Go Pope Benedict XVI

Difficult, yes, impossible, no.
The difficult is often worth doing. The long view of life is important. A study of history and people is important. If all these are considered, which they often aren't, Humanae Vitae makes sense. But then again, how many people have read it?
Yay, Pope!

Pope: Sex can become 'like a drug'

• Story Highlights
• Pope Benedict admits that Vatican's teaching against birth control is hard
  
• He praises document condemning contraception on its 40th anniversary
  
• Benedict concerned that human life risks losing its value in today's culture
  
• He worries that sex can "transform itself into a drug" one partner has to have
  

VATICAN CITY, Italy (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged Saturday that the Vatican's teaching against birth control was difficult as he praised a 1968 Church document that condemned contraception.

In a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the document, Benedict reiterated the Church's ban against artificial birth control as well as more recent teaching against using artificial procreation methods.

Pope Paul VI's 1968 "Humanae vitae" ("On Human Life") encyclical prohibits Catholics from using artificial birth control.

"The teaching laid out in the 'Humanae vitae' encyclical isn't easy," Benedict said.

"What was true yesterday remains true even today. The truth expressed in 'Humanae vitae' doesn't change; on the contrary, in the light of new scientific discoveries, it is ever more up to date," the pope added.

Benedict appeared to be referring to artificial procreation methods, which in the Church's view offend the dignity of life and go against Vatican teaching that the only way to conceive a child is through intercourse between husband and wife.

"No mechanical technique can substitute the act of love that two married people exchange as a sign of a greater mystery," Benedict said.

Benedict expressed concern that human life risks losing its value in today's culture and worried that sex could "transform itself into a drug" that one partner had to have even against the will of the other.

"What must be defended is not only the true concept of life but above all the dignity of the very person," the pope added.

Paul VI was said to have agonized over whether to allow artificial conception in preparing the encyclical. Benedict described Paul's decision as the fruit of much suffering and the document as "a significant gesture of courage."

"Forty years after its publication, that teaching not only shows itself to be unchanged in its truth, but it reveals the farsightedness with which the problem was tackled," the pope said.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

All AboutPope Benedict XVI • Roman Catholicism • Birth Control • Vatican

Happy Mother's Day...

And for Mother's Day, I got POOP!

Wow, do I feel great.
It's kinda gross, so I won't type it here.

I got lots of it though.

There is a present from my husband here, but I'm waiting til he gets home before I open it and see if it is not...
POOP.

:)

The Duggar Family and other dynasties

This family is great. You can probably get videos of them from Netflix, because they have been doing reality shows of their family. Another family is on Discovery Channel, and they have a show called "Jon and Kate plus 8" because they had twins and then sextuplets! And they all look like Gabe and Grace, too! :)
The Duggars are at it again, but hey, they are the true meaning behind a t shirt I saw the other day (and I want one):

We're not just a large family, we're a dynasty!

Happy Mother's Day: Woman pregnant

with 18th child

By JILL ZEMAN, Associated Press Writer 55 minutes ago

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - It's a happy Mother's Day for an Arkansas woman — she's pregnant with her 18th child.

Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

"We've had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us," she said, laughing.

The Duggars' oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.

The new show looks at life inside the Duggar home, where chores — or "jurisdictions" — are assigned to each child. One episode of the new show involves a "jurisdiction swap," where the boys do chores traditionally assigned to the girls, and vice versa, Duggar said.

"The girls swapped jurisdictions, changing tires, working in the garages, mowing the grass," she said. "The boys got to cook supper from start to finish, clean the bathrooms," among other chores.

Duggar said she's six weeks along and the pregnancy is going well. She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they'll keep having children as long as God wills it.

"The success in a family is first off, a love for God, and secondly, treating each other like you want to be treated," Jim Bob Duggar said. "Our goal is for each one of our children to be best friends, and everybody working together to serve each other makes that happen."

The other Duggar children, in between Joshua and Jennifer, are Jana, 18; John-David, 18; Jill, 16; Jessa, 15; Jinger, 14; Joseph, 13; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 10; Jeremiah, 9; Jedidiah, 9; Jason, 7; James, 6; Justin, 5; Jackson, 3; and Johannah, 2.

___

On the Net:

Duggar family Web site: http://www.duggarfamily.com

Discovery Health site: http://health.discovery.com/convergence/duggars/duggarfamily.html

• Email Story
• IM Story
• Printable View

An idea for my new career... ideas?

Hello my friends...

Those who know me know that I can get some pretty neat ideas sometimes. Really big ones. But the problem is, real life sets in and I realize I can't quite balance all that, at least not right now. So, like many ideas, this one is probably going to sit on the table for at least 10 years, and then maybe I could finally concentrate on it. Better make that 20 years. Hey, 51 is a great time to start something new, right?

Anyway, here is something that has long been puttering about in my brain, and no one has done it yet that I know of.

Most people I know were on this track -- quick! We gotta get into college! We gotta get really awesome grades, take college prep classes, as many as possible, and then we gotta do sports or plays or music, or else something really amazing to impress the admissions people, and then maybe we'll get a scholarship or at least accepted into a decent school and become somebody -- doctor, lawyer, teacher, engineer, and on and on. Never mind that we don't know what it's like to live on teacher pay, even though people say not to expect much. We can be warned and warned, but we've never tried living on our own, so we don't know yet. At least not most of us.

If we want to be a doctor, never mind that there will be at least $40K in loans to pay off, we'll make plenty of money and pay it off "someday". Engineers, too. Never mind if we want a master's degree, we'll be taking out even more loans and pay them off "somehow" at $500 per month.

Never mind that many of us will want to marry someone almost right after college, some of us even during college. And then some of us will have kids. And some of us will decide, while we're at it anyway, to have a few more kids, because we may as well if we're going to have them.

And what if we want to change careers? There's retraining, and job market fluctuations that one cannot predict. There's medical problems, and credit cards you thought you could pay off "someday" and then lost track of somehow. And then both cars you got from your parents die, and now you have two car payments, because you never did learn anything about cars in order to fix the ones you have, and you don't have the money to pay someone because of all of the above.

Now, after all that... what if you want to buy a house? Pay for college? Start a retirement plan? What if you aren't sure at this point, despite having two college degrees, whether you can pay for your health insurance and food at the same time? What if you actually go bankrupt because you have no time machine to go back and fix these things with?

What if, amazingly, do you do solve all those problems, and now you have kids and are tired of letting other people take care of them, and decide after all to become a one income family, at least for the next several years?

What if you never learned how to cook? Or sew? Or fix your car or your appliances? Or garden? Or grocery shop in a prudent and carefully planned way? Or use coupons? Or budget at all? Or save money? Or laundry and dishes? Or put off til tomorrow what you don't need today? What if you never learned "LIFE MAINTENANCE"?

And why did nobody warn us? Any of us? I know so many people who are just learning something that we should have known all along, and should have been taught or been interested in learning, but we were so hot to get into college and get all that homework done that we never had the time.

I would like to compose a seminar/workbook/class, and I'd like to propose it to colleges, starting with this area and then statewide, and then hopefully farther, to warn people of exactly how much life is waiting to slap you upside the head when you leave college.

Maybe some folks are just going to make such ridiculous amounts of money in their chosen fields that they don't care. But I tend to think the human toll is humongous, when it comes to families, stress, money and living a real life, and what we sacrifice because, well, we don't see any other choice.

I'd like to warn those just starting out.

Would anyone like to propose topics for me to start on, since I've got 20 years to work on this?
Thanks!

Another perfect house...

Have to post this. If only we were rich and famous, I'd buy this right now. Except that it has five acres, and I don't think I want quite that many. But the house is PERFECT. Can't you just see bbq's and horses every day? And a huge garden?
Well, I'm putting it on my blog for posterity, so I have all my favorite houses in one place and can pull them up as examples when we're ready to go house hunting.
:) Maybe next year...
If you are curious, plug the MLS # into your realtor website. I can't get the pics to work.

$350,000


Description
$350,000 Bedrm: 4 Bath: 2.75

15315 BROOKSIDE PL
Snohomish, WA 98290 MLS# 28047492

2,039 Sq Ft 4 bed 3 bath rambler on 5 acres located in the 3 lakes area. Privacy & land w/room for the animals to roam. Bring the Horses! Home features 2 master suites, one w/5 piece bath & jetted soaking tub w/french doors to the deck. The other master w/walk-in closet & 3/4 bath. The home is very bright & open w/great room feel. 2 fireplaces, hardwood floors, & very well kept. The large wrap around deck is perfect for back yard BBQ's. 2 sheds one for fire wood & one for the garden equipment.
Architecture

Year Built: 1979 1 story
Brick Exterior Composition Roof
Wood Exterior

Interior Features

Square Feet: 2,039 Garage/Other: 2
Bathroom Off Master Bedroom Ceiling Fan(s)
Den/Library/Office Dining Room
Family Room/Great Room Forced Air Heat
Hardwood Floors Other Heat
Utility Room Walk-in Closet
Wall-to-Wall Carpet

Property Features

Lot Size (Acres): 5.00 Deck and/or Patio
Fenced Yard Garage
Garden Area, Designated Other Site Feature
Outbuildings on Property Pasture Land
RV Parking Available Territorial View
Wooded Lot

School
School District: Snohomish Middle School: Centennial Mid
High School: Snohomish High Elementary School: Buyer To Verify

Taxes
Property Tax: $3,387


Listing courtesy of: RE/MAX Northwest Realtors


Disclaimer: Information is based on data available to the associate, including county records.The information has not been verified by the associate and should be verified by the buyer.

Back to top

generations vs. computers

I have been thinking again. Muddled thoughts, but they keep recurring, and that means I should write them down before I forget them. The kids will tell you how bad mom's memory is, but I don't remember it ever being any other way. Even as a kid, I'd forget stuff.
Anyway...
My husband and I are Generation X. In fact, I'm about as young as Gen X gets, and then you move on the Gen Y, which is our siblings. Which puts us and our siblings in different generations, and it really shows. I think one of the most stark differences is how we think of the internet and computers in general.
Some of my logic is a bit off here, because my husband has the unfair advantage of access to computers at an early age. But keep in mind that Mr. Apple Computers/Mac/Ipod was busily inventing the future Mac in his garage the same year I was born. Which means there were no personal computers yet. My great Uncle Dick was still working with room-sized ones. For high school graduation, I received a Mac Color Classic, with a nine inch screen. I used this all the way through college and into my first teaching job. When we got married, I had to convert to PC because that's what my husband had. We spent 2000 bucks on a computer in 1999. Since then, I now have a three year old Dell laptop that is doing just fine, thanks, and it cost me $800. Crazy.
Then you look at my sister, Bonnie. She is of the myspace generation. She could totally live online. Her social life is all online, though she does go out and see real people. But facebook and myspace and all that, along with music and movies, was all there for her! Heck, we didn't even have web access in college yet, really, until halfway through college. Now people bring laptops to class.
My point is this: My age group is the fine line between people who are allergic to tech and put up with it as a necessary evil, and those who can't imagine life without it because they literally have never had life without it. I remember life without computers, and I liked it. But I also like life with them! Notice I am blogging. The hard part, I find, is explaining this love of computers to people like my parents, to whom computer operations just don't come easily. They use them if they must, not for fun very often. Youtube isn't operational on their computer, because they only have dial-up. I can see why they don't think internet is fun if they have dial-up! Cuz it's not!
I have been thinking recently that sometimes people will judge each other's intelligence based on whether they know tech lingo. SOMEONE I know is fairly guilty of this. If people don't understand computers, they must be backwards. I mean the kind of people who simply don't own one, out of choice. But I don't think that is fair, because they are thinking, "I have gotten along my whole life without computers, I am 60 or so, why do I need to care? Phones and mailboxes are still around." And I can totally see that.
A little empathy goes a long way in this case. But it sure is interesting to watch both sides from age 31 1/2.

Oooh! Victory Gardens return!

Thanks for posting this, Barb McKillip, and happy birthday!

This looks great! It's sort of what we were planning anyway...

SPIN FARMING:

www.spinfarming.com


Thursday May 1, 2008
home | contact us
SPIN Farming
What's SPIN Meet SPIN's Creators Buy SPIN Guides SPIN Cities Media Coverage Photo Gallery Contact Us
SPIN's agricultural and financial breakthroughs have been developed at Philadelphia's Somerton Tanks Farm, a prototype single location half-acre farm, and at Wally's Urban Market Garden, a half-acre multi-locational farm in Saskatoon Saskatchewan.
SPIN Makes Agriculture Accessible to Anyone, Anywhere

SPIN stands for S-mall P-lot IN-tensive

SPIN is a non-technical, easy-to-learn and inexpensive-to-implement farming system that makes it possible to earn significant income from land bases under an acre in size. Whether you are new to farming, or want to farm in a new way, SPIN can work for you because:

* Its precise revenue targeting formulas and organic-based techniques make it possible to gross $50,000+ from a half- acre.
* You don't need to own land. You can affordably rent a small piece of land adequate in size for SPIN-FARMING production.
* It works in either the city, country or small town.
* It fits into any lifestyle or life cycle.

SPIN is being practiced by first generation farmers because it removes the two big barriers to entry - land and capital - as well as by established farmers who want to diversify or downsize, as well as by part-time hobby farmers.

Ready to Take SPIN for a Spin? Then follow us.