5 Quick Things #367 🌿

adding salt, Adirondack chairs, acedia, and Hobbits

May 09, 2025

Hey there,

Habemus papam! 💛 And the first American pope! 🤯

…Like everyone else, I didn’t remotely see that vote coming. Let’s all pray for our Holy Father:

O God, shepherd and ruler of all the faithful, look favorably on your servant whom you have set at the head of your Church as her shepherd; grant, we pray, that by word and example he may be of service to those over whom he presides so that, together with the flock entrusted to his care, he may come to everlasting life.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

*Springtime at Giverny*, by Claude Monet (1886) #

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Hobbits as the model of temperance? You wouldn’t think at first blush — but Maddie Dobrowski makes some solid points: “Tolkien’s Hobbits stand as an objection to the notion that temperance is all about saying ‘no.’ Temperance is fundamentally a ‘yes’ to enjoying the world the way it was meant to be enjoyed.”
2. For Mother’s Day this weekend, I’ve asked for the same thing I ask for every year: 1. time outdoors with my family (preferably near water), 2. food I don’t cook, and 3. a clean house I didn’t clean. May the Lord hear my prayer!
3. Use the finger-touch method for doneness, add salt afterwards, and make your sauces — plus 27 other things Steph Robinson learned at European cooking school. I may not have gone to a bonafide Irish cooking school, but in my two-plus decades of cooking for my family, and I agree with these useful tips.
4. As I mentioned at the start of Easter, an easy way to take a posture of feasting during the long season of Eastertide is to take your quotidian life outdoors. So, this week I’ve been doing my morning prayer time + sipping my morning coffee while chatting with Kyle out on the deck in our new Adirondack chairs. He tells me the types of all the birds chirping (he can tell based on their birdsong) while I tell him all the thoughts swimming in my head (as the resident morning person) while he wakes up. …It’s been lovely.
5. And finally, no new Drink episode today (it’ll come out next Friday)… While you wait, here’s a favorite rerun.