing many other things as well.

Bless the Lord for his goodness!  Let’s live for Heaven today and be at peace, knowing Jesus is protecting us in his love.

Well, it’s not near as good as the Gretencord’s banner, but I have made a new banner for our blog and finished it before dinner is served!

I put it together with Microsoft Paint–perhaps there will be some revisions if I get more time for it.

Clarissa and Jesse have a new blog, as do Veronica and Enrique–all part of Gerardo’s extended Garcia family and our friends as well.

Y’all should’ve told me that you had new blogs!  I heard about it from Roxanna just last night, and I’m excited about keeping up with you. 

I am trying out some different themes again and am going to create an image for our blog which hopefully will look cool.

Pardon our dust in the meantime!

…and takes over the radio airwaves.

I’m considering writing a letter (okay, an email) to K-LOVE and “The River”–my two sources for “positive and encouraging music” in Austin in which I will tell them that we are not even in Advent yet, much less the Christmas season, so they should stop blaring the 24-7 Christmas music.

Don’t get me wrong: I like positive and encouraging music and have these two contemporary Christian stations programmed into my car radio, but all they play now is Christmas music, and I already know that the day after Christmas is over, they will stop playing it, even though the Octave of Christmas has just begun!

The gift of the liturgical seasons was one of the most delightful to me when I became Catholic.  They just make sense, and they are the way that Jesus’ Church remembers and celebrates His life, death, and resurrection.  Christmas lasts more than one day, and so does Easter.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Katie told me to read aloud George Washington’s First Thanksgiving Proclamation, so I did, and wow! how awesome to read our nation’s first president giving thanks to Almighty God so clearly and powerfully.

Many misguided people in our nation today claim that “church and state must be separated” and by that they mean the abolishment of all religion and religiously-founded laws, celebrations, displays, etc.  But that is a perversion of what the separation of church and state truly means and a foreign concept to our nation’s founders and all generations since except for our own.

Don’t believe me?  Then go read Washington’s proclamation.  Who else but God are we giving thanks to on this day?

When I was an atheist, Thanksgiving was kind of the lead-up to Christmas where we got to eat turkey and got together with our family–it was nice, to be sure, but I was not thankful to anyone or anything in particular besides perhaps my immediate family who loved me.  Now as a Christian I know the True Lord of the Universe, Jesus Christ, and I love to give thanks to Him for his manifold blessings and love.

Have a blessed Thanksgiving and offer humble thanks to our glorious God!

Mark Shea has a good article on CatholicExchange.com today about the false belief that the sins that someone commits shows their “true self”.

He talks about Mel Gibson’s drunken outburst from a few months ago as an example.

I’ve always wanted a compost pile, and now I finally have one!

When I was a boy, my mom got a composting bin, but we just kind of stuck it in the corner of the yard and put leaves in it, which composts slowly–I was impatient and wanted a hot compost pile that would burn up waste in a short time, turning it into rich mulch. I thought it was so cool that kitchen and yard waste could turn into something useful and do so in such a short time. more…

Muhahhaha!

I have claimed glorious victory over the guest toilet, which has been out of commission since we moved into our home.

I had to replace the valve coming out of the wall, but when I went to Home Depot this morning, I was confused and unprepared for the 200 different valve types: Was it steel or copper?  Was it 1/2 inch or 3/8 inch?  Was it CPVC (and what is CPVC)?  more…