Dirty Catholic

Candles, Cakes, & Crucifixions

Today is Mr. Man's 33rd Birthday!

In some (insular, highly religious and slightly odd) circles, the 33rd birthday is referred to as your "Jesus Year." As in, "By 33, Jesus founded one of the world's largest multinational charitable organizations in history, and then he died for your sins. What have you been up to?" No pressure or anything.

A kinder, fuzzier approach is to call it your "death and resurrection year" and to therefore pay attention to the big changes that happen during the year. Of course, then it's not any different than the rest of your life as a Christian, except maybe you actually pay attention to the mini-paschal mysteries that happen in your everyday life.

Mr. Man has a more literal approach. He thinks he's going to die. He mentioned it maybe four times yesterday. I choose to ignore him. (And we wonder why Jesus stayed single.)

Anyway, if Mr. Man lives, we're going to celebrate his Jesus Year with Burmese food and then spending the weekend in our birthday suits at a hippie hot springs. Like you do.

If you are feeling like sharing, please wish him a Happy Birthday in the comments, and/or tell us how you survived your Jesus Year. Any good death/resurrection to report?

Weekend of Mitigated Virtue

In a quasi-Lenten fashion, I decided I was going to try to do something good for the planet in honor of Earth Day. Not on the actual day mind you, since I was otherwise engaged (and I'll tell you about it soon), but I wanted to start a new practice going forward.

In order to save energy, I decided I'd hang all our laundry out to dry instead of using the dryer. Then, to reduce our use of non-recyclable plastic containers, I decided to start making our our yogurt. Mr. Man won't eat plain yogurt, so I put homemade jams and such in the bottom to tempt him.

(fig, peach, honey, and plum-apricot)

The yogurt making went pretty well, but I still have a few kinks to work out like making it thicker than the current buttermilk consistency. If I can conquer that, I think it will be a pretty easy thing to do from week to week.

So I was feeling pretty virtuous with all this yogurt-making-laundry-drying-back-to-the-earthiness.  Then this weekend Mr. Man and I discovered that not using our natural gas dryer saves us only about $1.00 worth of gas per month, which seems like not very much (gas, not money) to get worked up about.

So after a week of hauling laundry inside and out, chasing the chickens away from nesting in the clean stuff, and cursing when wet laundry fell off the line into dirt, I thought, "Eff it!" and decided to use the dryer. Which I promptly discovered no longer works.

Apparently the dryer enjoyed it's week off and patently disagrees with me about the intrinsic value of $1.00 worth of natural gas. So back to the laundry line I go. I am sure I will learn to love the crunchy towels.

The Devil's Tofu

So, I'm a little bit granola. I turned my front yard into a garden and I have a CSA box. I try to ride my bike (though mostly unsuccessfully) and raise chickens for eggs. I shop at Whole Foods, but have the decency to be a little bit embarrassed about it. I'm that sort of yuppie-granola, just like almost everyone else in the bay area. 

Of course, it's not my fault. I come from a long line of tofu-eaters. My mom served us tofu as children, when we were the weird Californians eating bean curd in Boise. My Dad used to put soymilk in regular milk containers so we wouldn't notice the switcheroo. My step-grandmother even wrote a tofu cookbook. 

So as I stood at the deli counter of the grocery store that shall not be named perusing my options, I noticed skewers of Jerk-seasoning flavored Seitan, and thought, "Yum!"  It was all well and good until I heard myself ordering "One pound of that jerk, Satan, please."

Maybe I should rethink my lifestyle choices. 

The Latest Trick

Have you ever found yourself about to cry in a situation when you would really rather not?

Yeah, me too.

But take heart! You too can avoid embarrassing "I cried a the Dentist" moments with my (not-yet) patented "Jack-in-the-Box" method.

Step one: Watch this commercial.

Step Two: When realizing that you are about to lose your shit, quickly imagine a random series of unrelated items. Apples! Bunnies! A rowboat! Electricity! Confetti! Keep imagining these things until the urge has passed. Repeat as necessary until you have located a friendly shoulder to cry on.

I imagine this might also work for being really, really, pissed off. Anyone with anger management issues is welcome to try it and let me know, but only if it worked.

Nothing Unusual

Mr. Man and I are not really picture people. I am generally annoyed with the process of taking pictures ("Everybody say 'Cheese!'  Oh... wait let's take one more. Oh, You have a camera you want to take another picture with? Hold on. How do you work this thing...okay! Just three or four more. Keep smiling!'") and Mr. Man lacks the follow-through to do anything with the pictures once they are taken. So we are pretty much picture-less people. No photos of us in the house. The wedding pictures are still in a box in the spare room. Just about the only thing I can (barely) motivate myself to take pictures for is this website.

Which brings me to the topic for today: baby pictures. It is a well-known phenomena that the first born is photographed within an inch of her life while the youngest is lucky to have one picture of his infancy. Having no children, we have already experienced this process with our...chickens.

Remember when we got our first flock? Those things were constantly photographed, visited by friends and neighbors, and songs were written about them. They even got their own sections in the archives of this website.

In January we bought 2 more chickens. Maybe I mentioned it on Facebook? Anyway, the other day I noticed that they had grown up.

That's Pepper on the left and Hilde on the right. They haven't started laying eggs yet, so I guess this is analogous to introducing you to a 10-year old that I just forgot to mention for the last few years.

God help our future children.

Looks just like...

I can't get over how much the new bishop looks like an old roommate of mine. (My mother would here insert, "Housemate, not roommate. If you say 'Roommate' people think you are living in sin!")

Anyhow, this particular housemate quit his job to pursue modern dancing and acrobatics full time. He took courses on ropes and hoops and high-wire acts. He once ordered hundreds of daffodil bulbs to plant all over our dilapidated neighborhood. He introduced me to quinoa and amaranth grain. You might say he was a little bit granola. More than anything, he was just a really nice, kind, interesting guy.

If the new bishop has more than just physical similarities to my old housemate, the Diocese could be a very fun and happy place in the next few years. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

A Tip for the Tooth-Troubled

If you dentist has a foot-fetish, don't wear sandals to your appointment.

You don't want to distract the person holding a drill in your mouth.

Drunken Brunch Ham Bone Stew

Hmm. So In the last month or so I've hosted a bridal shower, 4 small group meetings, my mother-in-law, a cooking class, 2 movie nights, an Easter brunch, and some other stuff. Some of it I did for money, some of it for love. But for all but the Easter Brunch, I was stone-cold-sober owing to the fact that I (mostly) gave up drinking for Lent.

So of course, I celebrated the resurrection of our Lord and Savior with liquor. Easter Brunch was a fun, boozy time. And we had leftovers.

Here's what I did with them:

It was pretty tasty, if I do say so myself.  Here's the recipe in case you, too, find yourself with a ham bone and some half-finished bottles of liquor.

Drunken Brunch Ham Bone Stew

1 ham bone, with some good bits still attached
1 onion, chopped
1 lb assorted dried beans (Skip the soaking)
pinch of nutmeg
1 bay leaf
whatever booze is left in the bottles (I used half a bottle of Cab Sav, a hefeweizen, and some peach schnapps)
carrots
celery

+Put the first 5 ingredients (ham bone through bay leaf) into a largish pot. Pour in the leftover liquor. Add enough water to cover the ham bone. (You should have at least 8 cups of liquid.) Simmer for 2 hours or until the beans are softening up a bit. Add more liquid (liquor, water, chicken broth, your choice) if the beans soak it all up.

+Add the chopped carrots and celery. Simmer for another 1/2 hour. Add salt & pepper to taste.

+Right before serving, throw in a splash of lemon juice or vinegar to brighten it up a bit.

Makes...a lot. A big pot full. Probably serves 8-10 bowls. Plus, all that nice booze won't go to waste.

Weddings Aplenty

So yesterday I alluded to part of this in a devious attempt to get you to return to the blog two days in a row. (Guess what? I'll tell you even more tomorrow!)  My younger sister (she of the large ear) got married.

Twice.

To the same guy.

The first was a small church wedding so everything would be cool with the Pope. The second was a big fancy social wedding, so everything was cool with Martha Stewart.

I think the fancy wedding was great, but I couldn't tell you for sure, since I spent the entire time staring at my chest.

Perhaps I was so preoccupied with the girls because they, and my entire body, turned a startling shade of orange:

The cause of this is unclear, but I can assure you that I do not tan, in a bottle or the sun, so apparently I am this color naturally.

The wedding must have been pretty fancy, though, because they somehow got Tinkerbell to be the flower-girl:

 

So that was fun. And now I have another brother-in-law on my side of the family. Now when I say, "You're my favorite Brother-in-law" it will finally mean something.  Because seriously, our new brother-in-law? We love that guy. 

Crazy for Easter

So...I gave up blogging for Lent?

Actually, I gave up a life of my own for a life as a wedding consultant.  Sadly, it interfered with my hectic blogging schedule.  My apologies.  The upside is I now have days worth of topics to discuss, beginning with this:

God spared me from the crazy for Lent, but the trade off was getting the crazy for Easter.  A very devout, albeit slightly off, local man came to Easter vigil and promptly defending the Easter Vigil from the travesties of photos and laughter by loudly, and repeatedly,  chastising people during the middle of the service.  It was so shocking and distracting that I could hardly pay attention to the priest who was singing during his homily.  So there you go.

Other than that, Triduum at the new parish was a liturgist's dream of organization, preparation, and liturgical correctness that would please even the Pope. It's exactly what I said I always wanted. But heading into Holy Thursday I felt not pleasure but an intense sense of loss.  I began sobbing during the opening procession, and while that can give people the impression that I was really moved by the proceedings, really what I was thinking was, "I hate you people!" It was a good, Christian way to start the holy days.

Here's the thing- I had become accustom to the old place, to our wild, unwieldy, many-language-speaking, cumbia-music-playing, crazy-costume-wearing, 20-people-baptizing, flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants way of doing things.  I loved the bigness, I loved the energy, I loved the packed church.  Of course, there were plenty of days when I also hated the sheer size of that community, the futility of trying to change or direct something so large, the mind-numbing slowness with which such a behemoth moved.

The new parish is markedly different.  It is so small and intimate that you can know all its members by name.  The liturgies are impeccably, admirably organized, small details are thought through, and the leadership appears to actually communicate with one another effectively.  I choose this parish because it seemed to have all those things the old place lacked. It seemed nearly perfect.  To my great disappointment, however, near perfection does not diminish grief.

Every time I think I've finally moved on, something small -like Triduum- will set me off again. For all the joy and glee I have found in being free from life as a professional Catholic, I miss it, and the community I worked with, dearly.  Talk about crazy.