Eclectic Amateur

Amy Welborn is blogging some good stuff on family size (archive link is currently messed up, Amy). She also points to Greg Popcak on “Integral Procreation”.

This makes sense to me. I really love my kids. Children are an incredible gift and blessing. That said, I’m pretty sure I don’t have the fortitude (not to mention patience, prudence, wisdom, and other virtues) to deal with any more blessing right now. Or if I could grow the sufficient amount in less than nine months.

My lawn is dying.

This is not such a big deal in and of itself. (Blasphemer! shouts the spirit of Suburban Man™.) It’s just some plants, after all. Not big stuff on the Cosmic scale. But it’s the reason that it’s dying that has me ticked off today.

You see, it’s dying because we haven’t had any rain in a while, and I haven’t been running up my water bill by watering it religiously to golf-course-like greenness. The lack of rain shouldn’t be such a big deal — that’s pretty common in July. At least, it wouldn’t be a big deal if there were actually any topsoil there to hold moisture, rathern than just sandy subsoil.

You see, it’s been standard practice for I-don’t-know-how long for developers to start converting farmland to a new subdivision by bulldozing away all the topsoil first. That way, they can sell it back by the cubic yard to homeowners who actually want to be able to grow anything.

I used to blame some mysterious Suburban Ethic™ for the fact that everyone seeems to water contstantly to keep their lawns green. The SE does exist, but I see now that it’s also a practical thing. Fail to water, watch your lawn brown back and die off. (Yes, I know that grass goes dormant. This is beyound dormant.)

To add insult to injury, we’re on watering restrictions. The explosion of subdivisions has severely strained the water system, which can’t support these untold gallons being brought almost a hundred miles from the Detroit River to be dumped into the lawns of a hundred Washtenaw (and Wayne and Oakland) County subs.

Now, I grew up on farms. We always had acres of grass (I know, I had to mow it). We never watered our grass. It browned, but it was never in danger of actually dying and needing reseeding. Nancy is from older neighborhoods in Detroit and Livonia; she never saw such a thing either.

So our water shortage is not just the human vanity of homeowners, but the corporate greed of a generation of developers. Because, if they just left the topsoil where it was, the soil would work to retain water, and lots of this watering would be unnecessary.

“Art? Never met the man.”

When Mark said modern art is crap, I didn’t think he really meant that crap is modern art.

(*sigh*)

And Dr. Bill back in college wondered why I couldn’t take modern “art” seriously, after having been introduced to Giotto, Fra Angelico, Michaelangelo, and the Dutch masters. “Zach, it’s almost like you think it’s just some sort of scam pulled over on the public.” Yeah, that about nails it.

Freeswimmingness achieved again. This time, it looks like we can absolve mom and dad — some of them are getting sucked into the filter. Time to look into an alternate filter.

Yet again, lost the last batch (are mom and dad snacking on them? It seems likely). New batch hatched this morning — I almost saw it, I must have missed them by about five minutes.

I couldn’t resist commenting on Mark’s noticing protesters about trained chickens. And indulging in a moment of schadenfreude in learning via Google that Buckey Egg Farm owner might be jailed for contempt — although further reading indicates jail time probably won’t happen for this scoundrel.

In the unsung heroes department, find Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. What this man managed to do with a mere handful of troops and no support in World War I is simply astounding. Even more astounding is the respect he kept from his African troops and his British foes after the Great War (when he was destitute after a failed political career, it was British soldiers who collected money to provide him a pension).

Karen Marie Knapp, who saw much more of the Bishop’s conference than I could hear, tells me that when the motion (for episcopal penance) was reintroduced, that the bishops did agree to a day of fasting and abstinence in reparation for their faults and set the date as August 14.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re doing that much. But do the math, this is 1/270th of the nine months of penance that Abp. Flores proposed.

While I’m not a moral theologian, and I don’t know how to quantify penance, it seems to me that a single day of fasting fails to address the gravity of the bishops’ failure and complicity in this terrible scandal.

… is my basic thought in listening to the EWTN coverage. With the exception of a few glimmers of light struggling to break out here and there, it seemed depressingly political and non-spiritual. (Yes, I know, everything should be done “decently and in good order”, but one would hope that the successors to the Apostles ought to know that parliamentary procedure is a servant, not a master.)

Most inspiring moment: the bishop (Abp. Flores?) who rose up and called the entire body of bishops to remember that this is not just a matter of poorly-coordinated policies, but that this is sin that has offended and pained Jesus greatly, like unto his Passion. And called the bishops to enter a nine-month period of pennance, with holy hours and fasting and prayers, to begin to make things right.

Most depressing moment: Although this proposal received an immediate second, it was not part of the approved agenda, and was therefore tabled. Discussion then turned immediately to the utterly mundane and administrative matter of the division of once province into two.

(OK, so the justification of this is that they needed to get the provinces in administrative order so that some lay oversight board with representation by province could then be filled ASAP. Still. It shouts to the world, to anyone with ears to hear, that most of the bishops Just Don’t Get It™.)

Anne Wilson notes a Washington Post article on “alingual” children.

All I can say is: God have mercy.

No, I can say one more thing: this is not limited to children of immigrants. I have witnessed this myself. The Children of Television are not all the children of immigrants.

I cannot comprehend this. I feel like I spend so little time talking with my children, yet the numbers show that I’m actually way ahead of the national curve, and they are all wonderfully expressive and verbal. (Giving us the “problem” of getting them to stop talking sometimes …)