Our Memorial Day weekend baking experiment: Zimtsterne, a German/Swiss cinnamon cookie made with almond meal, powdered sugar, and egg white, baked in a 250-degree oven on a hot day. Only 4 grams of carbs per 3-cookie serving!

I know the frosting is traditional, but thinking these might be better coated with powdered sugar (see the star in the lower right). F proposed the frosting might work better as a dip for the cookies.

Wordle 344 6/6

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Excellent girls’ day out with F: splurged on new manga and a new D&D book; had breakfast and lunch out with lots of good talks; and binge-watched a lot of anime. Grateful.

Hope this bodes well for a summer of recalibrating after a rough end to middle school.

Wordle 343 4/6

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My kid is learning the hard way how much teenage girls can really suck toward one another.

Starting to experience PTSD all over again from my junior high and high school years. My goal is to make sure my kid has more support through these years than I ever did.

Wordle 341 6/6

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F is now a high school freshman. She wore Grandma Garcia’s diamond pendant, exactly a year and a day after her passing. Onward.

NPR reminds us:

There are a couple of inevitable responses to a mass shooting in America: funerals and fundraisers, prayers from politicians and the resurfacing of one particular article from satirical site The Onion.

”’No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" has been republished 21 times in almost exactly eight years.”

I just saw a Uvalde shooting victim’s First Communion photo, and I am officially broken. Retiring from news and social media for a while.

Watched the two-part doc on the Kids in the Hall, “Comedy Punks,” hoping it might get me to like them. It didn’t work. I really want to like them (I’ve always thought Dave Foley was adorable, and I saw Scott Thompson outside a White Hen Pantry once in Chicago), but I can’t.

Wordle 340 5/6

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Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, dismissing “the Republican talking point that mass shootings are a problem of mental illness, not easy access to guns” (emphasis mine):

Spare me the bullshit about mental illness. We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world. You cannot explain this through a prism of mental illness, because we don’t — we’re not an outlier on mental illness. We’re an outlier when it comes to access to firearms and the ability of criminals and very sick people to get their hands on firearms. That’s what makes America different.

David French in The Atlantic ($):

Thoughts and prayers. It began as a cliché. It became a joke. It has putrefied into a national shame.

If tonight, Americans do turn heavenward in pain and grief for the lost children of Uvalde, Texas, they may hear the answer delivered in the Bible through the words of Isaiah:

“And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.”

Wordle 339 5/6

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Random thoughts:

  • I’m tired.
  • I don’t enjoy social media anymore. I’m beginning to wonder if staying in touch with friends from college and elsewhere is really worth sticking around Facebook.
  • My capacity for news – or what purports to be news – and the chattering masses online is down to nothing now. My online consumption is limited to faith content and sports coverage (often in newsletters), and sometimes even that can be intolerable.
  • I’ve grown incredibly disenchanted with humanity.
  • I’m exceedingly grateful for this little web space of mine.
  • My head is crowded with thoughts about how to uncrowd it. My soul feels so cluttered and in desperate need of structure.
  • Themes that keep popping up in my spiritual reading (not listed in order of importance): order, peace of heart, mortification and suffering, Jesus in the Gospels, purity of intent, forgiveness, disappointment.
  • Very grateful for the Hallow and Amen apps that provide prayers and meditations and Scripture readings I can listen to when I need to wind down at night.
  • Did I mention I’m tired? Deeply, deeply tired.

Logged 50 work hours last week.

That’s it. That’s the post.

Wordle 338 4/6

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F’s cooking class made alfajores, a shortbread-like sandwich cookie filled with dulce de leche and popular in South America, but a field trip for another class kept her from sampling them. So, we made them at home.

I thought I’d be bored by today’s morning ballgame on Peacock. But Jason Benetti and his rapport with the local baseball analysts du jour make the game eminently watchable. ⚾️

Wordle 337 4/6

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Wordle 335 6/6

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Whew, indeed.

Wordle 334 6/6

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Had a lovely visit this evening with Hudson, a Bernese mountain dog and world’s largest lap animal.

Wordle 333 5/6

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Forgot the Wordle yesterday. I make a point of not doing it until after morning prayers, and I just went about my day after prayers and forgot.

Too bad my streak starts over; more concerned about keeping up our “Genius” streak on the Spelling Bee puzzle in The New York Times.

Wordle 332 5/6

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