Our Hearts Are Restless

For my own sake, I have decided that it is high time to pick up the pieces and post something cheerful on this blog!  2015 ended in a depressed slump, as a chaotic month of chasing my tail over freelance projects switched gears into mourning the loss of my grandmother.  2016 has potential to be quite interesting, as I begin my first-ever full year of "adulthood" (which is quite a relative term if you think about it.)  No more bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball between home and school; no repeat of 2015's school/graduation/job hunting/frantic moving/wait I'm an adult now-ing.  I hope. I'm looking at a year of 8-5 Monday-Friday work weeks, punctuated by the occasional holiday, weekends in Indy, and perhaps a few adventures here and there.  Happily, the benefit of an office job is that it gives me evenings and weekends to do (or choose to not do) stuff in.  Right now, that means balancing freelance commissions with a burgeoning social life.  ...

There's a reason I haven't written on here much over the past month.  I knew that I had to write about Granny - not just an abstract post like In the Shadow of Death - and I wasn't ready yet.  I can't write on this blog until I talk about her death, because it's a bit like falling off the horse.  She always read my blogging, even when she complained she didn't understand the words I was using.  When I was in Rome, she'd see my pictures and ask me questions about where I'd been and what I was doing.  For a while, my excuse was that I needed time to recover from the emotional drainage of the funeral.  In reality, it's hard for me to write knowing that my dedicated audience of one is gone.  Yet the last thing she'd want is for me to stop writing because of her. So for better or worse, this post is being written, because it's time for me to cry.  Please forgive the many writing errors I know will crop up. Sometimes, my brain tries to trick m...

I needed a clever way to give y’all an update on my life as an Anachronistic Millennial.  Thus was spawned In which I give you all the current “ings” of my life! Reading : A coworker lent me two fairly new books, which I have to admit is a little out of my usual style!  The first was The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why , a non-fiction study of disasters and how they affect the human mind. It was an absolutely fascinating work – the author, Amanda Ripley, delved into everything from psychology to physics.  The other was a recent Pulitzer Prize novel, All the Light We Cannot See .  This was occasionally a rough read, since it takes place during the traumatic times of World War II, and sometimes gets a bit graphic.  Not my favorite style—this new fad of first-person present tense can be irritating—but on the whole, the work was a well-woven series of vignettes with a feel of realism. Watching: One of my coworkers had ...

Over at Will Write for Tomato Pie, Erin has kindly invited me to write a guest post - so go read about my "Word Addiction!"

Hello y'all!  I'm absurdly excited about my first post over at CatholicMom.  Click on the pic and check it out!

While thinking about adjectives tonight (more on that later) I decided to find an online word-cloud generator.  I popped over to WordItOut, and copied out all the adjectives from a section of the first chapter of Lord of the Rings.  Couldn't do the whole thing, although I have ambitions.  But, just for fun, here's a word-cloud of Tolkien's adjectives.  The size is randomly generated, not based on repetition.  Some things about the randomness amuse me - "enormous" is in the smallest font, but "grey" is grey-colored, though "dark" is printed in white. Oh and by the way...yes, I'm a nerd!

How many books are on your "I've been meaning to read that" list?  This one has been at the top of my list for at least a year, and it took me until this week.  Luckily, I'd packed it in my emergency reading kit! The Watson Chronicles by Ann Lewis "Holmes turned the platter, inspecting the plum pudding as he would a cadaver at a crime scene." It's challenge enough for a writer to find his or her own voice; it's even harder for an author to match her voice to another's.  Especially when you get into the nerdy world of Sherlock Holmes fans, which is a cult with an obsession rivaling that of Trekkies. In The Watson Chronicles , sequel to her earlier work Murder in the Vatican , Ann succeeds in matching style and voice to Arthur Conan Doyle's originals, while bringing a fresh perspective to the beloved character of Watson. Perhaps my best part of The Watson Chronicles  is Ann's ability to reach past Sherlock's ven...

Sometimes at adoration, I pray by writing to Jesus. It helps me focus on speaking to him rather than trying to control my thoughts as they wander all over creation.  I thought I'd share with you what I wrote this First Friday - it's just stream of consciousness but sort of the Ignatian method, where you put yourself into the Gospel scene and try to imagine it and talk to Jesus.  Here goes: "Could you not watch one hour with me?" I'm kneeling beside him in the garden, watching him wracked with grief and pain. His body tense, shaking, next to me. Tears from my so - powerful king. And the sweat of blood - it scares me, but I dare not interrupt his thoughts to ask if he's alright, if he needs anything.  "Father..." the cry of a son, full of love and pain and pleading. Father...I cry out too, begging that he be saved from whatever is tormenting him so terribly. The wind rustles the trees but the night is still. I dare not leave him to wake John or one o...