The Incident Concluded
September 20, 2007 in MY WEB COMIC, MY WEEK, THE SIMPSONS NEWS
THE SIMSPSONS NEWS
Revisions…that’s it. Nothing exciting.
MY WEEK
The Incident (concluded from last week’s blog post)
So I ran out of the room and I quickly put on my shoes in order to go outside. I opened the screen door and walked outside. The lightning flashed again and I started counting, hoping I had gotten it wrong and the storm was going away. No such luck. The sky was cloudy and they were moving my way. I surveyed my surroundings. I needed to know what the heck I was going to do and I needed to do it quick. There was a dining room table on the lawn and it was WAY to heavy for me to move. Besides, there was no space inside the house for it. Neither was there space for the large dresser sitting in the walkway next to the lawn. There were a bunch of drawers on a wooden futon that went with the dresser as well as two small, dressers that had two drawers each. It was okay if the wooden futon got wet because I knew it was gonna go in the backyard in the new house. The drawers and the small dressers needed to be dry though. There were also a bunch of chairs that went with the dining room table over to one side. I looked at the gazebo tent doubted whether it would really keep the furniture that was there dry. It felt too open to me and water would definitely get to the furniture through the bottom as it ran to lower ground.
I felt overwhelmed. My mind was racing and the storm was getting closer. The first thing I thought of was the chairs. I could at least save them. I picked them up and I took the six of them inside as fast as I could. I put some in the garage, (which was full of my parents things and left pretty much no space for anything else). I put some chairs in the living room (which left no convenient walking space between the TV room and the living room). I then ran back outside, looked around and quickly decided that the drawers where next. There were nine of them. I put some inside the garage on top of the chairs and some in the gazebo tent. I hoped that it was a good idea to leave the drawers in the tent. Before I dealt with the last of the drawers though, I started closing the tent as best as I could in order to prevent water from coming in (there were openings on all four sides of the thing and I had to make sure they were closed as tight as they could be). As I was getting the last of the drawers, I started to feel the drops begin to fall.
“Oh no, oh no, not yet!” My heart began to sink. I hadn’t figured out what I was going to do with the rest of it yet. It was only sprinkling a little but it was enough to put me in a panic. I scanned the area, looking for the box of trash bags I had been using earlier that day and it was no where in sight.
“Just give me a few minutes God, just a few minutes!” I prayed as I ran inside the house frantically looking for the trash bags. I had a heck of time trying to find them. They were gone. I ran back outside to look for them and there they were, hiding behind the curtain of the gazebo tent. I grabbed them and started to take out the trash bags. I ran over to the dining room table and started to wipe the water off with my hands (as if that would actually do any good). Then I started to put the trash bags on top of the table. It was so wet already that the bag stuck to the top.
“Come on God, I don’t want you to turn off the water works. I just need a few more minutes so I could cover this stuff up.” It took me a few minutes to finish putting the trash bags on the table but it felt like forever. When I finally got done I went to the dresser and realized, to my relief, that it had stopped sprinkling. I looked up and discovered that (I’m not making this up) there was a small circle of open sky around the house while all around us it rained.
“Thank you, thank you,” I prayed, “I’ll finished this quickly.” I then tried wiping the dresser top off as best as I could and began putting the trash bags on it. The wind began to blow and since it was no longer sprinkling there was nothing that would make the bags stick to one another. I ran around looking for the packaging tape I knew was around the area, located it and began to tape the bags together as I put them on the dresser. Once done, I put the bags on the small dressers as well. I didn’t know how much time I would have before it began to sprinkle again. The small hole in the clouds was slowly moving across and the sky. It wouldn’t be long before it began to rain again. So far I had managed to cover everything I needed to cover but it was wet under the trash bags and that wasn’t good. I started taking the trash bags off the table in order to dry it with some paper towels. Afterwards I put new trash bags on it and taped them together. I did the same with the big and small dressers. While I was doing this I had gotten to the point were the adrenaline I had earlier was beginning to ware off. I just wanted to go to sleep and I was getting really grouchy. As I looked up at the sky, I began to see stars. It looked like the worst had passed. It almost felt like what I was doing was no longer needed. I found out later that it wasn’t. Looking around I became satisfied that what I’d done was the best I could do under the circumstances. At this point I just wanted to go to sleep. I headed back upstairs, damp and drained of all energy. I crawled back into bed and accidentally, woke Alesha up.
“I was outside just now. There was a lightning storm and I went down to cover up the furniture as it rained.” I told Alesha as I laid down on the bed exhausted.
“Oh no,” she said groggily and went back to sleep.
MY WEB COMIC
My web comic is coming along nicely. I had a small talk with a friend of mine and Alesha and through that conversation I managed to solve some story problems I was having. Act I and II are finished and now I’m working on Act III. Act IV is the real tricky one and it’s the one that needs the most work. I don’t often have enough time to work on the story and the blog at the same time. I often have to choose one over the other. I tend to choose the blog only because it has a more immediate deadline.
QUESTION
I wanted to know if you could do me the favor of letting me know why you read my blog. I know I haven’t written anything on Catholicism or philosophy but that’s only because I haven’t quite found the right way to write about them yet without sounding like I’m ranting. If you want to know what it sounds like when I write about this stuff, I recommend you go and read a comment I put up a while ago on the Daily Breakfast site under the Creation and Evolution episode comments (mine is the last comment. Click on the words “Creation and Evolution” to link to the post). If you don’t want to know what it sounds like, don’t bother.
If the Catholicism and Philosophy thing isn’t something you want me to write about, then what is? Please let me know. It would really help me to know what I’m doing that you like and don’t like.
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What in the world is a “traditional Catholic”?
September 27, 2007 in ANSWERING COMMENTS, THE SIMPSONS NEWS, Traditional Catholics
THE SIMPSONS NEWS
Under the gun again. We are really behind on the show and Act I has to be shipped by next Friday. Act II gets shipped the following Friday and Act III the Friday after that. Right now, it doesn’t look good. I’ve been working overtime this week just to try to get as much done as possible. Fixes that seemed simple at the time, have turned out to be really complicated and time consuming. It’s gonna be a difficult couple of weeks.
ANSWERING COMMENTS
Well, Bill asked me a really interesting question on the last post.
My advice to you Bill, in order to get the best answer, is to ask your co-worker what he means by “traditional Catholic.” Only by doing that will you get the clearest answer because, you are right, Roman Catholicism is about as traditional as you can get.
Having said this, I can’t help but speculate myself.
The first thing that comes to mind
is that this person is actually not a Roman Catholic at all but belongs to the schismatic sect of the Society of Pius X.*<= I’ve crossed out the first sentence of this paragraph because it is in error. For the reasons why, please read my blog post: BattleLore, Harry Dresden, and Catholics.* This is the sect that Mel Gibson belongs to (I think). This sect rejects the changes brought about in the 1960s by the Vatican II council. As strange as this may seem, the Society of Pius X isn’t angry at the Church because it’s too Dogmatic, it’s angry because it’s not Dogmatic enough. (Although, as of the time of this writing, if you go to their website, their home page says that they “…profess filial devotion and loyalty to Pope Benedict XVI.” On further investigation I found that this just means that they are in dialog with the Pope and are actually hopeful that they are close to mending the shism).The second thing that he may mean, might be that he just happens to like pre-Vatican II trappings. That is to say, he likes the aesthetics of how the Church used to do things and, without being schismatic, prefers pre-Vatican II things. I can sympathize with this view since I hold to some of these views myself. I find that I like to go to the occasional Tridentine Mass (pre-Vatican II Latin Mass), I like Latin as well and I study it when I get a chance, I also like reading Aquinas and books on the Trivium and logic, etc. Unfortunately some of the Catholics that think this way tend to be a bit “militant” and have gotten a reputation, even within the Church, of being Catholic Fundamentalists (yikes!).
Another thing he could mean is that he considers himself a Catholic who tries his hardest to live out his faith as a well informed obedient Catholic (like Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta). As opposed to many Catholics who are Catholic in name only but could care less about the Church and it’s precepts. These types of Catholics are such archetypes within the faith, that they’ve been given goofy nicknames like: “Cafeteria Catholics” (who get their name from the way they pick and choose what doctrines they will follow and which they won’t, as if they were picking food from a cafeteria) or “E.C. Catholics” (who get their name from the fact that they only go to church on Easter and Christmas). Of course, not all “uncommitted or semi-committed Catholics” fit within the confines of these two categories. Many, through no fault of their own, just don’t know any better or haven’t really given much thought to their faith and what it means, even though they sincerely think they have (like I once did). It might be that by calling himself “traditional” your co-worker might be trying to distinguish himself from these other types of Catholics.
Another thing he might mean, and the least likely, is that he considers himself a “catholic” (notice the lower case c.) The word catholic (katholikos from katholou in greek) means “throughout the whole, i.e., universal”. Your co-worker might be a “protestant” (non Catholic Christian) who has become aware that the early Church thought of itself as catholic and is not afraid to use the term. I have a protestant/Christian friend who does this very thing.
Or finally, as my friend Ely said after I showed him my blog drawing,
“Maybe he’s such a ‘traditional Catholic,’ he’s Jewish!” (Jerk, upstaged my joke. Wish I’d thought of that.)
Let me know what you find out Bill.
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