Erudition and Resistance- Standing up for life.

Living counter culturally in small and apparently boring ways is an extremely powerful way of life.

If in every town, once a month for one hour, every Catholic Lay person, Religious, Priests, Bishops and everyone in the area, stood outside a local abortion clinic and prayed the Rosary- what a radical change would come about! No one could overlook the issue and seeing a thousand people praying outside a place of death would force everyone who saw them or heard about them, to get off the fence and make a choice on what they believed on this profound moral issue.

But a handful of ordinary individuals doing the same thing are much more easily mocked and ignored and so change doesn't take place or until God, perhaps getting fed up with inaction decides to intervene. I can't help thinking that I'd rather be one of a big group being obedient to God, than waiting for God to intervene- which would be a lot more frightening and asking why we didn't act ourselves.

Making Butter- A simple way

I think that this little article was from the Daily Mail (a few years ago).

I love the Merlin series on the BBC!

I just love this fan trailer on You Tube. It is so lovely and I think it sums up the first series of Merlin (BBC) really well.

Memories of the snow

Seeing the snow drifting down from the heavens and failing to settle on the ground, brought back memories of earlier this month.

Sprouting - Cress

Last year I bought a packet of Cress in a local garden centre. I had this idea that somehow I would overnight love gardening... it didn't happen and I never got around to sowing them.

Anyway, I managed to dig them out of the seed tin and with a firm resolution, decided that I would sow them this week. I was absolutely amazed how quickly they grow! I would water them before college when they were just seeds and when I returned home, they had already sprouted.

Having said that, I just checked on them.... and they look flattened. The paper had just completely dried up. Dad said that wasn't like that when he woke up this morning. Perhaps it was the heat from the oven.

As it has lots of health benefits, there is a good side to growing them. Not that I do it for that- just that it tastes lovely in an egg mayonnaise sandwich!

Become your destiny

Home Made Yoghurt- from a friend

I'm making it regularly at the moment: the first batch was runny, as we agreed often happens with the home made variety.

I made a second batch, in the same one, one-and-a-half-times-as-high-as-it-is-wide, 1 pint jar. I used the previous batch for the next starter, just to test the theory that yogurt thickens the more batches you re-make from the 'same' starter. That batch was even runnier than the milk I used to make it! "Oh," thought I. "That's no good."

Having bought a load of milk in the Eurostar at 10p a pint I decided to see what would happen if I tried to make yogurt from that starter. Just how runny can cured milk get? As I had quite a big quantity to use up (2 pints), I made it in the scrupulously clean, stainless steel saucepan where i boiled the milk and where I had made yogurt before. The saucepan is one and half time as wide as it is high and I pretty much filled it. That watery milky supposed 'yogurt' starter made a perfect batch of set yogurt.

Incredible. Thought I ought I ought to share that little gem with you...

(Used with permission.)