Amytime!

I enthusiastically welcome May with open arms. I'm always glad to say good-bye to April's ambiguity. Fickle April never knows if she wants to be warm, cold, windy or pleasant, but May is one month closer to the heat.

Also, some of the most beautiful days in the history of the world have fallen in the month of May. I remember two of them distinctly.

But the most convincing and obvious reason for appreciating this month is it's name. Rearranged, it spells Amy. Know what that means?

May is Amytime!!!!

Current Mood: concerned about my mango tree

Tip of the Day

ER doctors refer to motorcycles as "donorcycles." The brain cannot be replaced. Wear your helmet, tough guy, or start looking for someone to feed you applesauce and processed squash.

Quoth She

"Sadness is a wall between two gardens."
-Khalil Gibran

Strawberry Stream of Conscious

Myriads of yellow-green seeds nestled against a ruby colored backdrop; I think a strawberry is beautiful.

The inner hollow is practically glowing with minute globes, reminding me of pearls or clear glass beads. Clusters of globes form walls and hollows within hollows, like ice caves and formations you see in glaciers.

I've seen pictures in National Geographic magazine where part of a glacier has been eaten away by the sea, allowing a boat to enter its hidden inner world. I'd like to be the photographer in that boat, bending her neck upward, her eyes the first to see that other-worldly cathedral.

Every shade of blue and white ornaments the walls with swirling arabesques, bas relief as fine as lace. Arcs carved, domes scooped effortlessly, the lines of crystal pillars and beams fall away cleanly.

The photographer, a would-be princess in a palace of ice, is suddenly aware of her plainness, her grubbiness. Warm, pink skin does not belong in this frozen sterility. The glacier is too beautiful to permit human life.

Her camera attempts to capture the color known as glacial blue and the sanctuary where only whales worship and seals sing praises. She leaves sadly, her heart forever changed. Wherever she goes, regardless of what beauty surrounds her, she will long for the cathedral she cannot inhabit.

But the strawberry--I'm getting away from myself--I think it's beautiful, that's all.

Tip of the Day

If you hear what sounds like a cell phone ringing out of doors but no one is in sight, it might be a mockingbird. Really.

Quoth She

Ars longa, vita brevis

(Art is long, life is short)

Current mood: indulgent

Tip of the Day

Is 'snuck', as the past tense of 'sneak', a real word?

There is a helpful summary in The New Fowler's Modern English Usage by R.W. Burchfield (OUP 1998):

sneak (verb)
Its origins are shrouded in mystery ... From the beginning, and still in standard British English, the past tense and past participle forms are sneaked. Just as mysteriously, in a little more than a century, a new past tense form, snuck, has crept and then rushed out of dialectal use in America, first into the areas of use that lexicographers label jocular or uneducated, and more recently, has reached the point where it is a virtual rival of sneaked in many parts of the English-speaking world. But not in Britain, where it is unmistakably taken to be a jocular or non-standard form.

Bryan A. Garner calls snuck 'nonstandard' in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage (OUP 1998).

Some British dictionaries provide usage notes warning against the use of 'snuck'.

askoxford.com

Quoth she:

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

Full Blown Rose

A tightly curled rosebud holds potential beauty and fragrance inside itself. The rosebud is firm and impervious to insects, but it was not meant to remain closed.

Time and the sun's warmth convince it to loosen its grasp and the rose gradually opens to the world.

I'm beginning to think "growing in God" means changing like the rose. It means becoming more accepting, forgiving and loving.

Growing in God is a process of gradually softening, opening up and letting go until the petals drop, one by one, into His hand.

Current mood: touched

Party Like a Catholic!

Friday I partied like a Catholic. No kidding, the party was in a rectory. Someone opened a door in the hallway and I saw the inside of the chapel. Weird, but an enriching experience for several reasons.

1. Who knew there were good looking priests who wear the collars of their Abercrombie shirts flipped? Not me. I can't picture the guy reading me my last rites, but it wouldn't be a bad way to go...

2. Some party-goers fomented Protestant - Catholic tensions, and entering into the spirit of the Reformation, suggested printing a copy of the 95 Theses and nailing it to the church door.

3. I learned how to get away with taking a dog into Burger King and also that the Catholic Church never approved the idea of Limbo so it never existed. I suspect that the former bit of information will have more life application than the latter.

4. Ben from North Carolina being schooled on how to be one of the "frozen chosen" and his response to my question about Southerners and the Civil war: "You mean the war of Northern aggression?"

5. And of course, celebrating Big Ol Maahty's birthday.

Missy and Malc

Six months later they're still talking baby talk (that's the only word I can think of, but really, I don't what you'd call it) and I'm glad.

I think this means we're friends :)

Current mood: quite non-Catholic