Happy New Year!

 Advent marks a Catholic's " New Year", and time to renew our spiritual life and overcome faults. The calendar new year is also important with new resolutions as well.


I have been working on a list and trying to focus on my spiritual life which includes sacrifices that have an intention. 

I am also trying to read more, keep up the pro-life working, and stop wasting so much time!


Did I conquer my resolutions of 2015?

 Replace half the windows in our home. ** No**
2. Replace the backyard deck. **No, and what a mess in trying to get this done!**
3. Finish painting the front porch. **No, and another mess of a story**
4. Work on learning how to tile, and change out a toilet and vanity for my half bathroom. **No**
5. Work on training Ambrose on the leash  and eventually walk him two to four times per week.***Yes, and we are walking him 5 times a week!***
6. Read 15 books by the end of the year. This time, though, I am not going to create a set list. **No, and I think I work better on a list***
7. As always, work on improving my overall health. ** I gave up aspartame soda permanently**
8. Work on expanding my knowledge regarding music. **Yes, in a small way**
9. Work on expanding my knowledge regarding the Spanish language. **No**
10. Work on my spiritual life. **Yes, in a small way***
11. Try to put together a plan for the future for our home and my work career.** My work career took a nice turn for the better***


Have you made any this year?

Budget

I am still working on final numbers but will post something in 2016 once I have something cohesive. I can tell you know that I am off budget like nobody's business but let's get accurate numbers before I throw myself under the bus!

How did you do for 2015?

2015: Moorland Cottage by Elizabeth Gaskell

This is the last book of the year that I finished for 2015.
It is a short work of fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell (known for being anti-Catholic).
The book is about a young woman and her constant self-sacrifice for her widowed mother and reckless brother. God, kindness, and suffering is at the heart of this book and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Although I had an actual book- this can be found online as well.

Stila Cosmetics

 I purchased these off of Stila's website at a very reduced price. I haven't been using too many berry colours on my lips so this has been a nice change!

2015: Memoirs from the House of the Dead

I think this will be the last book that I finish for the year. I have another book almost completed but it is of a spiritual nature and I tend to re-read chapters in that one.

Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of the Dead is one of my favorite books he has written. It details the life of someone in a Russia prison for a number of years. The details are wonderful and based off of his own experience in such a prison.
Once again, Dostoevsky dives in the mind of man as he struggles with evil and good within himself as well as those around him.

I enjoyed this book from beginning to end and I hope you pick this up and make it a part of your 2016 reading list!

Pictures of Ambrose on Christmas

Playing with his two new toys!

The alligator didn't know what was coming!

"The angel and I are one"

"When I move- she moves"

"Will mom let me have that wrapping paper?"

"It's time for a nap!"

Christmas Pictures

I would love to see pictures of your holyday decorations!

"IF GOD DOES NOT EXIST"

Joe Sobran was my favorite columnist before he died in 2010. He offered more good sense per paragraph than anyone else.In 1993, William F. Buckley publicly fired Sobran from National Review. I had known for three decades that Buckley was the liberal establishment's token conservative intellectual. That act confirmed it. He had also become the neocons' tool. Buckley buckled. Here, Sobran comments on the Littleton massacre, also known as Columbine. Two teenagers killed a dozen schoolmates and a teacher. They injured 21 others.People ask: "Why?" Sobran asked: "Why not?" * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The Littleton murders are still provoking "solutions" for the problem of youths who choose to shoot their classmates. The usual method of these "solutions" is to imagine how this particular horror could have been prevented, and then to generalize the answer into some sort of national law or social program. More gun control, better counseling, spotting "early warning signals," and so forth.But if any measures could have prevented these murders, they may not apply to others. The next crime to shock us as Littleton did won't duplicate Littleton; it will be something else, something different in all the details the supposed "solutions" address. The uniqueness of this crime -- and of many other crimes -- gets lost in bogus analysis. A couple of specific teenagers were determined to do evil. If they had been prevented from doing it the way they did it, they could have found another way.Maybe the real trouble is that modern culture simply refuses to face the fact of evil. "If God does not exist," as Dostoyevsky wrote, "everything is permitted." As if to underline his words, one of the killers fatally shot a girl when she said she believed in God. If God does not exist, right and wrong are reduced to subjective preferences; even human life loses its dignity. "Thou shalt not kill" means no more than "I hope I won't get shot." Laws become the amoral collective preferences of the majority. But what if the killers, as at Littleton, are prepared to die in the course of their crimes? There are always those who won't be deterred by laws. This is a fact of life. Christian culture has always recognized original sin, man's eternal and irrational inclination to do wrong. But to the denizens of modern culture, the idea of original sin is nonsense.Modern culture is a negative, not a positive thing. It's what is left when you subtract Christianity from Christian culture -- so it's a barren, bloodless, desiccated, and uninspiring thing, sometimes called "secular humanism."Modern culture recognizes nothing above man, so there is nothing worth dying for and sacrifice is absurd. It recognizes no God and denies the soul, the afterlife, and ultimate justice. It tells us we should fight against Hitler (or some Hitler-of-the Month like Slobodan Milosevic), but it can't explain why a young man should be prepared to give up his short life, the only existence he will ever know, when "sacrifice" means no more than suicide.In a secularized universe, nobility and honor have no meaning. Neither does chastity. Yet these are virtues recognized by most other cultures. The ancient Greeks and Romans thought honor and chastity were worth dying for; they worshiped the virgin goddess Diana, and they praised the chaste matron Lucrece for killing herself, for honor's sake, after having been raped.Secularized culture, being negative, is only legalistic. It can't move the heart or fill the imagination. It merely encourages grievances about an ever-widening range of supposed civil wrongs, under the general heading of "discrimination." All social relations become legal and political relations.We can even amend Dostoyevsky in light of the twentieth century: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted, especially to governments." The state that recognizes no absolute right or wrong will keep trying to enlarge its own power, even to the point of declaring some people subhuman if they get in the way of social engineering or even personal pleasure.Our own government has made abortion a legal right, while pretending to be "neutral" about religion and morality. Deciding that some lives may be taken at will is anything but "neutral." It assumes that unborn children are nothing but biological matter. At bottom, it assumes the same thing about the whole human race. It assumes that for human beings, there is no higher happiness than unrestrained sexual pleasure; after all, "higher" and "lower" are only relative terms.For some people, there may be something sweeter than sex: revenge. That was what drove the Littleton killers. And why not, if God does not exist? The Littleton killers were products of the very culture that is trying to disown them -- a culture that has ignored Baudelaire's words: "Satan's cleverest wile is to convince us that he doesn't exist."

This article inspired the title of a new collection of Sobran columns of the same name: Subtracting Christianity: Essays on American Culture and Society (fgfBooks.com, 2015). This column was published originally by Universal Press Syndicate on May 13, 1999.