Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make
movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art
as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence,
a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be
expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on
everything to prove its Orthodoxy.
-- Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things
This is a picture of Lionel, my Useless Blob.
He's really here, jumping up and down. To adopt your own Useless Blob, click on him.
![[christian fandom]](http://www.valdyas.org/~irina/blog/graphics/page/cf125x125.gif)
2004-03-26
Celebrating the Liturgy in the evening always makes me realize more than usual that we really do have a mystery religion. The Liturgy of the Presanctified already hints at it, but a full-blown Liturgy, like the one we had for the Annunciation, where the sanctifying is done right then and there, makes it very clear.
2004-03-23
Every year, around this time, the fourth or fifth week of Lent, I make kulich. Every year I forget that it really takes the whole day, even though I keep the day free for it. It’s not that it’s so much work, but that it comes in awkward chunks with too little time in between to really do something.
2004-03-22
Little kids’ church school today: three three-year-old girls. The four-year-olds have all turned five and belong in the next group now; the current crop of two-year-olds are still too little to listen.
Me: “Who is that on the icon?” (pointing to the Mother of God, on the right)
Boudewijn’s asthma threatening to get the better of him, we’re having to find new homes for the cats. I sent out a “Help!” message to all of my friends and acquaintances within public transport distance, and got a useful response from only one: friends of his wanted Johanna, the black one.
I put a message on a “rehouse pets” site recommended by the local RSPCA equivalent and got a call from someone in Rotterdam who wanted the black one too, but they were willing to settle for the tortie, Leentje. We made arrangements.
2004-03-18
The kid had another fencing match, in Ermelo this time, quite close to Grandpa (who we visited afterwards). The first was in Almere. The second time, in our own town at that, she got ill on the Saturday and the match was on the Sunday, so she missed it. This was the third time. And she made up for missing the second: won seven out of her eight bouts.
And I took the best fencing picture in my
life, at least my life until now; this is a cut from it, fit to
advertise junior
fencing. Mine is the one with the red pigtail. The other one is
the boy who came to the match thinking that
girls were no good, and was beaten 5 to 2 in the very first bout by my
daughter. He was apparently so impressed that he promptly let the
little seven-year-old girl in the set beat him as well.
2004-03-08
Going through my old bookmarks I found the FlyLady site, and as I’m doing the spring cleaning in four-hour installments (kitchen cupboards today, stove tomorrow) I was interested. I’d forgotten the sugariness, the cutesy abbreviations (trademarked, no less), the silly and sometimes downright stupid advice.
2004-03-06
I’ve really started wearing a headscarf for services. It wasn’t only an incident. It agrees with me. I’m still finding out when exactly to wear one: definitely for Liturgy, definitely not for ecumenical Vespers, but there’s a large grey area in between. It will probably take me another year to become completely clear on that.
I don’t have enough headscarves, at least not the right kind.
We — the girls and I — spent part of Wednesday afternoon cleaning the candle-stands in the church. What we use to put lit candles in at the moment, pending renewal, are one large and two slightly smaller Turkish aluminium baking-tins, a similar tin but stained black, and two tins that look the same but turned out to be colanders, with a bottom full of holes, covered with a paper plate and a sheet of aluminium foil to keep the sand in.
2004-03-04
Hendrik was ill — first urinary tract infection, then bladder stones, then urinary tract infection again — and the vet gave him special diet food, in a tin. He usually isn’t all that fond of tinned food, he’d rather have kibble, but this is designed for sick cats so it’s extremely delectable. To all cats, not just to sick cats.
2004-03-03
Five mail messages in one day, spread over three accounts, purporting to come from the Valdyas.org team and warning me that I was spreading spam and viruses, that I’d probably caught a trojan, and to use their free anti-virus tool or configure their free forwarding service.
That can’t be from us. For one thing, the Valdyas.org team is Boudewijn and me, and we never sent it. There is no such thing as “support@calcifer.valdyas.org”. If I had a virus (which seems unlikely on my Linux-only computer) the sysadmin, that is, my husband, would tell me, not send impersonal messages to each one of my accounts.
2004-03-01
Thinking I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb I wore a headscarf to the regular Sunday Liturgy as well. I hope by Easter everybody thinks it’s what I do. For now, it’s a kind of Lenten resolution: if I want to do something that is good (or at least non-bad) in itself, I should do it and not stand around wanting it.
My daughters giggled, and when I asked “do you think it’s silly?” one said “a little” and another asked “why do you do it?” When I answered “because I like it” she was satisfied.
