Some Saturday stuff- April 13th.

Zoe plays Vanna White by displaying my two new book purchases.

After gettiing some positive feedback from last week’s Saturday stuff post, I figured I’d do it again today. Funny how totally different my mood is this Saturday, though. While last week I woke up in a mood to do yoga, I’m totally in a lazy, I feel like vegging out mood today. I just got back from Dunkin Donuts and got a big iced chocolate minty coffee and some munchkins for the Munchkin. I also went by CVS and picked up some sorely needed hair products. Now that Zoe has a full head of hair, leave-in conditioners really go quickly around here. Before hitting up the “Relaxed & Natural” aisle, I stopped and plopped a bright orangey-red tube of lipstick and an equally vibrant bottle of nail polish in my basket. Different for me, but so Joscelyne, and God, I miss that girl.

Jos loved to play with color, including bright blue eyeshadow.

So on tap for the day, using those hair and beauty products (getting my home salon on), and starting to read “Life After Art” by Matt Appling, whose blog, “The Church of No People” is a definite must-read. Besides blogging, Matt is a husband, minister and an art teacher. Once I finish, I’ll let you know what I think. Check out the trailer:

I also purchased Rod Dreher’s “The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.” Just reading excerpts from the book has brought tears to my eyes. In a piece for the Dallas Morning News, he writes:

The first thing Ruthie Leming told her children after they learned she had lung cancer was this: “Girls, we are not going to be mad at God.”

That was not only an order from a mother to her young daughters gathered around her hospital bed, but an article of faith on which my sister built her fight against the disease that ultimately claimed her life.

Ruthie, only 40 at the time of her 2010 diagnosis, had every reason to be mad at God. She had never smoked and had taken good care of her body. Yet, she was one of the vanishingly small number of young nonsmoking women who contract lung cancer.

She could have raged at the unfairness of it all or lost herself in despair. Nobody would have blamed her; in fact, many of those closest to her did just that, at least when she couldn’t see us.

Instead, she kept her calm, her hope and her good cheer, even when everyone and everything around her was falling apart. “We just don’t know what God’s going to do here,” she would say. She meant it, too.

…

 

Before she fell ill, Ruthie was a small-town Louisiana schoolteacher, a wife and mother, and a faithful member of the Methodist church in which she had been raised. Hers was a simple faith, one that could be summed up like this: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

 

That was all she knew. That was all she wanted to know. In the end, that was all she needed to know.

Of course, I’ll share my thoughts on this book later, too.

If you’re up for some reading, do check out this Atlantic.com story on the butcher abortionist Kermit Gosnell. While I’ve known about the story for a while, most people don’t. I hate the overused phrase “mainstream media”, but it does seem to be a MSM blackout on the story. I think my knowledge of it rests solely on locale. I live not only less than 90 minutes from the monster’s death mill, but I also have a good friend who lived just a couple blocks away. He made sure to let people know of the atrocities that had occurred right in his backyard. Fair warning, though, that Atlantic story contains a pictures of an aborted baby girl. It’s highly disturbing.

Now for a strong pivot to a story not so upsetting, did you know that the apples in your local grocery store is probably a year old? I didn’t, either, but I’m not really surprised. Goodness, it’s getting to the point I’m going to feel compelled to only buy fruits and veggies at little farmer’s markets. At least they’ll be popping up as the weather warms.

And because I still have last week’s “Community” episode stuck in my head, Sophie B. Hawkins, take it away.