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.
This fellow, an adolescent red-tailed hawk if you ask me, was high above the hermitage the other day, circling up in the thermals on top of the ridge, looking to get above the smoke from the forest fire we had, and, of course, to look for prey down below. There is no more smoke, what with the heavy rains having come and are now gone (which even brought flood warnings).
Where there’s one, there are most likely others. Totally cool. I love it. Unless it gets too hungry and starts looking at me. But I haven’t heard of them attacking people. Timber Wolves can and will people. They can take down, and eat, a moose, cleaning their teeth with the femers. But these guys, the red wolves… Nah! They would surely have to think twice even with a black bear. But if they were really hungry, I wouldn’t bet on the bear. Wolves are super cunning, especially in packs. Bears are almost totally blind. The wolf is going to win, maybe injured, but it will win. With all this going on, a Good Shepherd lays His life down for those He’s protecting. We thank our Lord for shepherding all of us, right to death, and then to life for all of us with Him.
At least there is a certain Laudie to provide a bit of normality amidst the mayhem that would ensue. Another way, I think, that guardian angels work.
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. 
