Odd coincidence

I have always felt drawn to the Carmelite hermits of Christoval, TX.  Not to join them or anything, but I appreciate them sitting out there in the middle of nowhere, pursuing their calling to sit out there in the middle of nowhere praying all day.

I also like to watch Big Love.

Little did I know there was a connection between the two.  Turns out that the FLDS compound (aka YFZ Ranch) in Eldorado, TX, is a neighbor of the Carmelite hermits, and the guy who keeps an eye on the YFZ Ranch at the Texas Polygamy blog is also a friend of the Carmelites.  His latest page of aerial photos of the YFZ Ranch also includes some pictures that show just how out in the middle of nowhere the hermits are.

Another CCD post

CCD finally resumed normal operations yesterday after about 5 straight weeks of special topics and/or weeks off due to Lent and Easter.  We’re in the home stretch for First Communion now — this was the next to last lesson.  We’ve got one more lesson next week and then a week of run-throughs at the church so everybody knows where they’re supposed to be and when.

We did our first bit of ‘practice’ communion in class.  Fr. Vic brought some unconsecrated hosts and I started walking the kids through the procedure for receiving communion.  It’s a good thing we did too.  Upon the first taste of the hosts there was a lot of squealing and giggling and complaining about how yucky it was and even several cases of the kids taking it back out of their mouths.  Things were a lot calmer the second time around and after class some of the kids were asking if they could have another one like it was a Dorito or something.

Video phone

I have a friend from Ireland who came over to visit us for a couple of weeks and while he was here he showed us his little ACN video phone.  It’s basically a netbook with a built in VOIP phone and webcam and a phone interface and keypad in place of a regular GUI and keyboard.

He was really jazzed about these phones, but I wasn’t that taken with the idea of seeing the person you’re talking to.  He brought his phone from Ireland with him so he could use it to call Ireland and people in Ireland could use it to call him.  For the most part the kids left it alone, and then a couple of days before he left our middle boy (4) decided the phone looked dirty and he would help out by cleaning it off.  He then proceeded to use a water pistol to squirt water all over it and that shorted out all the electrical stuff in it and it was dead as a doornail.

We were unable to revive the phone before he left to go back to Ireland.  We offered to buy him a new one and the deal we arrived at was that since he wanted to get one with a US number, he would sign up for a US one and we would pay for the phone and the initial setup.

The phone arrived at our house yesterday and I decided to set it up so that we could use it to call him in Ireland until we got it to him over there.  My opinion of the phone has gone up since using it, particularly with the setup.  It worked right out of the box without having to refer to the instructions.  I just plugged the Ethernet cable into the router and the power cable into the outlet and turned it on and after a few minutes of setting itself up it was ready to use.

When they say you need a broadband connection you really do.  If you’re in audio-only mode it works fine with crystal clear sound.  If the video is on that sucks up most of the bandwidth and unless you’ve got a really fat pipe it winds up looking like an old Japanese monster movie where the lips are out of sync with the voices (when you can hear the voices at all).  Our friend thought the bandwidth issues was on his end and he was going to call BT and see if there was something they could do before calling us back this afternoon our time.

Farming issues

My career as a farmer is off to a shaky start.  Varmints keep eating my strawberries just before they get ripe and the rain has beaten down the tops of all my onions.  Is this a problem?  (I know the strawberries are a problem, I’m just not sure about the onions)

Ay caramba

Stupid Internerts!  Where do I get my money back.

Did this show up on Facebook?

According to Facebook, you should be able to import feeds from other ’social networking’ sites such as Delicious, Flickr, and blogs.  So I went through that process and it imported a bunch of stuff right then, but now nothing seems to be showing up again.  Did this show up on Facebook?

So it sounds like their import functionality isn’t working right, or at least isn’t working the way I think it should work.  Based on the comments I have seen on those Facebook blog posts and on other sites around teh Internets I don’t think I’m the only one having this problem.

Flickr vs. Facebook

With the end of my Facebook moratorium approaching, I can’t decide what to do about posting snapshots.  Should I keep posting them to Flickr the way I do today and let Facebook read that RSS feed and post notifications, or should I post to Flickr and Facebook both, or should I be fully assimilated and let Facebook handle all my social networking needs directly from their site?

Updates

Just so people know what I’m thinking about during Lent:

Favorite cheese: Cashel Blue

Favorite chair: Poang

All’s quiet

So I’ve given up teh Internet for Lent.  Except I can’t do that because I need email for work and to communicate with the outside world.  So I have given up the WWW for Lent.  Except that I still use that to check the weather forecast and to check a couple of Lent related sites: Vultus Christi and the Lent section of Godzdogz.  And to post to my own blog.

So in the end what I have given up is Facebook, blogs, and Wikipedia.  Which account for about 90% of the time I spend on line.  I’m making up the newly freed time by reading Introduction to the Devout Life, How to Read a Book, Halting State, and Try and Make Me.

Chilly

One of the the things that happens when you have a drafty old house in the winter time is that all of the liquid soap type products change.  When it gets cold they all develop a consistency that is more like jam or jelly (or like napalm if you want to put it that way), especially early in the morning after the heater has been off all night.  The shampoo, the shower gel, the liquid hand soap by the sink.  Even the cooking spray oil is thicker.