Hope and Spots

Yesterday it was announced that...the FSSP is going to be okay. At least, that is what I gleaned from Twitter. When I tried to click on the actual FSSP announcement, their website appeared to be down.

I then went to Facebook to say that the FSSP was going to be okay. In response, I was bitterly reproached by a leading Catholic activist in Australia, an ally, as it were, and a thoroughly good and useful chap. Thus, I do not really know what to make of yesterday's news. When it comes to the Traditional movement, I mostly think about the concrete individuals who make up the Traditional movement in Edinburgh and Dundee, and then occasionally farther afield, like Motherwell and Glasgow---and Rome--and wherever Dr. Peter Kwasniewski lives, for occasionally I am sent one of his excellent books to review. 

Not wanting to be overwhelmed by things I cannot control---and I write as someone who has watched her stable, peacefully dull native country descend into virtual civil war and psychological chaos--I focus on things I can control, like having enough biscuits for next Sunday's after-Mass tea. Happily I do have enough biscuits for next Sunday, and yesterday's news leads me to hope I will be putting biscuits out on the same table for the next month, perhaps for the next decade. 

(Incidentally, I need to put out fewer biscuits, or at least space them out better, as one of the treasures of the parish confessed to his mother on Septuagesima, I believe, that he had eaten too many biscuits and his stomach hurt.) 

Thus, in an awful month, I have some hope my local TLM community will be able to continue to worship together and then hang out together in the wheelchair accessible church and hall the FSSP rents. I hope that what we have so far lost will also be reinstated. I do not really dare hope for more; that last sentence makes me feel like I am living on the edge.

Speaking of living on the edge, I meant to do a lot of stuff yesterday, which was Family Day in Ontario, and thus a day off for me. Unfortunately, I had one too many requests to add to the stuff I have promised to do, and the result that I dissolved into a puddle and slid off to bed. There I read Kim, which I am discussing with one of my pupils. I also watched an episode of Framed: A Sicilian Murder Mystery with the subtitles off. And in between, mirabile dictu, I had a nap.

My new method of bribing myself with stickers to do everything I want to do is working very well. For some reason, I very much want to have my red, blue, green,  and orange dots (or at least most of them) as well as my anti-sugar gold star at the end of the day. The blue and orange dots are for temporary projects---they should be done by Easter, please God--and then I will not take on any other projects until September or something like that. The reason I find it so hard to get things done without sticker-bribes, I suspect, is because I have too much to do.