When I was a little kid in Kindergarten, I had the privilege of having the great Mrs. Klaphake for teacher. I mean, do you remember your Kindergarten teacher’s name? Anyway, she presided well over the mayhem. I was especially impressed with her abilities during lunch-hour. If I had a bunch of grapes with me, and some other kid saw this, and presented a mouth yawning wide, I would try to toss one of those grapes in the direction of his or her mouth. Most often, this wouldn’t be successful, depending on how you looked at it, for then that grape would soon be tossed high into the air and the others would all try to grab it in their mouths all at once. I think I was sent to sit in the corner a few times! That did me good I’m sure. This picture of the great Laudie-dog reminds me of all that. I must be getting old. Such memories!
Also in Minnesota, but this time further out in the Northern forests, where our home had some tall windows next to the garden, non-stooping birds of all sorts would — and I hate to say this — they would fly with all their might, as if stooping like a falcon in bomb-diving position, and smash against the windows, sometimes knocking themselves out, sometimes breaking their necks. 
The bangs against the window were sometimes a bit frightening, so loud would the collisions be. There were, thankfully, zillions of birds in Minnesota, much more than in the rain forest here. The solution would be to draw the drapes across the window. That really works. No drapes here. But there’s only been one bird that I’ve seen in my now over two years here that has met his demise by way of window stooping. This kind is pretty common. Not sure what it is.
In other news, I’m bound and determined to:
- Put up a Thanks to Benefactors post
- Put up some insulation in the hermitage
- Put up some posts with Father Mark Gruber’s conferences
- Put up some posts with the interview I did with a most wonderful 93 years young Holocaust era survivor
- Re-trench the trenches on the path up the ridge to the hermitage as the promised flood-warning rains smash down on already totally drenched ground — threatening already compromised slope stability — so that there are not only flood warnings, but also landslide warnings. Yikes! ✔
- Continue with Spring cleaning. ✔
- Put up some Florae for the Immaculate Conception posts.
- Continue with this novena (join anytime!) – ✔
The Judas Crisis: A Special Request for Priests (1-9 May, 2013)
Update: I was distracted today from my to-do list.
- I ended up ripping off the old door of the chicken coop below the hermitage, the one’s that a pack of transmitter-collared hound dogs smashed through at the beginning of 2012, killing the rooster. The door just literally fell apart as time went by. So, another, from Habitat for humanity, almost for free, went up in its place today.
- I totally dissembled the gradines in back of the alter and reinforced everything, and gave everything a good cleaning, and then put it all back up again. Much better. Also, the sanctuary candle was put next to the tabernacle, even while the lamp-holder was removed from the wall to make room for a more solid wall between the chapel and the wood-stove area.
- I hauled in more firewood before the unending rains really got going. But the day is not over!
Update: More distractions:
- The sanctuary candle went back up, along with Our Lady of Guadalupe (exact color and size) which I received from the sacristan of the Basilica down the way, and also the Icon of the Most Holy Trinity as written by Andrey Rublev.
- A great boon for working on the hermitage a bit has been the ripping down of a… um… plastic tent which I had put up in the hermitage next to the wood stove. I had been living in that for the winter because of the lack of insulation. But now I’m getting to that things like insulation, so, O.K.
The temps are supposed to nose-dive below freezing for the next few days, and I’ve now just run out of all the wood I had stacked up for the winter. So, I went out this morning to cut some totally dead trees into managable sizes, say, about the size of a cross. Shouldering those, I forged my way back to the hermitage and dumped them on the steps. They’re a bit waterlogged, so to speak, after all the rains this past week. Later, I hope to cut these up a bit more, then perhaps chop them up and stack them inside. As you can see, I’ve not bothered to make much progress on the hermitage “door”. I have to do something to be in solidarity with the priests who are most marginalized. This is at least one small thing. I hear, though, that there may be a pack of seminarians invading the hermitage so as to put up some real wall and doors during the summer. IF that were to happen, O.K. That’ll do them good, so I’m all for it!
Friday, 2 December, 2011 through Saturday, 31 December, 2011, a set of Gregorian Masses in the Extraordinary Form are offered for the repose of the soul of P.B., the great apostle of the South, so dedicated to the sanctification of priests and bishops in the purgatory of this life and the next, at the request of C.W.
Monday, 2 January, 2012 through Tuesday, 10 January 2012, Holy Mass is offered in the Extraordinary Form for Father xxx and the entire Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Petri, as the best way to start 2012 afresh, at the request of C.W.
Just as today’s sunset was lighting up the sky before all became dark, I finished filling in the spaces between the rafters in the higher section of the roof. There’s only one slope to the hermitage, as it’s really a “movable storage shed”. The highest side, the chapel side, of course, is up twelve feet plus the rafters. Tacking together some scaffolding for that entire length of the hermitage helped much.
Accompany me, Father George David Byers, S.S.L., S.T.D., as I begin life as a Catholic Priest-Hermit by choice. Holy Souls Hermitage is dedicated to the sanctification of my fellow priests, bishops, deacons & seminarians going through the purgatory of this life or the next. Prayer and sacrifice go up, of course, for both Benedict XVI and the next Successor of Saint Peter. 
