Happy Friday! And Happy 4th of July! May your hot dogs be yummy, your ice cream be creamy, and your pools or water sprinklers cool!

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us and for our country.

But as I was sitting with my mom yesterday, I was reading one of my much loved women's magazines, and they had a little blurb in there about "beach reads." You know, those books that you take to the pool to read in the sun. One of the points that the author of the article brought up was interesting: Beach reads have to be good enough to keep your attention, but they also have to be "put-downable" because you are forever having to quit reading them to slather sunscreen on a kid, or turn and look when the chorus of "Mommy, watch this, watch this, watch this!" gets unignorable.

So, after all that build up, give me some suggestions. What are your favorite "beach reads"?

Happy Thursday, ya'll!

You see, it falls into the same trap as Wuthering Heights, another of those "oh, so romantical" books that make me want to curse and throw things. The tag line for the movie was "How long would you wait for love?" Sounds good, huh? But what they don't tell you is that after being spurned by the girl he fell in love with as a young man, the main character proceeds to sleep with more than 600 women before he is reunited with his "love" 52 years later.

And these affairs are not without consequence. One young woman is killed by her jealous husband. Another young woman (his NIECE, whom he began sleeping with when she was FOURTEEN) kills herself when he leaves he to go be with his "one true love".

Sorry, but that is just overheated, fake romance and is a pile of you know what. You want me to admire him for "waiting" for 52 years? Then actually WAIT for 52 years. If you don't and proceed to have more than 600 affairs (which you catalog in a notebook) then it's not "romantic" it's pathetic and grossly wrong. It is yet another attempt to separate sex from love, and make it OK to have sex randomly--after all it doesn't MEAN anything, does it? Yuck.

Oh, and women throw themselves wantonly at this man ALL THE TIME. While we were watching the movie, Bethany (the youngest of our book group members) said, "Well, it's obvious that this was some man's fantasy, isn't it?"

Yes it is.

Anyway, I put it aside to read Red Dog by Louis de Bernieres, which is a small book. Basically a collection of stories about a dog in Australia. It's meh. But it's next month's book club book, so I'll read it. At least it doesn't make me throw things.

I'm also reading Right Ho, Jeeves and laughing away at poor Gussie Fink-Nottle, lover of newts. Genius.

And I'm reading Fr. Neuhaus' book Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth. I just finished his conversion story, which I was fascinated by, as I am by all conversion stories. I guess we converts can't help but love 'em, because there is such a sense of "Oh yeah? You too?" While Neuhaus was a Lutheran, and I was an Anglican, much of what he says is certainly true of me. The last part of the chapter rang especially true:

The root of all sin, said Luther, following Augustine, is a condition described in two words: Incurvatus est--we are turned in upon ourselves. The young Augustine, like people of all times, including our own, thought he was searching for God. Yet in his mastery of all the philosophical paths, he was the master, and therein was the problem. Finally he faced the question: "What am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?" Perhaps his best-known line is this: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Rest comes with surrender, with being shaken out of the state of incurvatus est, with submission to an other, and finally to the Other. The Other is embodied, as in the body of Christ, the Church. The form of the body, most fully and rightly ordered through time, has a location as specific as the location of New York. Finitum capax infiniti--the finite is capable of the infinite. One's search could not forever stop short of the finite that is the Catholic Church.

One day maybe I'll write out my conversion story. But this much is the same as Fr. Neuhaus' search--though he puts his so well, and I cannot--our search began with a search for the Church that was TRUE, not the Church of Terry and Craig. We knew we had to be where truth was, not where we were comfortable. In fact, we suspected that comfort would have very little to do with it.

Anyway, Neuhaus' book is good, and worth a look.

BUT, if you're going out with a bunch of hot sweaty people to line the streets of downtown and watch the 2nd largest day time 4th of July parade in the whole country, you just might want to wear something like this instead:

Guess which pair I'm more likely to wear?

Happy Tuesday, ya'll!

A simple song, but one that I tell McKid that she needs to remember, and write in her heart. And so do I.

Click here and you'll go to a Youtube video where you can hear the music. This is a lot different from the music I normally post--not liturgical. Just fun!

Sorry for the absence last week, but things are busy at CasaS with McKid home all day and my mom being not so great. Between here, there and yon, there hasn't been much time to peruse the internet, and what little time I had lent itself more to a few mindless games of canasta. I've thrown myself into the hands of the Regency Romance Writers, as a way of escaping reality. Well, those writers and P.G. Wodehouse. It's a hot summer, ya'll, and my brains are slowly frying.

I'll have a few thoughts on parenting, born out of my sitting poolside during swimming lessons and the usual hymns, shoes, books and art.

Glad to be back my friends. Hope you're still there.

Oh, and I'm bummed that Smock, who is the pickiest eater on the planet, gets to go to Taste of Chicago, while I am condemned to stay home and make mac and cheese.

Does that seem fair to you?

I thought not.

Love you, Smock. Bring me back a fried eel or something.

yes, the foodie also known as smockmomma and her more handsome half, smockdaddy, are off to chicago next week for fabulous food, a cooler clime and to celebrate fifteen years of wedded bliss.

*76-83 degree highs are expected in chicago versus the 94-95 degree highs in our neck of the woods. can somebody say yeeHAW?

i'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that next weekend is going to be an even bigger weekend for get smart if word-of-mouth advertising has anything to do with sales. smockdaddy and i, who both loved watching the get smart t.v. series as kids, took the "big d" (who is 12 years old and has never seen an episode of get smart) and joined hundreds of others to see the big screen version last saturday night and we, along with everyone else in the theater, laughed out loud from beginning to end.

mind you, i wasn't quite as impressed as everyone else seemed to be -- case in point: i was totally unimpressed, and actually annoyed, by the relentlessly persistent and overt pot-shots at the bush admin -- but overall i thought steve carell was perfect as a, shall we say, smarter and more sympathetic maxwell smart. the word "adorable" comes to mind. as for anne hathaway, whom i've always enjoyed watching play "herself" in movies, is still fun to watch as herself and is a perfect "straight gal" with great gams as agent 99. heroes geeks will be happy to see masi oka make several appearances as one of the agency's techno geeks.

several times during the movie i thought "big d" and smockdaddy were going to pass out because they were laughing so hard they couldn't breathe. and i'll admit that i had to dig my fingertips into my temples because i was laughing so hard i got a headache halfway through the movie.

bottom line: get smart is slapstick par excellence.

I first saw this image in a calendar that I got from the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. I love the gentleness of it. I love that it felt no need to be true to the historical period of the Bible, but put the Madonna in the clothes of the time of the painter. It always brings home to me that the Virgin is for all times and for all people. She is beautiful, is she not?

Happy Friday, ya'll!

It's not even that I have to read "pretty". Some of my favorite books, like Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, are hard, sometimes ugly, and sometimes depressing. That's not it. But at least you had an idea about why someone wanted to write this book. I don't get it with Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. I'm quite sure the fault lies in me somewhere.

So, whether or not it gets finished, I will probably try again to get at least some of it read before book club meeting next Wednesday night. Fortunately, we are watching the recent movie adaptation of the book at our meeting. Theoretically to compare the book to the movie. I'll just have to talk a lot about the movie, I guess.

Actually reading now? I'm 2/3 of the way through The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in my quest to reread the Narnia series this summer. On deck? Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings and Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. After that? Probably Right Ho, Jeeves, to finish up my omnibus volume. If not that, then Rumer Godden's China Court, which I picked up for $1 on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books.

How 'bout you?

Like everything else in this world, VBS has moved upscale to compete with television, video games and the like. Most Blessed Sacrament chose Power Lab as their VBS this year.

While I am normally prepared to scoff at the high-tech, bright colored, shiny new things, I must admit that McKid came out of VBS dancing and singing all about Jesus. That's a good thing! When I asked her if she had a good time? "Mom! I had BEYOND a good time!"

They're doing something right. Monday's theme was "The Power to be Thankful" and there was a little homework assignment--several ways a kid could show she was thankful for what someone had done for her. McKid sat right down and wrote a thank you card to her VBS teacher.

Good for her.

We'll see what today holds, but so far, it's all thumbs up from here.

Everyone who knows me, at least in real life, knows that I have a mini-obssession with flip-flops. Love 'em. Look at 'em in every store I go to. Want more. Even when I have enough!

But a girl also needs some classier shoes. Maybe just shoes that don't make a noise when you walk. These would be a nice choice. But there sure is a big difference in price level!

------------------------Elisabeth Elliot, A Lamp for My Feet