Dogwood



The chinese fringe bushes are not quite as spectacular as they were, but the dogwood is now in full bloom. It's almost funny how much it looks like it did a few months ago, when it was covered in snow. Also, the ground cover in the flower bed near the patio has sprouted beautiful purplish-blue flowers.

The backyard azaleas are not quite blooming, but the ones in the front yard are spectacular. We didn't know what colors we had until a couple of weeks ago. Most of them are white, to my disappointment, but by the front door there are some pink and purple ones. Unfortunately, the bushes in the front are weedy and uneven in size after several years of neglect. As soon as they stop blooming I'll attack them with my shears and force them into conformity.

Clothes

When flowers start to bloom and the weather warms, most girls of my acquaintance start thinking about spring and summer clothes. Lightweight skirts and dresses, sandals, a cute hat or two to keep that delicate complexion from too much sun. Those of you who tan nicely, rather than just turn unsightly shades of pink and mottled red, can keep that to yourselves, by the way.

I probably won't be buying many new things this spring. I bought plenty of new clothes last year--mostly fancy things, anticipating job interviews and a job that never came--and wonder of wonders, even after eating my own cooking for a year they all still fit me. Even with budgetary considerations, and space "constraints" (I've already kicked my husband's clothes into one of the hall closets, though to be fair I let him put both the long gun and handgun safes in my closet), I can still ogle the pretties. If I had all the money in the world and a genuine need for new clothes, here are some things that might be on my list:

eShakti:

Floral-embroidered linen dress

Sailor-inspired collar and birdcages on the hem!

Sash-front layered skirt


Orvis:

Ribbon-trim straw sunhat

Button-front vest


L.L. Bean:

Mountain Laurel Sport Sandals. Not so glamorous, I know, but pretty enough and practical: I spend a lot of my springs and summers walking on uneven surfaces like gravelly festival parking lots, dirt trails, and grassy fields, through which I am often running in pursuit of an escaped dog. Practical and comfortable are important.

Washable linen skirt--one in every color, please!

Rain bucket hat, because unlike Washington and California, it rains on the East Coast during the summer.

Coldwater Creek:

Crinkle flare skirt

Print-detail cloche


All pretty, and pretty modest. What clothes do you love for spring and summer?

Birthday Cake


Today is my husband's birthday. What better day for my first foray into cake-baking from scratch? His mother gave me a cute little recipe book of some of his favorites from home as a Christmas present (I had requested it--he is not always easy to cook for, and also we have moved a long way away from his parents this year), and among the recipes was a cake she has often baked for his birthday. Chocolate, of course. So I paired it with a chocolate buttercream frosting recipe from the Williams-Sonoma website and spread a tart cherry jam between the layers. I got to sample all three items separately during the assembly process (chef's prerogative) and each tastes pretty good, so hopefully they go well together. The decoration is simple, but I have no experience with pastry bags and don't feel up to piping anything, so I just bought a little tube of green gel frosting to do the lettering. Not too shabby for a first attempt, I think!

North Carolina Springtime



White dogwood, magenta Chinese fringe bushes, and brand new patio furniture (thanks, Mom!). Mixed daffodils under the Japanese maple. The pictures are slightly overexposed because it was amazingly bright and sunny yesterday, and 85 degrees!

Prayer Request

Please pray for my friend K.E. whose husband announced today that he is moving out immediately, leaving her and their two young children. This is apparently very sudden and unexpected, and K. of course is devastated. Hopefully this wound in their marriage will be healed, by God's grace.

Also, Seedlings!

My husband and I are planting vegetables, and have started some of the seeds indoors. Here is what it looks like after one week.

The tall ones are tomatoes, and the others are basil, chives, and Walla Walla sweet onions. The parsley, for some reason, has not sprouted. I don't know whether it's just slow, or was planted too deep, or the seeds were duds. The first round of lettuce is in the bed outside. We are waiting for the components for veggie bed #2 to arrive, which will be deeper and hold carrots, beets, and onions. We pretty much have to buy plastic/resin boards for a veggie bed, because it's so humid here and the shed near where the vegetables are has previously been infested with termites. I'm hopeful that we'll have a decent first crop!

From the File "Things I Love"



Netflix has the "Wodehouse Playhouse" DVDs. We're currently on the second DVD. If you like Wodehouse, you must see these. They are hysterically funny. The acting is quite good, and the short intros by PG himself are a nice touch.

Some of the episodes can also be seen on YouTube.

Hymnals, Too

I actually started work on an index for my fantasy hymnal last night, beginning with excerpting everything worthwhile from the two hymnals that were already next to me: Worship III and Gather.

I can report that I took about a third of the hymns that are in Worship. Note that the hymns make up about a third of the book, and I only took a third of them. So, by my calculations, 1/9th of the book is worth using. No reason for it to be as fat and heavy as it is.

Almost anything worthwhile from Gather is duplicated in Worship, so only two additional hymns from Gather made it onto my list.

Next I will more thoroughly examine the Adoremus hymnal, but I suspect I will not have many additions from that corner. I think there's hardly anything in Adoremus that isn't also in Worship; the Adoremus hymnal is kind of like a Worship hymnal with all the bad stuff taken out, and a decent order of Mass in English and Latin inserted, which is why it is half the size and a third of the weight of Worship.

On Hymnals

image source


I was recently asked, casually, what hymnal I would pick if I had my choice. I'm sure that the friend who asked me this had no idea what a can of worms she was opening up. She probably thought I'd just be able to name one. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. There is no Catholic hymnal in existence that would be able to stand on its own for parish use. Any one that you picked would have to be supplemented almost every week by worship aids with lyrics in them. I've yet to come across a Catholic hymnal that isn't plagued by at least one of three things: heresy, poor selection, or really bad music. Here are some examples:

St. Gregory
The organ accompaniments are atrocious, and the original compositions are lackluster at best. Also, since the only available edition is a reprint from 70 years ago, it's out of date; there has actually been good stuff written in that time period that I'd like to include.

Traditional Roman Hymnal
Useful for the SSPX, I suppose, but though I really like the selection they have, I presumably will always be employed in OF or combination EF-OF parishes, and there aren't enough English hymns to make it useful for that.

Worship III
Well, aside from the obvious problems of objectionable '70s and '80s hymnody, it doesn't contain enough hymns in some of its various categories to make it sustainable for year-round use. For instance, there are only nine hymns in the section marked "Eucharist." Now, of course you can use other hymns during Communion, if you're going to sing hymns then, but really? Nine was the best you could do? There are that many in a throwaway missalette! Also, it's really fat and heavy, kind of difficult to hold with one hand.

Gather
I'm including this one because, along with Worship III, it's what we currently have in our pews. Do I really need to say why I don't like it? I object to a lot of the music in it on artistic and theological grounds.

Collegeville
Plagued with a combination of the problems of Gather and Worship III. Fat, heavy, and with a lot of pretty awful music.

Adoremus
None of the music in it is objectionable, there just isn't enough of it. It might be useful for a school or for a chapel where they don't have Mass year-round, but in a parish setting its small selection will become boring pretty quickly.

The Parish Book of Chant
Does what it says on the cover. It's not a replacement for an OF hymnal. Also, the selection is pretty small, if those are the only things you expect the congregation to sing. If I expected my parishioners to do a lot of singing in Latin, I'd get a Kyriale and a Liber Cantualis.


I know there are probably others that I've left out. My parish is going to get new hymnals later this year, before Advent. They're getting Gather Comprehensive, the one I really, really don't want, but I'm only a lowly choir member here, wife of the organist, and I have no say. My poor husband--they asked him if he'd rather see a permanent hymnal or throwaway missalettes, and he said hymnal. He had no idea it was going to be that!

The only hymnals I've ever seen that I genuinely liked and thought useful were Anglican. If I were in charge of my own music program and had to get new hymnals, I'd either buy Anglican hymnals and attack them with white-out and scissors (by way of editing), or use a print-on-demand service and make my own. I would not expect the hymnal to also serve as a hand missal.

I'd probably want to have two books in the pews: one would be something like the Gregorian Missal, with all the proper chants, but would leave out most of the feast days and include the readings and a Kyriale. Basically, a hand missal with notated music. The other book would have some (probably seasonal) Simplex Propers and a largish selection of solid hymns in English and Latin. I really think that an arrangement like this, though probably expensive, would be able to provide all of the congregational music for an idealized Ordinary Form-only parish, in which you'd have a sort of Low Mass early in the morning, with all vernacular hymns, a later Mass (or the anticipated Mass) with Simplex Propers and hymns, and a mostly- or all-Latin High Mass in the late morning with the Gregorian Propers.

Update

I asked my husband how he felt about seeing women breastfeed. He said that he was a little unnerved the first couple of times, but he has now seen it often enough that he's used to it.

I hope that someday, many more men in the U.S. will be able to say the same: that seeing a woman breastfeed in public, or even just in her own living room with family and friends around, is a perfectly normal part of life. Unfortunately, this is not yet the case.