Friday, September 25, 2020

A perpetual novena? And misadventures with Zoom...

Hello all, and I hope that your week is wrapping up nicely. 🤗 I feel stressed, no big surprise, but hanging in. Things at both schools are still going well, and I guess (?) I've adjusted to working from home. It helps not having the kids here to entertain at the same time, to be sure. But the other side of the coin is that I'm lonely. I like going to my office, and seeing my colleagues. I miss them, and I miss the students. But we've been told to be prepared to not be back on campus for another year. I have to admit that I didn't take that news so well. I've felt down all week. This is all just so unnatural. I'm doing the best I can.

To top it all off, I started my teaching this week, and this year it's all on Zoom. Nothing like demoralizing bouts of screenshare fails and non-responsive audio to make a girl feel special. :-0 I did not enjoy it, to be sure. I will say that the second class went much better than the first. I got the sound issue fixed, and I experimented more with the screensharing ahead of time to troubleshoot the problems I was having and became much more adept with it. It still feels weird to only communicate with people through a screen, but it was a bit less bad. For now, I think that's as good as it's going to get.

To cheer me, I've been novena'ing up a storm. My piece over at Catholic Mom this month is about potential novenas for fall/winter 2020 (feast days that don't fall on Sundays being my criteria), and I'm pretty much planning to start a new one anytime I finish one up. I'm currently praying the St. Jerome novena, and I ended up adding in the archangels. I have the Pray novena app on my phone, and it sent me a notification about that one, so I figured, what the heck? It pushes the prayers to me every day, so it makes that one incredibly easy. If you do not already have that app, I highly recommend it! After we wrap up St. Jerome/archangels, I will be wanting to start a new one. I'll let you know which one I decide on! If you have a recommendation for early October, please let me know!

 I wanted to pray the St. Therese novena, and maybe *start* on her feast day rather than conclude on it. Thoughts? Or maybe we could select another from the list. Let me know what you think, along with how you're doing, in the comments!

Friday, September 18, 2020

St. Jerome novena starts Monday! And a few other prayerful life musings...

 


Hello friends and happy Friday! I'm so excited that we're starting our first community novena of the fall/winter season this year with St. Jerome on Monday! All of the deets and prayers are in the special page that I created for the novena, also linked at the top of the blog (desktop) or as an option on the drop down menu (mobile). St. Jerome is the patron saint of librarians and biblical scholars, and is also a great patron for students. If you have any special intentions that you would like the community to pray for, please leave them in the comments! :-)

For my part, I've been doing a lot of praying for my kids as their first full week of school wraps up. So far so good, but it's early days yet, for sure. Anne, in particular, seems SO HAPPY to be back to school, and she really loves her teacher and classroom this year. I don't even know how she's in 4th grade, as she still seems like my little baby to me. 😢 But during the spring and summer after everything shut down, I have never seen Anne so distressed and downright lethargic. And for a 9 year old, that is very worrying. Now, she gets up in the mornings very content and ready to get on with her day, whereas before she was sleeping way too much, and just languishing on the couch in her free time. With both Mike and I working from home, it was difficult to divide our time between attending to those reponsibilities, and also trying to keep the kids engaged and off of their electronic devices. It was such a nightmare, it's hard for me to even think back on it now. Needless to say, I'm so happy to see her thriving again! And Henry seems content, too, albeit in a quieter way, as teenagers are wont to do. He had an easier time adjusting to remote school back in the spring, as would be expected given the difference in their ages. But still, he's up and ready to head to school in the mornings now, in a good mood. It's heartwarming to see. 

In other big news, I am back to IN PERSON dance class again, after 6 months of online only, and I cannot fully express how good it feels. I'm grateful that I got to continue my training and learning in the midst of the nightmare that was the lockdown, plus I got to study with some internationally known instructors that I normally would not have been able to access due to geographic location. So those things were good, but still, it was *not the same* and there can be no meaningful level of correction in a group online-only setting. Not to mention how much I missed my troupemates and dancey friends. The disruption to normal socializing that this virus has wrought has been brutal for my mental and emotional health, as I'm sure it has for everyone. So I'm very, very happy to be getting back into a dance routine that involves rehearsing in the physical studio! 

Performing is still pretty unknown right now, which is an enormous bummer. As I've gotten older, I have come to treasure performing as an important part of my identity. I've been in some online shows, and while I'm SO grateful for those opportunities, those are also not the same as performing in front of a live audience. There is no energy to feed off of, no connection to make with other humans while you dance. I'm hoping small parties will be happening again soon, but the restaurant scene has just been hit so hard by all of this, I don't know when that will come back. The capacity limits plus the money they have lost make that unlikely for quite some time. We'll see, I suppose, I'm just trying to think positive. And we support our local restaurants with takeout orders every single week!

How is everyone else doing this week? It does actually feel like a new leaf is turning over this fall, yes, even in the midst of our larger global situation. What new things are you embarking on this September? :-) And don't forget to leave prayer intentions in the comments! 

Friday, September 11, 2020

Planning seasonal novenas...

Well, my kids are both at school as I write this. And I'm feeling pretty weepy. 

😭

They're both happy and secure. It's going very well. I was afraid that the adjustment this year would be much more daunting than usual because of the way things so abruptly closed back in March. But this is the best start to the school year we have ever had. Both seem happy to be back to a routine, and like their teachers. One day at a time, but I'll take it. I'm still feeling emotional, but that's just me. :-0

Given all of this, our novena chat (that I mentioned last week) couldn't possibly be better timed. 

   

What I'm going to do this year is pray 1-2 novenas every month this fall and winter. I'm going to start listing them in a separate page on the blog again, so that anyone who would like can see which one I'm planning to pray, and can join in if they like! It will be the tab listed on the far right if you're using a larger computer or laptop, or will be the last item on the drop down menu list via mobile. For September, I am planning to pray the St. Jerome novena. This will begin on Monday September 21st, and finish up on his feast day of September 30th. St. Jerome is the patron saint of librarians, biblical scholars and students! All of the information and prayers will be up on the St. Jerome page.


After we finsh that one, I think I will pray the St. Therese novena, beginning *on* her feast day of October 1st, to break things up a bit. ;-) And I'll post a new page with her information on it as soon as we finish up St. Jerome! Sound like a plan?

Are you joining in the St. Jerome novena? Or have other novena plans this fall? I'd love to hear about them!

Friday, September 4, 2020

A reading list as we head into Labor Day weekend...

Happy early September all, and somehow we are moving into the weekend that heralds the unofficial end of summer. I will grant, this was the most emotionally exhausting summer of my life, and I'm thinking you all feel the same. I will admit to feeling a bit discouraged at this time. I'm trying not to dwell on it too much because there is literally nothing I can do about it that I'm not already doing. And getting myself re-upset is not helping me or anybody else. So I'm trying. 

I've been reading more, and as a librarian and lifetime lover of books, I realized how much I had gotten away from it since the pandemic started, yet how valuable it is for my mental health. It's like my brain has a harder time shutting real life down now so that I can escape to my happy cozy fiction worlds. I've been making more of an effort to do that, and keeping up with these little reading lists here on the blog is motivating me to keep moving through my Kindle queue (which is CONSIDERABLE :-0). 

So this week I finished Botched Butterscotch (which was a novella, so super short! Very cute too, involved a theft, not a murder), and embarked on the next book in the series (the newest installment!), which is Marshmallow Malice:


Caught in a sticky situation . . . 

With Juliet Brody and Reverend Brook tying the knot in Ohio’s Amish Country’s most anticipated nuptials of the year, Bailey King is determined to do everything in her power to make the event a sweet success. Except midsummer heat waves and outdoor ceremonies don’t mix, and an exasperated Bailey soon finds herself struggling to fulfill bridesmaid duties and keep her stunning marshmallow-frosted wedding cake from becoming a gooey disaster. Then much to everyone’s shock, the entire ceremony crumbles when a guest drops dead, and the cause isn’t sunstroke . . . 

Turns out, the uninvited victim came equipped with lots of dirt on the devout reverend’s hidden past. As Reverend Brook tops the murder suspect list on what should have been the happiest day of his life, Bailey and her sheriff’s deputy boyfriend vow to clear his name. Can the duo boil down a series of baffling clues before Juliet considers her marriage a bad mistake—or the killer whips up another deadly surprise? 

Recipe Included!

This book is just delightful. I love the setting and the characters. I'm already about 25% of the way through! 

Also this week, I have a new download, which is Grilled for Murder (a Country Store Mystery)


Robbie Jordan may have had reservations about the murder victim, but she still needs to turn up the heat on a killer if she wants to keep her new restaurant open for business . . .

In the charming small town of South Lick, Indiana, Robbie has transformed a rundown country store into the runaway hit Pans ’N Pancakes. But the most popular destination for miles around can also invite trouble. Erica Shermer may be the widow of handsome local lawyer Jim Shermer’s brother, but she doesn’t appear to be in mourning. At a homecoming party held in Robbie’s store, Erica is alternately obnoxious and flirtatious—even batting her eyelashes at Jim. When Erica turns up dead in the store the next morning, apparently clobbered with cookware, the police suspect Robbie’s friend Phil, who closed up after the party. To clear Phil and calm her customers, Robbie needs to step out from behind the counter and find the real killer in short order . . .

This is just $1.99 right now for Kindle, and I found out about it via the Kindle Daily Deals newsletter, so if you're not signed up for those already, you may want to consider doing so. ;-) I love finding new books for less than $2!

Are you reading anything new this week? Have any plans for Labor Day weekend? I'm planning to plot our fall community novenas next week, so stay tuned for next Friday's post on that topic! :-)