Saints from Cory Heimann on Vimeo.

Cory is a student at my alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and filmed this there.

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Can. 211 All the Christian faithful have the duty and right to work so that the divine message of salvation more and more reaches all people in every age and in every land.

Can. 212 §3. According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons. [Code of Canon Law]

[Via Hermeneutic of Continuity]

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I’ve just received word that my mom has been rushed to the hospital near her home in Maine with an infection in her leg and a fever. This is particularly serious because she’s had several knee operations, including knee replacement, and has suffered from infections in the knee, which required hospitalization and surgery. They had become so bad that the doctors warned that another infection could cause her to lose her leg or even her life!

So today she called my sister to say that she had a fever and the telltale redness in her leg. The doctor advised her to call and ambulance right away to get to the hospital and so she’s there now. We’re waiting for an update.

Please, if you will, pray for her, for the low spirits she must be in now and for healing of her leg. Thank you.

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Oh, the coffee! It’s sold out of a street truck by Redeye Roasters, who were recently featured in The Boston Globe. This is small-batch hand-roasted coffee that is manually drip-brewed to order. I have rarely tasted coffee so good. That’s going to be one of the reasons to keep me coming back every week.

This week, there were finally some vegetables and fruit. We picked up strawberries and beets and sugar snap peas. The peas are incredible, so fresh and sweet. We were munching them all the way home, like candy. They were so good I felt like I should feel guilty for eating them.

We took a detour into Wompatuck State Park on the way home, to show it to my sister-in-law Theresa. It’s a very nice state park, very close to Boston, but with a backwoods feel. They even have a campground there. We pulled into a trailhead parking lot and let Bella run around in the woods for a while, collecting pine cones (for playing “Poohsticks” and acorns for Piglet; it’s a Winne-the-Pooh thing), while Melanie took photos of flora, fauna, and Bella. I stayed with the car mostly because Sophia fell asleep in the car, a partially munched snap pea on her chest, as you can see in that photo there.

We’re still getting used to our new neighborhood, but I’m glad we’re finding new places to make new memories, even as our old memories in our old home recede. Hopefully, we’ll come to love our new farmers market as much as the old one, even as we miss the folks we came to know there. (I do miss the cheesemakers and the Vietnamese farmers especially.)

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What kids in high school really need to learn is personal and civic economics. You can’t help but notice how so many people don’t understand even the basics of finance related to bother their personal lives and to the public matters that affect them.

For example, there’s a local story about the governor wanting to replace off-duty detail cops with civilian flaggers, partly because of the cost of the detail cops compared to civilians. One of the arguments in favor of keeping the cops is that the cost doesn’t come from taxpayer funds but from the utilities using them. Well, who do you think ends up paying the utilities? Those costs get passed along to the consumer. Or when legislators respond to the economic crisis and declining tax revenues by raising taxes, like meal taxes and sales taxes! All that will do is keep people out of stores and restaurants, decreasing revenues even further. When my costs increase and recession hits, most people don’t have the luxury of demanding a raise from their boss even as the company struggles. Yet, I hardly see anyone raising a stink over these inanities. Even more, I see my fellow voters putting the same economically clueless jokers back into power every election.

But even in personal matters, many people seem to not understand basic economics. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen one of those lifehacking, productivity blogs tout a tutorial on keeping a checking book or on building a nest egg as if they were imparting secret knowledge. But the sad reality is that many people, young and old, don’t know the basics.

This is why I think every senior in high school should be required to take two courses: personal economics and civic economics. While home economics has come to be known for teaching you how to bake a cake and sew throw pillows, a personal economics course would teach some important life skills: maintaining a checkbook, saving for retirement, getting and keeping credit including credit cards, buying a car, finding a house, choosing a mortgage (and making sure you understand the paperwork), and so on. These are skills that almost everyone will need and so few people have, unless they learn through hard-earned experience. Or they have particularly prescient and conscientious parents.

I certainly wish I’d been more discerning with credit card debt and student loans in my early twenties. Those two areas alone have set me up for a lifetime of financial ostacles to overcome.

Then there’s what I call civic economics. It’s not just about public policy and government, but more about finances that go beyond me and my family. How does the stock market work? What is the banking system? What is the consumer’s place in the grand scheme of things between industry and government? Where does money come from? How do taxes affect the economy? Of course, it’s readily apparent that this course wold be greatly affected by the instructor’s political bent, liberal or conservative. But maybe here, some good textbooks would be able to offset some of that.

In any case, I think schools would do well to offer some practical education in areas that will affect every single student for the rest of his life. You can’t say that for trigonometry.

Photo credit: Flickr.com user Betsssssy. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is next week and as usual in both Apple fandom and the media, everyone is trying to predict what Apple is going to announce. I pay pretty close attention to Apple and have done so for the past 25 years so here are my predictions for what we’ll see at WWDC:

 
1. New iPhone operating system, which we’ve already seen, will be given a ship date. I think we’ll also see some more new features demonstrated, including video.
 
2. New iPhone hardware is also a given. We’ll see larger capacity models at 16GB and 32GB, video-capable camera which will also do higher resolution stills, and a compass to go with GPS (so it will know what direction you’re facing in addition to where you are). I don’t think we’ll see an FM transmitter or receiver, to cite another of the more common prediction. Form factor/design will get minor updates, nothing dramatic.
 
3. iPhone ship date will be just before the release of the new iPhone software.
 
4. OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which has already been announced, will be reviewed and developers will get a close-to-final beta. I don’t think it will ship until the 4th quarter, probably September.
 
5. The mythical iPod touch tablet, i.e. an iPod touch in a larger form like a tablet computer. Less confident about this, but if Apple does announce it, it will be just to show it so iPhone app developers can begin modifying their apps to work with the larger screen and form factor. We’d see a new version of the iPhone App development software.
 
6. No new iMacs or Mac Pros or minis or AppleTV or iPods or Macbook Pros. We might see new aluminum Macbooks since the low-end white plastic Macbook now has better specs than the low-end aluminum Macbook at a lower price. That won’t last long.
 
7. One More Thing: The keynote is being given by a team of Apple executives, but at the end one of them will say the now-infamous phrase “One More Thing.” Steve Jobs will walk out to thunderous applause from the audience and return to his duties at the company.

So that’s my list. How will I do? It’s anybody’s guess since Apple has a track record of doing the unexpected. But I feel like I’ve struck a middle ground between the extremes of predictions I’ve seen so far. Let me know what you think you’ll see.

Photo credit: Flickr.com user Steve - Boston,Ma. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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I just finished reading a new science-fiction novel by Warren Fahy called “Fragment”. They can it an eco-thriller and it’s about an isolated island in the South Pacific, thousands of miles from the closest land that has been biologically isolated from the rest of the planet for 500 million years. Thus evolution has proceeded along a very different path, one that has resulted in an ecosystem so deadly and invasive that even one creature from it could result in devastation for every other organism on the planet. Of course, some folks stumble upon this island and the rollicking ride ensues.

By the third page of this book I had a pretty good idea of how it would end. Oh, not the details, mind you, but the overall arc mainly because it follows the predictable path trod before it by Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”, the “King Kong” movies, and even Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lost World.” In fact, “Fragment” falls squarely in the family line of novels that arose after the era of the Victorian Enlightenment, in which Man thought he had had conquered nature and was now its master. Inevitably, novels like Doyle’s rejected that hubris to show that however much Man thinks he’s in charge, Nature always triumphs. Or if it doesn’t, maybe it should.

Such thinking is even more fashionable today among those who warn of humanity's dire effects on the environment, and so Fahy takes up that banner. He does so very well with an entertaining and fast-paced read that includes one big twist and lots of scientific talk. (I’m not expert enough to know whether the science is accurate, but I can say it’s not so convoluted that a layman can’t follow. Or you can skip it and still enjoy the story.)

And yet, it’s still the Nature Triumphs over Man formula. You have the deadly but shadowy reveal of the “monster,” the disastrous first encounter by our hero, the retreat and then plucky advance, the dupe who blusters and is then lost, the villain who hopes to exploit Nature and his inevitable gruesome yet poetic demise, the heroic ending. If you’ve seen Spielberg’s movie, you can track the plot points even as the details change.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the story. It’s a pageturner as you follow along the hero’s progress and wait to see what new creation emerges from his fertile imagination. If you expect a popcorn-cinema experience, a good beach novel, then you’ll be satisfied. But don’t expect any innovation of the genre as it plays out strictly by the numbers.

A couple of additional points: The novel’s protagonists are not religious. They are scientists with a penchant for seeing religion as an anthropological construct or superstition. And the one or two religious minor characters in the book are just that: superstitious and hostile to science. It’s not fatal to enjoyment of the book, but it would have been interesting to see how a faith-filled scientist—one who sees science as an aid to his faith and vice versa—would have approached this island.

And as you might expect, the character development is somewhat lacking. Most everyone plays to the stereotype: The TV producer who cares only about ratings, not one whit for the human beings she lives with, the conniving mustache-twirling villain, the blockhead soldier, the oblivious scientist who lets his fascination lead to his death, and so on. Not to mention the Skipper, Gilligan, and Marianne. (I’m only half-joking.)

You won’t read this for a discussion of the philosophy of science or a good debate over man’s place in the universe. You will read it for the fast-paced action scenes and the fascinating flora and fauna of Henders Island.

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The experts say you should harden off your plants before moving them outside by putting them out in the sun each day, but bringing them in at night. That seemed like it would be a hassle with 72 plants, but what the heck, in for a penny, in for a pound. And so one overcast, breezy day around the middle of May I moved most, but not all (thank God) all my plants outside. And when I’d come home that afternoon, they were nearly all dead! It wasn’t too cold that day but I guess the wind, as minimal as it was, just killed them. A few of the plants were salvageable and I brought them all in where they covered the dining room table.

Pots stacked for drying after being washed.

Happily, the most robust tomato plants were still in the house, on a bookshelf in the office, looking out the front window. For some reason they loved that spot and grew like crazy there. Spooked as I was by the disastrous hardening, I kept those plants inside and then waited, deciding only to bring them outside to transplant them.

The next step was to decide where exactly to place the garden boxes and what exactly to fill them with. I elected to move the boxes from where I’d originally placed them on one side of the backyard to the other because, as I saw the leaves come in on the trees, it seemed that what I thought was a good place was going to end up very shaded. Meanwhile, the other side, while shaded part of the day, got good morning and midday sun, only falling the shade in the mid-afternoon, when the sun would be the hottest in the summer. Over they went.

Now, as you may recall, I had started out following the philosophy found in the book “All New Square Foot Gardening”, but I ran into some trouble as I calculated the soil mix I would need. The author, Mel Bartholomew, uses a very specific formulation he calls “Mel’s mix”, which is equal parts compost, vermiculite, and sphagnum mulch. For my 3 four-square-foot boxes, I would need 8 cubic feet of each. In addition, Mel says you need at least 5 different kinds of compost in order to ensure a good balance. But when I went to buy these materials, I couldn’t find them. Sure the mulch was easy enough, but the stores I went to had nowhere near 8 cubic feet of vermiculite nor did they have five different kinds of composts. Most had only one kind. The very helpful owner of a local garden center advised me that the mixture I was making would be way too fluffy and light and pointed out that there was no soil in there at all.

Melanie ties the plants to stakes. Note the ersatz stake in the back left made from a driveway reflector.

In the end, I mixed together 6 cubic feet of topsoil, 2 cubic feet of vermiculite, 8 cubic feet of mulch, and 8 cubic feet of a manure/plant matter compost. It wasn’t too dense, but it had enough heft to give the plants something to hold onto. Underneath the boxes I put down some weed barrier, which blocks weeds from growing up through the soil, but doesn’t block air or moisture. (I was a bit saddened to think of that beautiful grass I was killing.) Then I laid out a big tarp and threw a third of each of the components into a pile in the middle. Using a combination of shoveling and rolling the tarp ends up, I gave it a good mix and then shoveled it into the first box. I then repeated for the other two boxes.

By this time, I was worn out and it had taken a lot longer than I’d expected. Melanie had been helping as much as a 8-month pregnant woman can, but I was hauling heavy bags back and forth, not to mention stopping to mow the lawn and spray insecticide on the ornamental bushes out front. (The rose bushes had been decimated by aphids already.) So I elected to put off the transplant yet another weekend.

Thus, this past Memorial Day weekend, we trooped outside with the remaining tomato plants as well as the pepper and tomato plants that had survived the “Great Hardening Disaster”. then a quick trip to Lowes for stakes to hold up the tomato plants (where I bought one too few somehow). And then we transplanted, with me shoving the stake in and digging the hole while Melanie planted them and tied them off. Isabella wanted to help, but I had to keep warding her off from digging in the boxes. For spacing, we put them somewhat closer than the square-foot gardening method would have us do, which would have meant only 4 tomato plants per box. Instead we put in 6 per box with room left over for 3 or 4 pepper plants each. In the end we had 17 tomato plants in the boxes, plus a couple week survivors in large container pots. (We also lost one in transplanting while another died soon after.)

It’s been a week now since we planted them, a week of rain and clouds and mild temperatures, down into the 50s at times. The plants look pretty sad at the moment, droopy and yellowish green. I’m hoping it’s the rain, cool temps, and lack of sun, but I’m afraid we might lose them all. That would be a bummer, having started off so well with 72 plants, but I went into this as a rank beginner with no expectations. I wasn’t sure a single seedling would make it into a bigger pot.

Meanwhile, I have some basil growing in a pot on the bookshelf next to a little cilantro. These seem to be doing well, so we’ve decided to start some indoor greens. We ordered seeds for kale, mustard greens, arugula, radishes, beets, purslane, and sorrel. We hope to harvest them as micro-greens so the radishes and beets don’t have to grow very big at all. These would be nice if we can sustain them.

(N.B. You’ll note I didn’t mention the six tomatillos. As expected these didn’t fare well. Only one scraggly plant is left, but I don’t know if it will last long.)

My sad-looking but still living plants.

So now we wait for the weather to turn decidedly warmer. We’ll water and weed and wait for the first tomato and pepper blossoms to appear. I note that many people I read about in the newspapers around here are just starting to put their gardens, although many I know just buy plants and transplant them. We have a little head start though. Will it mean early fruit or early heartbreak? Only time will tell.

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President Obama has chosen his Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, to replace David Souter. As expected she’s very liberal and she’s not a pro-lifer by any means. But then we couldn’t have expected anything else from the most pro-abortion president ever, and anyway she’s replacing another liberal member of the court and so the conservative-liberal balance remains.

So, it’s interesting to see the abortion-related criticism against Sotomayor coming from’pro-abortion groups. It’s not that she’s too pro-life, there’s certainly no evidence of that. No, it’s that she’s not quite rabidly pro-abortion enough.

In a 2002 case, she wrote an opinion upholding the Bush administration policy of withholding aid from international groups that provide or promote abortion services overseas.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position,” she wrote, “and can do so with public funds.”

In a 2004 case, she largely sided with some anti-abortion protesters who wanted to sue some police officers for allegedly violating their constitutional rights by using excessive force to break up demonstrations at an abortion clinic. Judge Sotomayor said the protesters deserved a day in court.

Judge Sotomayor has also ruled on several immigration cases involving people fighting deportation orders to China on the grounds that its population-control policy of forcible abortions and birth control constituted persecution.

In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”

And in a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.

In my quick read of these summaries I see only a judge abiding by the law, who doesn’t undermine it just because she might not like the pro-lifers’ position. Did these radical abortion groups want her to rule against the pro-lifers who thought police used excessive force, to deny them their day in court simply because she doesn’t like their politics? I suppose it’s some small— very small—measure of comfort that she’s not one of those judges who rules on a whim. (What does it say for our society that we have such low expectations for our jurists?) Was she supposed to deport the Chinese woman to a country that would subject her to a forced abortion?

I say this reveals a lot about those who support so-called abortion rights in this country, that these groups don’t really care about women having a choice, but that they view pregnancy and childbirth as evil by default.

Meanwhile, the White House, instead of telling the bloodthirsty mob of Moloch-worshippers to back off, has tried to placate them with assurances of Sotomayor’s reliable vote on any abortion-related case that would come before the Court.

But White House officials appeared eager to send a message that abortion rights groups do not need to worry about how she might rule in a challenge to Roe v. Wade.

“He did not specifically ask, as we’ve stated for the past several days,” Gibbs said. “But as I just said, I think he feels — I know he feels — comfortable, generally, with her interpretation of the Constitution being similar to that of his.”

Win one for the blood-red horde.

Photo credit: Official White House photo.

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Most days you wake up and you think it’s just going to be an ordinary day. And once in a while, it just takes a left turn. Yesterday was one of those days.

I’d made an appointment with our excellent mechanic to bring in Melanie’s minivan for an oil change and state inspection sticker. About mid-morning I got a call from them, which I had expected was a notice that the work was done and they were delivering the car to my house. (Did I mention how excellent they are? Abington Sunoco. Tell them I sent you.)

Instead, the mechanic was telling me that when they went to do the inspection, the state computers came back that my registration wasn’t valid. That can’t be right, I thought. I renewed the registration this past February. It should be good until 2011. The mechanic suggested I call my insurance agent—which turned out to be excellent advice—and my agent (who is also excellent; Ahmed Insurance; tell them I sent you too) looked up my registration on the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, i.e. the DMV, computer system, which told him that my license plates had been returned on May 14 and the registration canceled!

A quick check with the mechanic confirmed that, yes, both license plates were still on the car. So what was going on? The working theory was—and still is—that some clerk at the DMV mistyped someone else’s plate number and canceled mine instead of someone else’s. All I could do was to take my plates and a verification from my insurance agent to the closest DMV office and try to hash it out. The problem is that the car was 30 minutes away in one direction in Abington and my agent was over an hour away in the other direction in Salem! But because I have such an excellent agent and mechanic, it turned out to be less of a problem. My mechanic drove the plates and registration to my office in Braintree; did I mention how excellent he is? And the agent found a local independent agent near my office to whom he could send my information so he could fill out and sign my form.

So once I had my plates in hand, I sought out the local insurance agent. This guy is not so excellent. For one thing, he charged me $20 to sign this form. I later confirmed with my agent that this was somewhat sleazy since it’s generally accepted that agents will do this sort of thing for each others’ customers as a courtesy. It took all of 5 minutes to complete the form, if that. Then this guy tried to advise me to leave my old plates in my car and go in to the DMV and just register my car from scratch, which would have cost me at least another $40. Talking to my own agent after he told, “You can do whatever you want, but my advice is to take the plates and have them fix their mistake.” In the end I followed his advice and I’m glad I did.

In the meantime, I drove to the Braintree DMV office and got in line to wait. And wait. And wait. I waited over an hour. When I finally got to the window, I put on my nicest, happiest customer face. I was pleasant and self-deprecatory and understanding and turned my puppy dog eyes to the woman. Where the baseline level of hostility at the DMV is usually around 6 out of 10, I think I managed to bring it down to about 3. She confirmed that the plates had been canceled in the Reading office, miles and miles away from my home and someplace I’ve never been, and that the system claimed that the plates had been turned in, which was obviously not true. So she quickly reinstated the plates. That’s it! No rigamarole and no additional fee. After that, I drove to Abington to drop off the plates and registration so they could finish the inspection, then back to work to try to salvage what was left of the day, and then home to pick up my sister-in-law, and then to the mechanic to pick up the car (by this time it was too late for them to drop the car off; I don’t blame them), and then home.

In the end, I was out $20 and a half-day of lost work. But I acknowledge it could have been a lot worse. If the police had pulled us over and discovered the canceled registration, they would have towed it on the spot and fined us. If it were Melanie and the kids, they could have been left standing by the road. And the fact that the cancelation happened in the same month as the inspection sticker expired was also a small miracle. If the inspection hadn’t been required now, we could have driven around for months and months on an expired registration.

As much of a hassle as this was, I am grateful that it wasn’t much, much worse. But it just goes to show how one innocuous typo in the wrong place can ruin the day of someone you never know about somewhere else.

Photo credit: Flickr.com user M.V. Jantzen. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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