I recently came across a wonderful Marian prayer and thought I’d share it here. I’ve added to the Clerk of Oxford’s translations in brackets, but all the translations are from her post.

Hail, lady, sea-star bright,
God’s mother, edy wight [blessed creature]
Maiden ever, first and late,
Of heaven’s realm the sely gate. [blessed gate]
The ‘Ave’ thou received in spell [message]
From the angel’s mouth called Gabriel
In grith [peace] us set and shielded from shame,
And turneth backward Eva’s name.
Guilty men’s bonds unbind,
Bring light to them who are blind.
Put from us our sin
And earn for us all wynne. [joy]
Show that thou art mother alone
And before him take thou our bone [petition]
Who for us thy child became
And of thee our kind name. [took our nature]
Maid alone, thou wert with child,
Among all so mild;
Of sin release us in haste,
And make us meek and chaste.
Life give thou us clean, [pure]
A safe way prepare, and lene [grant]
That we Jesus see
And ever blithe be.
To Father, Christ and Holy Ghost be thanks and praising,
To three persons and one God, one honour and worshipping.

Being a Tolkien nerd, this all has Elven resonances. That’s obviously intentional, since Tolkien was both a Catholic and a scholar who certainly knew a great deal about the “Mary, star of the sea” tradition.

In Rivendell, they sang to Elbereth:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel
silivren penna míriel
o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-díriel
o galadhremmin ennorath,
Fanuilos, le linnathon
nef aear, sí nef aearon!

O Elbereth Starkindler,
white-glittering, slanting falls, sparkling like jewels,
from the firmament the glory of the starry host!
Having gazed afar into remote distance
from the tree-tangled Middle-lands,
Everwhite, to thee I will chant
on this side of the ocean, here on this side of the Great Ocean!

Another Elven song:

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
O Queen beyond the Western Seas!
O light to us that wander here
Amid the world of woven trees!

Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!
Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!
Snow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee
In a far land beyond the sea.

O Stars that in the Sunless Year
With shining hand by her were sown,
In windy fields now bright and clear
We see your silver blossom blown!

O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees,
Thy starlight on the Western Seas.

I mentioned before that my ‘96 F150 is my summer (and likely much longer) project. It actually runs well, especially for being more or less neglected for years. It hasn’t been driven much over my twenty years with it because most of my driving was to my old job–thirty miles away. Not economical. Now most of my driving is within the city limits of our small town so it’s time to get her into shape.

Most of the issues are simple inconveniences:

• Replace panel clips on passenger side door
• Ignition switch sticks
• Driver's side door doesn't always fully latch
• Oil drain plug needs to be replaced next time I change the oil
• Tailgate sticks
• Squeaky
  • Belt
  • Brakes
  • Door

Nothing too intimidating for a newbie. Pictures to come, once she’s all cleaned up.

We got a lot done this past weekend.

On Saturday, we had a good, full day celebrating our anniversary. We actually left the city limits! 😊 We drove up to Bloomington, went to the greenhouse and a few other favorite shops, and went out to lunch. Then we picked up some honey from a beekeeper near Spring Mill State Park and drove home through the country. Later, we went to the theater to see “Project Hail Mary.” It was fine but, honestly, I don’t get all the buzz around it.

Pond

On Sunday we re-lined and built up the pond. Look at how sad it was when we started.

We wrestled the (thicker than original) lining into place and rebuilt the waterfall. The fountain, by the way, is an old butter churn that was left in the house when we bought it.

Finally, we got all the rest of the limestone in place, filled in with gravel, and got the perching stick back into place. We still have more aquatic plants to put into place but it’s much better!

F150

If you recall, my driver side inside door handle looked like this:

I got all the parts in on Friday. I never did find the part number for the U nut I needed. The ones I bought weren’t exactly right but they were close enough. In the end, I had to buy a different bolt and a smaller washer (total: $0.58) and temporarily remove the handle in order to get it to fit. I got to use a hand riveter for the first time and that was fun!

I’m hoping to give the truck a really good wash tonight or tomorrow night. It’s pretty grungy and I’d like to start driving it to work. I’m not a person who cares about a spotless vehicle, but even I have a point where it starts to bother me.

Scrapple

The scrapple-making was a success! Rachel helped a lot, for which I’m thankful. The smell was intense in the first hour of cooking. After that, it either mellowed or I went nose-blind. David’s recipe was easy to follow and it all came together well.

I fried up a piece this morning for breakfast and it was much more mild than I expected. I was expecting a very porky flavor. Tomorrow morning I’m going to experiment with a thinner slice, which is apparently less traditional. But I think I’d enjoy it better without the mushy middle that comes with the thicker slice.

What a great weekend!

I used to post notes about what I was working on and I’d like to get back into that habit. Not because it’s particularly noteworthy—just because I like revisiting these memories.

Pond

The big job this weekend was to get the pond ready for the year. Rachel did most of that work on Saturday while I piddled with other things, like building a new sugar snap pea trellis in one of the raised beds. Rachel drained the pond and power washed all the limestone. Unfortunately, after she refilled the pond, she realized the pump wasn’t working. That was a discouraging development, since that meant we would have to empty the pond by hand in order to extract the pump cord and hose from behind all the rocks. I talked her into leaving it for the next day.

The next morning (today), she found that the pond was half-empty. That meant, she said, we either had helper fairies or a leak. She refilled the pond about halfway and we left to visit my mom and pick up a new pump at Lowe’s. By the time we got back, the water level had not gone down, but we also noticed that the liner looked pretty threadbare in spots. We again drained the pond, got the new pump in place, and then partially refilled it. This week she’s going to contact the pond store in Monrovia to see if they have better liner than what we got at Lowe’s when we built it a few years ago. We’re likely going to be rebuilding the whole thing at some point this week.

F150

I inherited from my dad a teal green 1996 Ford F150. We’ve used it a lot over the years to haul trash, dirt, and mulch, as well as move friends and family all around the county. But honestly, it’s pretty neglected. Last year, during one of my rants about “cars these days”, I realized I had a perfectly repairable pickup sitting outside. I know basically nothing about cars. At best, I can do routine maintenance. But that day I decided to learn how to work on this particular pickup. It should be relatively simple to learn; there’s plenty of room under the hood and it has power nothing. Even the windows are hand crank. I bought a Haynes repair manual and started making a list.

First task: repair the driver’s side inside door handle. Right now when you want to exit the truck, you have to roll down the window and use the outside handle.

See that torn metal? There’s supposed to be a tab there where the handle attaches. I found a reinforcement plate at broncograveyard.com that I can pop rivet over the top of that area. Apparently this is pretty common on old F150s. I ordered it plus some door panel clips today.

Also, the gear shifter is sloppy. I already knew the solution here: tighten the bolt under the dash that connects to the shifter tube. Since we had been driving it a bit more lately, it had worked itself loose again. Today I read a suggestion of some blue threadlock to keep it in place. I did that a few minutes ago. Here’s hoping it holds.

Mentioning “total work” earlier today has me thinking again about how strange our contemporary work culture seems to me. Strange, I think, because I never really came through the usual acculturating institutions.

A bit about my background. I come from a working class lineage, through my grandparents and beyond. Well, that’s being generous about my dad’s family, which might be better described as “working-when-not-drunk class.” There are some professionals here and there among the aunts and uncles and cousins but my direct line is all laborers, secretaries, and cooks (not chefs!). My mom worked in entry-level medical and clerical jobs. My dad worked at the French Lick hotel in the bad old days, before it was restored by the Cook family. He also worked on the railroad before a disastrous accident that ruined his back. Eventually he got a HVAC certificate at Ivy Tech and worked a few years at a local HVAC company (whose owners moonlighted as a Southern Gospel quartet) before getting on at the Ford factory in its declining years. He worked there until his death; it moved to Mexico not long after. I resonate with Wendell Berry’s disdain for James B. Duke because I feel the same way about Bill Clinton: unforgetting, unyielding contempt because of what he and his rich friends did to my family and community.

I was encouraged to get an education, in the practical “get a good job” sense. They were excited for me when I started on the pharmacy track at Butler University. Alas, organic chemistry and romance ended those hopes: I quit after my sophomore year because Rachel was the only future that mattered. I started looking for delivery jobs simply because I liked the delivery job in high school. That led me to interview for a shipping and receiving job (delivery adjacent!) in a small manufacturer. While I was interviewing, the guy said “You know, we just had an office job open up today and I think you’re better suited for that.” Swallowing my offended feelings, I accepted an accounts receivable job.

At some point I had put my name in the lottery for a job at the Ford factory. While I was working in AR at the manufacturer, I got a call from Ford. (Rachel, was that call actually offering me the job or only offering me an interview? My memory is fuzzy, as usual.) At that point in the factory’s history, they weren’t really offering the full-time, union-benefits jobs. You could work your way into those but a job at Ford/Visteon was no longer a guarantee of a solid, middle-class living. My dad didn’t love the idea of me working in a factory, especially since it no longer offered a secure future. My pastor also thought I should “do something more” and encouraged me to finish my degree. I turned down Ford/Visteon and started night classes in accounting. Why accounting? Because I was working in accounts receivable. Imaginative, right?

Eventually my employer closed the manufacturing business and I got a job at a big nonprofit doing data entry in the accounting department. I eventually finished my BS in Accounting, slowly worked my way up in the accounting department, took several more classes, became a CPA, became the assistant controller and then interim VP of accounting for a few months before I quit and took my current, intentionally downsized job. Embrace downward mobility, as I told a friend recently.

One of the main reasons I embraced downward mobility was contemporary work culture. As I mentioned before, and as you can see from my history, I’ve never been a product of the right acculturating institutions. I didn’t graduate from the sort of “b-school” that had alumni networking events; it was the sort of school that advertised on daytime TV for people who were “unemployed or underemployed, or looking to turn their career around.”

I don’t read business books and I don’t listen to podcasts instructing me on how to be a “people leader.” I don’t admire CEOs or entrepreneurs (quite the opposite). I steadfastly refuse business lingo. The goals and lifestyles of those who are successful in this work culture are utterly strange to me, like I’m visiting another planet. For this I am thankful.

Despite my occasional dream of a liberal arts education, my actual educational experience has been eminently practical. Years ago I said I was a white-collar worker with a blue-collar heart–and I think that’s more true than ever. That’s not to say I didn’t pick up some affectations along the way. For a long time the “do something more” idea remained a part of me and I thought of myself as an aspiring intellectual. Thank God that’s over. I’m still scraping off some barnacles here and there but I’ve made peace with who I am and, more importantly, where I come from. In true second-half-of-life fashion, this work of reclamation is the task that matters now.

Adam Smith, “The Work of Leisure” (Local Culture, Fall 2025):

For Snyder the main obstacle to the rebirth of leisure is our devotion to work. We’re so devoted to work that even our play is workaday, since play for us is recuperation for work, and “we are still toiling when we are watching television,” as Snyder notes. Watching TV is a necessary evil, like work. It’s “like recovering from an injury.” Leisure, both for Aristotle and Rousseau, is not the opposite of work; it’s the opposite of the work/play dichotomy, and we’re so committed to that dichotomy that leisure holds little attraction to us: when we say we want more leisure, what we actually mean is that we want more play, which really means that we want more energy for work.

This triggered a realization about why I don’t like contemporary “prestige” dramas: they’re too much work. I’ve said here before that when I watch TV, I want simple entertainment; I don’t want homework.

Perhaps contemporary prestige dramas feel like work because they are by and for those who live the contemporary work/play dichotomy. They represent a play that is meant to be rejuvenating for more work. But because of play’s recursiveness (in this understanding), it must be “bettering.” It is ultimately intended to sharpen the mind dulled by the day’s work, so that it is ready to work again tomorrow.

I’m not saying my preference for simple-minded pleasure—laughs, chills, and thrills—is high-minded leisure. Far from it. But I do suspect the prestige dramas are an artifact of the culture of total work.