On our short trip to Chicago, I managed to get to the Lincoln Park Zoo with the sketch book and the camera. I had in mind that I would sketch more and photograph less, but the animals didn’t cooperate much with that plan. All the same, I managed to get a couple goodies. Even slightly […]

I’m getting ready for the weekend services, and I see that the saint of the day will be “Hieromartyr Gregory the Bishop of Greater Armenia, Equal of the Apostles and Enlightener of Armenia.”
We’ll be hearing this hymn at Orthros tomorrow:
Seeing a dreadful spectacle, the unbelievers were amazed; for him whom they had believed dead in […]

Winning the prize for longest movie title of the year (I think), we have “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” just coming out in theaters. I admit I’m a little intrigued with this one. There have been 11 other movies about Jesse James, and the sad fact is that the 1966 […]

Besides being the leavetaking of the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross, I saw that we’d be chanting a lot about the Great-Martyr Euphemia, and so I looked her up at the OCA Website (which is the best resource of online hagiographies I’ve found, BTW). She was persecuted, tortured and martyred in 305 AD […]

By the way, in case anyone is wondering why all of the sudden I’ve started having bulky images in every post, … apologies. My job as a graphic artist usually allows me the ability to drain off some creative juices and then I don’t have to start thinking I need to illustrate every shopping list […]

Happened across this story via Yahoo news, and I pass it along because it seems like a really good opportunity to use the internet for a godly purpose for once: allowing the citizens of the “wealthy” nations to directly help better the lot of the citizens of “poor” nations. I can’t call it almsgiving exactly: […]

With happiness still on my mind, a line from “My Life in Christ” jumped out at me:
The degrees of beatitude and torment in the next world will be different [for each person]. This is proved by the present state of the souls of different people or of the same man at different times under different […]

While deleting more of the stupid spam e-mail that I get, it occurred to me that there’s even more reason for people over 25 to feel convicted by this recent study. Remember that when these kids 13-24 were polled and asked what made them happy, they rarely said “money” or “sex.”
But if spam is any […]

Looks like I’ve got some weird issue with the sidebars right now. Well, I won’t be able to get my IT department (my husband) to look at it for a bit, so … hang in there and think good thoughts about the joys of technology. Sorry about the inconvenience.

… and it’s not MTV, according to a recent survey. Thank goodness their audience has a lot more brains than MTV gives them credit for.
NEW YORK - So you’re between the ages of 13 and 24. What makes you happy? A worried, weary parent might imagine the answer to sound something like this: Sex, drugs, […]