A few days off

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. Ours was pretty good. We spent a few days back in my home town of Appleton, Wisconsin, a prosperous small city of about 75,000 people, not including the sorta suburban areas to the west, north, and southeast of town. Add those in and you get to about 100,000. I took some pictures; here is the doorway of St. Therese, the church where my parents were married in 1963 and I made my First Holy Communion in 1970:

Doors of my life

We got back to Minnesota on Christmas Eve and went to Midnight Mass (well, it was technically 10 p.m.) at our home parish and then had an uneventful Christmas Day and Boxing Day at home. It's been a busy stretch for us; we were in St. Louis the previous weekend and we've been furiously trying to catch up since Thanksgiving. One of these days I might even write our annual Christmas letter.

Apparently Trump is in trouble again, or maybe after yesterday he isn't. It's tough to know, really. It's becoming increasingly difficult to figure out what's happening, because all news is so heavily encrusted with bias it's tough to sort out what really matters and what is purely invective. Is it more important that Trump didn't visit the troops, or that he did, or that he might have had foot problems 50 years ago? Is it more important that the stock market had a rough patch, or is it more important that it went up 1000 points yesterday? Apparently the government is shut down, although signs of government are everywhere and there's seems to be no trouble with tax withholding, either.

I am going to try to get back to a more normal blogging schedule now that we're back in town. I hope the coming days are joyful and prosperous for you as we approach the coming year.