Wrap-Up

I alluded to the fact we bought some calves last week. They are Jersey bull calves, about a week old from a dairy farm. When we brought them home it appeared one was not well and the other fine. Then it reversed itself. The sick one seems well, frolicking and eating well. The other got steadily worse over the weekend.

The hope was that we could raise these as steers for 6 months or so, slaughter one for ourselves and sell the other to help pay the feed bill (even with these being Jersey's, not known for beef).

Mrs. Curley and the two older boys had been working quite a bit with the sick calf (We had given electolytes, anti-biotic etc but by Sunday he wasn't taking much even when they tried to pour it down his throat. We didn't have a drenching kit and the feed store was closed), but hope was waning yesterday as I went to work in the city. On the weekend we just couldn't get what we needed. I planned on bringing home a drench kit from the city to see if we could snatch life from death. But it was too late. He died yesterday afternoon.

I really felt I should have been there, but I had to work. I am proud of the boys for taking care of everything for me.

I don't know if the remaining calf will be happy by itself, they are herding creatures. Yesterday was a sad day.

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Last night I came home very late from the city and caught 1030 AM from Boston on the radio for a couple minutes. It was strange to hear Boston talk radio with personalities I remember on the back roads of South Carolina. Last week coming home late, I listened a station in Ohio. But as I write this now, I realize I probably should have been saying the rosary instead of channel surfing in the car.

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I think by now others have said it, but it occurred to me the other day that the 'change' Obama promised is turning into a Clinton Administration re-run; at least that's how the posts are being filled.

And another thing, how long are people and other countries (read: China) going to buy up Treasury notes so we can prop up the financial system and have a stimulus package. I am not sure I like where this is going either way. (By the way, the Distributist Review Blog had at least two posts this past week suggesting how to bailout Detroit properly. Someone should send these to our President-elect and to every member of Congress.)

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Busy next couple days with cleaning and minor home improvement projects as we get ready for Thanksgiving. In your spare time though, check out Anthony Esolen's latest at Inside Catholic. Here's the opening salvo:

We Catholics are commonly urged to "engage the culture"; not to flee for monasteries of our own making, but to work within the institutions of mass media, mass education, mass marketing, and mass entertainment to advance the banners of Christ, our King.

I do not wish to criticize those who toil at that thankless task. Nor will I suggest that their work will be futile; no true service of the Lord can be without fruit. But I do believe we have mistaken the signs of the times. We seek to engage a culture, when there is no culture to engage. Our task is rather to revive the memory of what a culture is.

If that declaration seems provocative, I ask you to consider that word "culture," and to cease using it to denote the habits and fads of the masses. For the "masses" do not produce culture. The people do, when they cherish and preserve and pass along to their descendants what is most dear to them: their memorials and feasts, their music and dances and rites of passage and of courtship; their know-how, their moral laws; most important, their worship.

Great stuff...Oremus pro invicem!