shrift wins at weekend!!

Beats the heck out of mine.

Congratulations on the new baby Jessica! He looks perfect. I hope you are doing well and that your husband enjoyed his first Father's Day.

shrift wins at weekend!!

And the coffee was fab, and the BACON. And my foot eventually stopped trying to kill me. I think. I hope?

It wasn't the best weekend ever, but I've had worse.

My dad loved his bacon chocolate present. He hasn't eaten it yet, I think because if he'd opened it, people would have insisted that he share. i'd actually bought another one so that we could all try it, but he still didn't want to open his :)

A woman has been telling my coworker the heartwrenching story of her abusive marriage and the violence perpetuated against her children. For about 20 minutes.

I'm ready to either leave the building or commit seppuku on the sharp edge of my own overactive empathy.

Hi, y'all! I am SO GLAD I took today off work! I got home from Vegas last night at like 11:30, didn't go to bed right away, and am now lounging. I need to do some errands, including going to the Post Office, although I have no idea what was sent to me. Hmm.

Hooray for Dylan MoonBone!!

And boo for bad hospital experiences.

A Wired photo-essay on steampunk: [link]

Remember that steampunk keyboard? It's here - along with a beautiful monitor and mouse (that looks like a telegraph key). But perhaps even cooler is the steampunk laptop: Closed. Open.

Also, a fully-functional computer based on the ones in the movie Brazil [link] And,

What could be more absurdly great than a spot-on reproduction of an old telegraph sounder that taps out web headlines from RSS feeds? How about one made of lightweight aluminum for airship duty? Both are the bench work of Jake von Slatt. The sounder pictured is based on traditional designs, but von Slatt couldn't resist the temptation to create a more whimsical version cut from aluminum. On his website, you can watch a video of it as it pounds out headlines from craigslist.

[link]

There was a fuss a while ago about a little girl who wanted to take communion but couldn't take wheat - her parents got special rice flour wafers ... and the priest refused to use them, said that if she didn't take the wheat wafer, it wasn't communion.

I remember that case. The priest said that just having a sip of the wine was fine, she didn't need to also have a wafer for it to count as communion, but her mother said it wasn't "appropriate" for a little kid to have wine. (I vaguely recall one of the newspaper articles saying that there's something in the Catholic church that says a communion wafer must contain wheat -- the church offered one that had a tiny bit of wheat but was otherwise rice, and the mother said no.)

Ailleann, the Monday after Father's Day must be TMI day. I just spent a half hour hearing more than I ever wanted to know about our new cleaning lady's custody situation and former marriage. Hell, I don't want to know some of what I heard about friends' lives, let alone those of aquaintances.

Oh, and in the hippy church I grew up in, they had a loaf of bread and a choice of wine or grape juice. All of us kids had some phase when we were 12 or 13 of trying the wine, because we were so "grown up," but going back to the grape juice ASAP.