Pentecost Sunday, 2011

Pentecost Sunday 2011, at St. Basil Ruthenian Catholic Church at St. Albert the Great, Palo Alto.

Green is used in the Eastern Catholic churches to denote new life. Here is the reading of the Gospel.

Incensation.

Pentecost Sunday 2011, at Five Wounds Portuguese Church. It was a Traditional Latin Mass. Here the Priest is about to intone the Gloria.

The Servers saying the Confiteor.

A long, but beautiful day!

Stop The Press! Ulysses Has Sold His Red Pick-Up!

It is with great sadness to hear from one of our favourite Naval Officers, Admiral Nimitz, that Ulysses has sold his Red Toyota Pick-up truck?

Has the world gone mad?

Maybe next, one of our friends will start rooting for the SF Giants, or something similarly vile.

The Red Toyota, to put it simply, was almost synonymous with Ulysses.

Personally, I can remember Ulysses and I going out at 2100 hrs. on a Wednesday last year, going to 6 different stores in search of Batman: Arkham Asylum for the PS3. I can remember going 65 on Boronda Road, sure we would be stopped by the cops.

Our kids loved riding in the Red Truck. It was a badge of honour, and something that they all wanted to do.

When he parked his truck in Moss Landing, some birds had done their business on his truck. It looked like the windows were broken, and Ulysses promised to get the "Vandal Punks" who had messed his truck.

We would often see his truck on Sunday afternoons, speeding by us on 101 on the way to Holy Mass, just passing us up.

One could also hear him before seeing him as well, as often The Dark Knight soundtrack, or Andrea Bocelli would be blasting at roughly 135 Decibels.

Good times!

Ulysses will be stationed overseas, and will not be in need of his Truck. So we will miss you, big Red Truck. You provided us with so many happy memories, from forays to East Salinas in search of Tequila, to gong to Holy Mass and Divine Liturgy.

We will miss you too, Ulysses.

Ulysses Sighting: New Hampshire Edition!

Some may know that we have recently returned from the state of New Hampshire for vacation. We went for the blessed event of a Baptism, the making of a new Christian, but we also had time to do some other stuff, like...

ULYSSES SIGHTING!

Even all the way across the continent, there are all sorts of people driving these huge, powerful red trucks, and some of them are very convincing. You could almost believe that a powerful Naval Officer could drive some of these.

So we took some pictures of some of the more convincing ones. For your viewing pleasure, we present one of them right here.

If you look carefully at the truck in the foreground (click on picture for a larger view), you can see that it is indeed a Red Pick-up Truck. It even has one of those larger cabs that could fit 4, maybe 5 people. It looked like it had been taken off-roading. It had the appropriate Black trim. This particular truck was even in a church parking lot, so that was good. The driver could not be found, so we could not really be sure.

BELIEVABILITY RATING: 25%.

While indeed this was a Red Pick-up Truck, we were in New Hampshire, which is quite a ways from where Ulysses is currently at. Also, this pick-up truck in the foreground is a Dodge Ram, which is totally different from what he drives.

This sighting had much promise, but alas we were denied. If only we had seen more Red Pick-up Trucks that day. Perhaps we might have had better luck.

We had other sightings, but we will get to those in due time. In the meantime, there is a bit of a corner of a huge White Van just at the right edge of the picture. Maybe later we can zoom in on that for a...

KRAMER SIGHTING!

Stay tuned for more sightings!

New Hampshire: End Of Summer, 2010, Apples and Pumpkins

We highly recommend Apple Picking where ever you can do it. If you can do it in New Hampshire, all the better! The entire place just smelled of delicious apples.

Just be careful of all the kids who want to pick apples, because before you know it, the kids have picked 87 pounds of apples!

We had apples for the entire week!

Me: Is there anything to snack on?

Another: Have an apple!

Me: What's for dessert?

Another: Apple Crumble!

Whenever I think of New Hampshire, I will always think of apples, and good friends.

Scariest Christmas Decoration EVER!!!

It's the most wonderful time of the year... except when people put up pure, uncut nightmare fuel for Christmas decorations.

This either a Nutcracker or Toy Soldier, or both, put up at Candy Cane Lane in Pacific Grove. We have been going for several years now. Although the decorations don't change much form year to year, it is still nice to see an entire neighbourhood put up Christmas decorations.

Still...

This thing is huge. It is about 12 feet tall, with floodlights for the eyes. Few things have cared me as much.