Join me and Jennifer and some other thoughtful, beautiful people over at Conversion Diary for 7 Quick Takes Friday

This week is going to be pretty random, but if I don’t write something, then I’ll be even more off my game than I already am.

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O 10 Books:  There’s this meme going around on Facebook where you list the ten books that have “stayed with you.”  Keep in mind, this is not a recommendation list from me (see #3&4), but just books that made me think a little extra long.

1. The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins
2. The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
3. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
4. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
5. The Diamond Age, or: A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
6. Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (obviously)
8. Bleeder by John Desjarlais
9. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien by, well, that’s probably also obvious
10. The Bible, which seems like a cop-out, but reading it is what made me realize at the time of my rather shaky reversion, “Well, I guess I must be Christian.”

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O Double Digits:  First Shift turns 10 next week. I asked them what kind of a cake they wanted, and they said, “Daddy’s Chocolate Raspberry Cake.”  No decorations or theme, just the cake. I guess last birthday was our final “decorated cake” for them:

Get it?  They were turning 9?  Anyway, if I had known that that would be our last year with a “theme” cake, I might have hired somebody else to do a better job on the decorating.  Stupid Goldengrove.

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The boot is off!  I have been cleared to do aquatic exercise, elliptical or stationary bike.  Hooray!  But no time to do those things with two PT appointments a week yet.  Boo.

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O Exercise:  Between writing, family travel and now Advent preparations, I have had zero time to get to the gym.  What I have started is this Lazy Lie-a-bed Good Morning Stretches routine.

Doctor:  Do you exercise?

Me:  Yes, every morning before I get out of bed.  

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O Book Review:  Now that the blog tour is (mostly) done, I have gotten back on my schedule of reading the review copies I picked up at CMN.  The latest review is A Body In Prayer by Neil Combs.

I admit, this did not make the top of my schedule because when I read the title, I feared it would be some  kind of hippy-dippy, “stretch like this to open your heart to the light” yoga-fest.  I met the author at the Catholic Writers Guild Conference, however, and while his complete lack of in-person hippy-dippiness put me a little more at ease, still I remained leery.  Now that I’ve finished it, allow me to dispel any fears you might have!  A Body In Prayer is a moving, challenging, and yet still comforting read that helps us see that every single motion we make, whether voluntarily or involuntarily (yes, there is a chapter on praying with your stomach) can be lifted up to God.  A Body In Prayer makes the daily challenge of Christian living seem more approachable without ever watering down the fact that it is in fact quite a challenge.  Bravo, Neil!

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O Routine:  I am right now trying to get this finished while getting ready to return to daily Mass for the first time in about two weeks.  Between travel, sickness, PT, snowstorms, and then some more sickness, our days have been totally thrown off.  The upshot is that it gave me a chance to try shaking up our homeschooling routine a bit, which made math a more successful subject than it’s been in a while, so, as Ma Ingalls would say, “There is no great loss without some small gain.”

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O Dignity:  Lastly, check out Kate B’s series on how chastity education isn’t just for teens; it’s actually a means of keeping even our youngest children safe(er) from predators.  It’s like how anti-counterfeit workers are taught how to recognize counterfeit bills:  they don’t spend the day studying bad bills; they spend their days studying exactly what the real deal is supposed to look like.  When they encounter a fake, they can stand up and say, like St. Maria Goretti did, “No!  It is a sin!”    Good on ya, Kate!