Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner
If you walk into our church for liturgy any given Sunday, you will observe that about 1/3 of the women are wearing some form of head covering, which I will refer to as a veil for convenience. If you arrive during matins, the number is probably a bit higher, but likely remains less than 1/2. This is the highest percentage of veiled women at any church that I have personally ever attended, but I am given to understand that there are churches in the US where the percentage is much higher.
Why are so many women today feminists? Because their fathers were.
I recently read a Twitter thread by Free Northerner that started in reply to this tweet:
Here is the text of what Free Northerner wrote:
There are different ways to consider progress and success.
3 years ago I was debt-free, had enough savings to live comfortably for about 6 months, and was giving away approximately 1/4 of my income to charity. I worked out regularly, could bench press 405 for 2 reps, and could run a mile in 6 minutes 10 seconds (I never was able to break the 6 minute mark). I also wrote regularly, with some of the writing being posted here.
With a lot going on the past two months, I neglected to post at the end of September. I’m going to gloss over less interesting purchases (do you really want to know each time I buy more chicken feed?) in the interest of actually getting this done. My first project for September was cleaning out my garage. I have a single-car garage, and I had used it for several building projects. It had been a few months since I had parked in the garage, so I cleaned it out, organized it, and started parking in it again.
All through September and October, my wife has been canning. We got a free pressure canner the first week of September, and she later got over 100 free canning jars. I had purchased 2 dozen jars before that point, but with a few more boxes of lids, she went to town canning pickles, green beans, applesauce, apple butter, etc. I bought the wife a Foley Food Mill for the applesauce at the beginning of September, and around the beginning of October, she got a Victorio for free from my grandparents.
The next major project, around the second week of September, was felling a dying Black Spruce in the backyard, limbing the trunk, and burning the branches. I bought a beam cutter to use with my chainsaw, and I intend to square off the trunk with it, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. I also, with the help of my father and two of my brothers, pruned the maple in the front yard, which hasn’t been pruned for at least 30 years. We took out a number of 6-8″ diameter branches, and some larger. I still have to buck up a number of those logs, and split the larger ones, but all the small limbs have been burned.
I bought 100 landscape pavers off of Facebook, and built a flower garden along the front of the house with them. I filled the flower garden with compost, dog droppings, and grass clippings, and then topped it off with about 8″ of wood chips that I got for free. I got 8 railroad ties for free off Craigslist (and transported them 30 miles in my sedan) and with some lag bolts from the hardware store, secured them together to make a large square flower garden around the Maple in the front yard. This was placed so that I no longer hit roots with the lawnmower when I mow. Like the other flower garden, I filled it with grass trimmings, dog droppings, compost, and wood chips.
Between September and October I spent a large amount on icons, incense, charcoal, candles, candlesticks, an incense burner, etc. We now have a functional prayer corner with supplies to last a while, and icons over our beds.
As the weather cooled off in September, I bought 6 yards of flannel for my wife to make a dress (or 2) with, and 2 pairs of fleece-lined pants for myself.
Somewhere around mid-September, I re-did the nursery. I painted the entire room, the trim, and the heat register. I also replaced all the outlets with “child safe” ones.
My final project for September was to pressure wash my front porch. In October I put the first coat of new paint on it, but sadly, it remains unfinished.
October 1st we picked up a puppy, a then-8-week-old Great Pyrenees mix that has doubled in size in the month we’ve had him. It was the same day that we got the Victorio from my grandparents, and though we didn’t get the dog from them, we did get a wire cage from them for free, as well as a nice oil lamp.
We were at my grandparents specifically to help with projects there, and I kept my chainsaw running all day clearing out trees my grandpa wanted removed. I came back later in the month to finish cutting down trees and to get started on burning brush. In fact, I bought a new bar and 2 more chains just to keep up with this project.
I bought a few new Henleys and flannels as the weather got colder, and a nice blaze orange jacket from Vinnie’s hunting sale.
And then all projects came to crashing halt the 3rd and 4th week of October, as I was working 80 hour weeks and had no time for anything. Thank God, that time is past, and hopefully I can soon wrap up the unfinished projects outside before snow flies (or at least before it starts sticking).
Yesterday morning, while browsing the free listings on craigslist, I saw an ad for free woodchips. I opened it and saw it was an ad for a website called ChipDrop where you can sign up to receive free woodchips from local tree service companies. As I read more about it, I saw that you can list any and all species you will not accept, choose whether or not you will accept logs in addition to chips, and that you are guaranteed to receive only one delivery per request (rather than coming home to discover 8 deliveries in your absence), and that the woodchips are guaranteed to be no more than 2 days old.
My first project completed in August was mulching the trees and lilacs I planted earlier in the summer, and putting ashes around the spruces. 2 of the 10 spruces died, but thankfully it was the ones at either end of the line, so they are all still evenly spaced. At St. Vincent’s, I found a well-built older, wooden child-size rocking chair, which I bought for my son at a cost of $12.
On my list of major purchases to make for quite awhile has been some sort of pantry for my wife’s kitchen. I found an old entertainment center on the side of the road, and it has become our new pantry. I spent $7 on a bottle of Old English scratch cover, and $50 on two galvanized steel buckets that each hold 50lbs of flour and fit nicely in the bottom of the pantry. While I was at the hardware store for the buckets, I also bought a flyswatter for $2 and a new dustpan for $8.
The simplest project I completed this month was to mount my .22 caliber pellet rifle above the door from the kitchen to the back porch. This was in order to make it handy for shooting the rabbits that have been decimating my tomato plants. I went to Ace Hardware and bought 2 brass coat/hat hooks for a total of $10, and mounted them above the door. This has made it much easier to grab the pellet rifle when there is a rabbit in the garden.
Another project had to do with the chickens. We were steadily losing chickens–always during the day–with no sign of what was taking them. I bought some light plastic netting at True Value for a total of $55 and covered the entire pen. A few days later, I saw a black cat outside the pen, apparently foiled by the netting. I shot it with the pellet gun, and we haven’t lost a chicken since.
When I originally fenced the chicken pen, I used free welded wire fencing given to me by a friend that had moved. But at the chickens have grown, the space became insufficient, and too-heavy traffic meant that the grass was being destroyed. So when my wife saw several rolls of welded wire fencing and a dozen or so metal stakes on a Facebook buy/sell group for $35, I told her to get it. Using the new fencing, I came close to doubling the area the chickens can roam. Finally, I spent another $16 on another 50 lb bag of chick feed.
