The Squirrel's Easter Feast

Anyone who's read this blog for more than a week or two probably knows that I have a particular dislike for squirrels who steal food from bird feeders (even if they do look funny in the way they go about their theivery).

Today a squirrel decided he'd had enough with the traditional ways of stealing bird food, so he scratched out a hole in one of my Mom's bird feeders, and is now able to hang from his back paws and reach up to get some food out of the hole on the bottom of the feeder with his front paws. Since it's Easter, I guess his ingenuity should be rewarded...

Food for Thought from Fr. Hardon, SJ

When looking through a website with some information about Fr. Hardon, SJ, a priest who left quite a legacy and who lived in St. Louis, I noticed the following quote from one of Archbishop Burke's homilies, which gave me a little food for thought:

"Catholicism is in the throes of the worst crisis in its entire history. Unless true and loyal Catholics have the zeal and the spirit of the early Christians, unless they are willing to do what they did and to pay the price that they paid, the days of America are numbered" (From the Marian Catechist Manual, p. xv).

Whether or not our country's days are numbered, our Church can always use renewal and strengthening. Let us pray to the Holy Spirit that this Holy Week can be a great source of spiritual renewal, especially for the Catholic Church in America.

2008 St. Louis Transitional Deaconate Ordination [UPDATED]

I just finished processing the photos from this year's Transitional Deaconate Ordination Mass. Our Archdiocese now has four more holy deacons to call its own! I haven't had time to disseminate the photos yet, but I will be able to do so quite soon. For now, here's a picture with all the new deacons, Archbishop Burke, and Bishop Hermann (taken immediately after Mass):

[UPDATE: Here are the pictures from the ordination.]

An Easy, Free, and Fun Way to Clean Your Computer's Screen

I was emailed this just recently - I didn't know cleaning your computer's screen could be so fun!

St. Louis Weather & Birds

From 6" of snow last week, to a sunny 76° Sunday afternoon, back down to 30° and 5-8" of snow today... that's St. Louis for you. I put out my bird feeder last week, but have yet to see any birds. I do often see a pesky squirrel eating from it, though, but I haven't yet taken a picture of him. Here's the feeder in the snow today (see below)... I'll be hopefully getting some nice bird pictures as spring comes in full force (if this snow ever goes away!).

This is also the first image I've processed in Apple's Aperture 2.0 program; I'm using a trial version right now, but I'm contemplating buying the full version soon... it's a lot smoother of a workflow for my RAW files than what I've been doing (copy them from the memory card, open them in Adobe Camera RAW, enhance/retouch, then export to a folder of JPEGs, then import into iPhoto). Now I simply insert the memory card and import into Aperture.