Today, on the Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time, we honor Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious (died 1591). An Italian noble who grew up in a castle, he was trained from age four as a soldier and courtier. He suffered from kidney disease, which he considered a blessing as it left him bed-ridden with time for prayer. While still a boy himself, he taught catechism to poor boys. He received his First Communion from Saint Charles Borromeo. At age 18, Aloysius signed away his legal claim to his family’s lands and title to his brother, and became a Jesuit novice. The spiritual student of Saint Robert Bellarmine, he tended plague victims in Rome, Italy in the outbreak of 1591 during which he caught the disease that killed him at age 23. He is thus the Patron Saint of both Catholic youth and of those seeking relief from pestilence. Today is also Father’s Day, celebrated on the Third Sunday in June. The celebration was inaugurated in the early twentieth century to complement Mother’s Day in celebrating fatherhood and male parenting, and to honor and commemorate fathers and forefathers. Where Mother’s Day was met with enthusiasm, Father’s Day was met with laughter; it was the target of much satire, parody and derision. A bill was introduced in 1913, US President Calvin Coolidge supported the idea in 1924, and a national committee was formed in the 1930s by trade groups in order to legitimize the holiday. It was made a federal holiday when President Lyndon Johnson issued a proclamation in 1966. And, finally, when I got married on January 28, 1984, I was 25 years, 4 months, and 23 days old; and today marks 25 years, 4 months, and 23 days that I have been married. So, from now on, I have been married to Richard longer than I was single before marrying him. (Sounds like a watershed to me.)
About fifteen minutes before I woke up to greet the darkness of night, the Summer Solstice arrived at 12:45 am; so Summer has officially begun. (In SouthWestCentral Louisiana, Summer began about a month ago, if not sooner; we were in the sub-tropics before Global Warming was even thought of.) Before work, I gave Richard a Father’s Day Card.
Richard and I worked our eight hours today, with me on Blackjack, and Richard on Mini-Baccarat / Pai-Gow relief. It was a good Sunday at the casino; plenty of refugee poker players on the floor (from the ongoing tournament), and plenty of guys arriving for the Father’s Day Drawing (men only). Today was the last day of our two-week pay period; out of 80 possible hours, I worked 73 hours (I got out early on Monday the 8th, when Liz Ellen was still visiting); and Richard worked 80 hours out of a possible 80. So, with any luck, we should actually have some money to spare once our paychecks arrive for this pay period.
Once home, I freshened up my casino shirts in the dryer, and ate my salad while reading the Sunday papers (no news in our local paper of note except that our neighbor’s funeral was Saturday at 11:00 am – so what I saw as I left for Adoration was her people coming home from the funeral, and what I saw at the church just before 1:00 pm was someone else’s funeral.) While I was eating my lunch salad and reading the papers, our kids arrived with a cookie cake and a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 for Richard for Father’s Day. (Our son is visiting for the day from Baton Rouge, as Sundays are his day off from work.)
I then came into the bedroom, backed up my BlackBerry information and my third-party programs, and set about re-installing the operating system on my BlackBerry. I know I did this fairly recently (just last Wednesday, in fact); but yesterday I discovered that integrating my Facebook Friends with my BlackBerry Contacts uses way too much memory on my BlackBerry. It seems that just reversing the process (de-integrating my Friends with my Contacts) would restore the memory, but apparently not; so I set the BlackBerry to reinstalling the Operating System and my programs, and then took a nap from 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm.
When I awoke, I began putting my backed-up data back on my BlackBerry, did the TV scheduling, and did the weekly Computer Maintenance. At 5:00 pm, we (Richard, my son, and I; our daughter was at work) at dinner, which was ribs & pork loins, steamed asparagus, and white beans; and very good it was, too. I then continued getting my BlackBerry back to the way I like it, and set the DVR. (However, I did not go to 6:00 pm Mass; mea culpa, and that’s another item to add to the list for the next time I go to Confession.)
So, with messing around with my BlackBerry, I am close to the end of my day; so I will go ahead and finish today’s Daily Update, then make my lunch salads & breakfast eggs for the next two days before going to bed.
Tomorrow is Monday, and the first day of our pay period (we have high hopes of both of us making 80 hours for this upcoming pay period, which we should do, barring emergencies). In the afternoon, I will probably take a nap, so that I can be awake for the LSU – Texas game in the College World Series at 6:00 pm CDT on ESPN. (It’s a best two out of three series, so there will be another game Tuesday night, same bat-time, same bat-channel.)
We go a good ways back in time for tonight’s Parting Quote from Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, Italian philosopher, writer, and politician and one of the main founders of modern political science. As a Renaissance Man, he was a diplomat, political philosopher, musician, poet and playwright, but, foremost, he was a Civil Servant of the Florentine Republic. In June of 1498, after the ouster and execution of Girolamo Savonarola, the Great Council elected Machiavelli as Secretary to the second Chancery of the Republic of Florence. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli is considered a typical example of the Renaissance Man. He is most famous for a short political treatise, The Prince, a work of realist political theory; however, both it and the more substantive republican Discourses on Livy went unpublished until 1532 (after his death). Although he privately circulated The Prince among friends, the only work he published in his life was The Art of War, about high-military science. Since the sixteenth century, generations of politicians remain attracted and repelled by the cynical (realist) approach to power exposited in The Prince, the Discourses, and the History. Whatever his personal intentions (still debated today), his surname yielded the modern political words “Machiavelli” (a person of acute and scheming intelligence) and Machiavellianism (the use of cunning and deceit in politics or generally) (died 1527): “Before all else, be armed.”
From The Recamier 
I recall the look on your father Ed’s face when I pulled out my list “bless me father I do not wish to forget anything here….”
So I admit I got a giggle imagining you Blackberry in hand deleting your sins as they were forgiven
Then you reach heaven and Someone says…you know everything online still exists somewhere…..AND ITS HERE!!!!!
I consider being witty, being armed.
I do NOT have my BlackBerry in hand while at confession (she says with some dignity). I refer to the list of Sins before I go into Church. Although I have been known to tell the priest hearing Confessions, “this was a lot easier back in the days when I could say ‘bless me father, for I have sinned, I hit my sister again’.”