I am flexing some essay-writing muscles I haven’t had to use for 30+ years, and this as part of the admissions process. I still have the first reading assignments hovering before me.

We attended the first formal meeting last night in the diaconate formation program. It was great to meet the other men and their wives. Also got a chance to mingle with a class-in-progress and get some of their reflections and reactions. The next few years are going to be really, really interesting. Very excited.

Jumping spiders - new phone does pretty well with macro stuff

Amazing bit of music here: Voodoo Child on a clavinet with a whammy bar. As described! (h/t Metafilter).

We’ve welded together Loki and Lovecraft Country over here. Don’t try to change our minds, it’s too late.

Sunset cumulus, adjusted slightly

📷

Poolside reading

As usual, I overthought this completely.

curl https://micro.blog/micropub -d “h=entry” -d @yourblogpost.md -H “Authorization: Bearer BIGNUMBERHERE”

…does the trick, which is push yourblogpost.md to micro.blog. That will teach me to check the local docs first before ranging all over the Internet. I could conceivably use vim to write a post and then dump the buffer into a simple shellscript containing the curl bits above.

The folks here have made generating auth bearer tokens (BIGNUMBERHERE) a snap, so no need to dig through the Indieweb docs, hack up someone else’s xmlrpc code, or otherwise break a sweat.

For clarity - I’ve been happy with the iOS apps (micro.blog and sunlit), and tend to favor quill.pk3.io for posting. The console nerd in me loves a good old text-only interface.

Is anyone posting to micro.blog with a text editor or IDE-type tool? Before migrating, I used a markdown editor in vscode and pushed updates via git. I sometimes miss the all-cli experience and have been digging around for similar tools. Nothing is jumping out at me so far, though.

Re-reading: The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, OP 📚

I've been slowly working my way through The Ascent of Mount Carmel and have been turning over a point St. John of the Cross made about things-in-the-world and how none of them are suitable (or sufficient) for drawing an individual into closer union with God. It was almost an aside, and simple enough to follow: the means must be suited to the end that is sought. He uses a couple of examples - only one road leads to a city, so departing from it necessarily means that the traveler does not reach the destination. A piece of wood is set afire by gradually increasing heat. Since there's nothing in-the-world like God (or even close to Him), we should seek detachment or risk being pulled away. 

Something about this passage has been turning over in my head for a couple of days now. On the one hand, the point is well taken. Detachment from the world certainly seems like a necessity. As fallen creatures we're too easily captured by the shiny or pointy things that ramp our passions, good and bad. Detachment is something I've been working on for awhile and even with my built-in reluctance, the efforts have begun to bear some fruit. So, detachment, check. I get it.

The Incarnation complicates things for me a bit, as do the sacraments. Our Lord came into the world. Matter, created by Him, is good. He uses matter to impart grace via the sacraments. He is truly present - body and blood, soul and divinity - in the Eucharist. This means He's in the world. I imagine that the Mystical Doctor is teaching us the difference between adoring water and the One who hallowed it. It does seem a bit all-or-nothing to me though - certainly the created world around us contains a sort of proto-catechesis or the seeds of what C.S. Lewis, referring to fairy stories, called a baptism of the imagination. Surely the world leads us to Him, for how could it do otherwise?

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Or as likely, I'm not reading enough. It stuck with me though and returns periodically for a re-think, even as I've proceeded well past it in the book. Perhaps some detachment is called for!

It’s Sunday, which means something is going on the grill. Today that thing is paella. We use a grilled paella recipe from The Splendid Table and it hasn’t disappointed yet. Good for a crowd, too.

And one more for good measure (with extra bonus kit)

Re-post of some fox pics that were gumming up my blog’s feed - I took these earlier this summer, and just in time too! Our son-in-law came out the next day with some pro kit but they’d seemed to have moved on in the interim. At least one is still hanging around, I think. The dog is still going bananas occasionally and I’m still finding scat in strange, prominent places which is how foxes typically mark their territories.

I have a .edu e-mail address again after 30 years. Also a Moodle account! And the syllabus for my first class!

Right on time, I had a tornado dream. These generally recur during big periods of change. Yep.

Currently reading: Agency by William Gibson 📚

Wild blackberries are coming in strong. We picked a bunch the other day and turned them into muffins. They were very, very good! Just sent the kids out to get some more.

What fun! Thanks, @jean!!

Necessity being the mother of invention and all that, I fired up rtl_433 and a couple of really dirty shell scripts so that I can keep track of what’s going on with the smoker while I’m away from the house.

Currently reading: The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (includes The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle, The Living Flame of Love, Letters, and The Minor Works) by Saint John of the Cross 📚

Someone posted a Spotify playlist that neatly approximates the big AOR station of my Atlanta youth/adolescence. I’ve got that going in the background while the grill’s fired up again. Styx, beer, and barbecue smoke make for a pretty good combination.

These just went on the grill - dry brined overnight, then covered in an apricot glaze. I’m using apple wood to smoke them and the whole mess will wind up in tacos when they’re done. It smells ridiculously good even now.

Finished Zinn and am still trudging through Gramsci. It's dense to say the least, and I can't say I'm getting a whole lot out of it right now. So much of it (so far) is deeply situated in the Italian politics of the time. In any event, this will close out this period of politics and I'll be glad to switch back into spiritual reading (Saint John of the Cross), renewed efforts at regular lectio and so on.

I've been listening to a lot of retrowave via Spotify lately. It works well as background music while I'm working and scratches a deeply nostalgic itch. If you're not familiar, it's electronic music made today, but made to sound like it was made in the mid-to-late-1980s and 90's. A slightly creepier alternative, mallwave, can best be described as the music you might hear in...well, a dead mall: the lo-fi upbeat Muzak-pop-simulacra that you might hear crossing an atrium on your way to the Orange Julius.

Having reached Midsummer, I can report that the garden still seems to be doing well. The squash bugs finally arrived and now it's game of attrition to remove the little egg clusters as I find them. When I find the adults, I pick them off and feed them to the chickens, which is extremely satisfying. When the squash is done, I'll nuke that bed and we'll put something else there. Maybe spinach and mesclun mix. The cukes are booming and the tomatoes are starting to blush. The companion-planting is also coming along, though I think that planting it sooner would have given it a better head start in terms of rain. The hot peppers we direct-sowed also came up nicely. No blooms yet, but the heat is definitely agreeing with them.