You know ~ Cor unum et anima una... One heart and one soul ~ and one mind and one thought process... After a while, even our memories become one.
(Please forgive the blasphemies in this cartoon, but I just couldn't resist posting it for the subject matter. Doesn't this guy sound like Woody Allen?)
Happy birthday to you,
| What color M&M are you? Blue You are cool and sometimes have problems making friends because they are intimidated by you. However, the friends you do have are great. |
 Quizzes and Personality Tests |
Our TV just died. And, though we might have been better served by freeing up that corner of the living room for something else... we went ahead and replaced it. With a flat screen. Mainly because it takes up less space, and I have this dream of hanging it in a shallow little cabinet high on the wall with doors I can shut.
een-year -old magically and instantaneously learned how to burn cds and record slideshows to music. My seven and nine-year-olds can manipulate the computer better than I can. And I didn't teach them. My husband hasn't sat down to instruct, either. I think it's just that the kids are interested, so they play around until they teach themselves (hopefully without destroying the equipment!). They aren't afraid of it; they take technology for granted.
Summer's almost upon us. 
e're dying to try out the 3-D sidewalk chalk!)
* Same thing goes with sand play. If you don't have a sandbox, get a small bag of sandbox sand at the hardware store and parcel it out through the summer in a dishpan (or you know that little tub they give you in the hospital after you've had a baby?), with cups and scoops. Moisten it with a bit of water to make it moldable, and let 'em have at it. (One pan of sand per child is ideal.)
* Jumpropes ~ to be jumped with if you have girls, to be used as cowboy and Indian rope if you have boys.
* Bags of little plastic animals. You can find them for next to nothing in the dollar store and if you have children under the age of 7, they keep little hands and minds busy for hours, indoors or out.
of scraps of lumber. Show them how to make garages with bits of bark and sticks and watch them go!
I've always thought these Rube Goldberg Doohicky Thingamajigs were fascinating. Mesmerizing. But, my second thought is that here is someone with way too much time on their hands...
But isn't it amazing?
Look here to see if there's a Rube Goldberg Machine Contest near you.
Go here for more examples.
When everyone was thoroughly exhausted, we headed back down from the mountains, stopping for eggrolls at the supermarket deli for poor man's Chinese. My sons called me from school for a good chat. And I got to play on the computer and didn't have to help clean up the dinner dishes. Definitely all the makings for a wonderful day!
I hope everyone's Sunday was beautiful and blessed!
Can a Catholic, in good conscience, believe in ghosts?
Most of our experiences, though, have been Echo Ghosts, and I'll tell you about some of those here, if you want to pull up a good thunderstorm and tuck in with a cup of cocoa and join me...1. Signal Graces: Signs from God through either His direct intercession or those of His saints. (St. Anne, St. Philomena, and St. Theresa the Little Flower have been very generous with us in this way.)
2. Demonic Forces: Very real. Very scary. They can only become a part of our lives to the extent God permits it, so we can at least take comfort in that fact. (Praise God, we've only had a couple of fleeting scares on this front, and pray to never have more than that.)
3. Human Souls: Those can be of the condemned variety (rare, we believe), souls in Purgatory seeking our assistance in releasing them from their sins, and those who have gotten trapped between this life and the next. Of that latter group, we know that "it is appointed unto each man once to die and then the judgment," but we know precious little about the specifics of God's judgment for us and the anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that it's not as instantaneous (at least not according to our sense of time) as we would think. It's one to wonder about for sure.
4. Residual or "Echo" Ghosts: It seems that intense emotion, strong personalities and life-changing events can leave a mark on a place, causing a moment in time to repeat. These ghosts don't communicate or react in any way with us, but move about more like a record with a skip in it.
5. Wrinkles in Time: Sometimes a ghost can be interactive, but does not appear to have a spiritual agenda, either good or evil. It's a theory of ours that time doesn't always work the way humans expect it to. We know so little about it from God's perspective. Could it be possible that our time overlaps with another one sometimes, and unexplained voices and things we see exist in real time, but not our time? We can only guess.*Please understand these represent merely our theories, and do not reflect any teaching of the Church, whatsoever. We don't think they contradict any, either.
l roast cooking in the kitchen. One time we came in the kitchen and all the cabinets were open, and none of us had done it. My sister had an apartment in the basement of that house. One night, hearing all the tramping and noise of us coming home after an outing, she came up to say howdy. But, when she came upstairs, we weren't there and the doors were all locked.
In our circa 1898 home on the Western Slope, I would catch a girl sitting on the fifth step from the bottom of our staircase every so often. She was wearing a long peach-colored dress and had her elbows on her knees, her chin cupped in her hands. She looked miffed. I've always wondered what event that recorded. Did someone stand her up?
When we first moved into this house ~ the old farmhouse on the high prairies, I was surprised to wake up one morning to an old lady in a rocking chair sitting next to the window in my room. She was there for just an instant and disappeared. I prayed for her soul and never saw her again.
But the ghost we see the most often here at the farm is the young man in jeans and a cowboy hat. I catch him walking across the property fairly often. He's always outside.
My sister lived in a trailer on our property, just east of our house a few years ago. She's the member of the family who hears ghosts, while I tend more to see them. (Go figure that. We're an odd bunch, aren't we?) Anyway, Nina has told many stories of hearing people outside the trailer, when, after investigating, noone was there. (We live far from any other houses, the family was all accounted for indoors, and the animals ruled out, too.)
She was also the one who had someone sit on the end of her bed when she was sleeping in the old nursery in our last house (the one with the ghost mother in the white nightgown). She thought it was me or one of the kids coming in for some reason, and grabbed her glasses to see who was there. There was nobody there. Everyone else was sound asleep.
When we were getting ready to move back to the prairie from the Western Slope, my husband delivered a truckload of paraphernalia back to the old farm. While he was here, he took a walk-through of the house. He was alone, standing near the base of the stairs, when he heard something thundering down the stairs.
A priest once told us that it is likely that anything evil would bring with it a definite feeling of evil and fear ~ most especially if we are in the state of grace. So, never having felt an evil threat, we figure, to cover all bases when faced with a ghost, it's good to say a prayer for the soul, in case it's a member of the Church Suffering, looking for help from us. That's the best we can do. We don't worry about it much, otherwise. But they make for interesting conversation! Who doesn't love a chance to swap tales and spin theories? Especially now that it's thunderstorm season on the prairies...
