Thread 6 - TalkExiles: "Yup, still round."

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of previous threads (thread 5).

Gather here all ye refugees from the JTT Flat Earth Society, welcome to the reassuringly oblate spheroid of MN! Ye all already know the answers to the questions "How the heck do I format my post?" "Why can't I edit my typos?" "What do those acronyms mean?" and most importantly, "Where is everybody that I used to know?"

So really we're all here just to chat randomly.

The mass sounds amazing! Dawn seems like the perfect time for Easter mass.

Happy Easter to all!

Terrible news about Darkhorse.

Dawn mass in a graveyard sounds very atmospheric!

The local church bells have been really going for it this morning but have just this minute stopped. I guess that means the service has just started.

I am having a bathroom blinds conundrum, comments welcomed:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/home_decoration_pictures/4781034-privacy-window-film-for-bathroom

Mass in the churchyard in the dark sounds like quite an event @DeanVolecapeAKAelderberry

“And my first chocolate since Shrove Tuesday - big egg? little egg? chocolate covered cherries? decisions decisions.”

I mean, the obvious answer is all the above!

In air fryer news, I just looked at my electricity usage for this week and wondered about the spike in Friday. What did I do to use over 25% more electricity than usual? Then I remembered: I cooked a roast dinner in the actual oven. Obviously a roast dinner means having the oven in for longer than most other meals but even so, that’s quite a difference.

I bought a pre-cooked lamb in redcurrant sauce thing for my dinner, and inspired by this thread heated it in the air fryer rather than the oven with complete success. I am now rather full of food.

The Easter dawn mass is lovely - done for the first time for the 'Jubilee year' in 2000, it's become a tradition - and last year was the first and only time it rained. Today was a bit overcast so we didn't get the full moon floating along the hilltop before setting, but we did have a wonderful dawn chorus. Also a brisk north wind blowing in from the nearby lake, but gloves and coats do work. My parents are buried there, I'll be buried there, there are many friends there now - that Easter Gospel with the women going to the graveyard and finding the empty tomb does resonate.

Now to find those little eggs - a bit of the big one has gone its destination, as have some of the cherries. And maybe a little glass of imitation Baileys would be in order.

Our new Easter Sunday tradition (started yesterday) will be to do an Escape Room. DDs love escape room or exit game type things.

Passed our local church on the way home yesterday afternoon, and on the path outside it they had made a display of what (from a distance) looked like a collection of fairy gardens in disposable roasting trays: mossy lawns, pebble paths, little features make of twigs tied together with string, tiny buildings made of scrap wood, broken pots and stones. When we got closer, we realised the children of the congregation had made them, and they were little Easter dioramas. The mossy lawns and pebble paths were as expected. The little twig features were loads of crosses. The tiny buildings were crypts with a larger boulder at the entrance.

Also, have a look at these:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2023/apr/08/preserved-in-pixels-traditional-malaysian-shops-and-eateries-in-pictures

Delightful little models of shops, stalls and cafes straight from my childhood in Malaysia. And many of these are fast disappearing (not the food purveyors, to be fair, those are sacrosanct in Malaysian culture).

Are Easter gardens a new thing? I've suddenly started seeing lots of mini tombs all over social media this year.

They were an Anglican Sunday School thing in the late 60s and early 70s - I had friends who always made them.

We used to make them when I was a kid in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It was just as much a Spring thing as a religious thing I think.

I think our Junior school, nominally C of E but in practice secular (because huge, 40 children per class) encouraged them, but it tended to be the same few children in each class who got involved (probably Sunday School types who understood what was going on - at that stage my family wasn't churchgoing and I had little or no clue).

Very sorry to hear the news about darkhorse. I hope someone can tell him - I think he's male? - that we're thinking of him here.

Very glad to see that a few of us have delurked to wish darkhorse well. Such sad news and he's only in his 50s. Fuck cancer.

I axed my login for there.

I don’t remember making dioramas at Easter, just palm crosses (for Palm Sunday) and Easter bonnets.

Happy Zombie Jesus Day!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Easter diorama. Easter to me is all about chocolate bunnies which signify springtime and the importance of chocolate.

Those digital Malaysian shops are fantastic!

My daughter and her family have just been in Dubai on holiday for a week. On the way back the three year old saw a man in full emirate dress and yelled "mummy is that Jesus?"

Ha ha, @Britinme !

That's adorable, @Britinme.

My Jesus story dates back to when I was about three and was taken to either Good Friday or Maundy Thursday mass. I thought it was Good Friday but then apparently there is no mass on Good Friday so my poor Catholic brain has had a huge fart over all the Good Friday masses I thought I'd been to.

Anyway! The big church Crucifix is down and everyone queues up to kneel and kiss the feet of Jesus. It's my turn - and frankly, anyone who takes a toddler to kiss the feet of a crucified Christ has no one to blame except themselves when things go tits up - I see Jesus lying there and can only assume that I thought it was some sort of lollipop deal going on. I don't know what I was thinking being far removed from toddler me. I see the feet, I see the legs. I see the whole Jesus thing lying there and I bend down, lick his feet, lick up his legs and I'm keeping going when I'm picked up and taken away. I remember I wasn't too bothered because Jesus tasted like copper coins and not a nice lollipop. So, yeah, I was licking all the way up to Jesus's downstair's business and that is my Jesus story.

Ha ha, Crows! That would make a very funny scene in a TV show, I can picture it perfectly.

I need to write a sitcom!

That's hilarious @NotDrowningJustCrowing !

Very good crows. It's a communion service (technically mass of the presanctified) with cross-kissing on Good Friday - my anxiety this year was because I'm still wearing a mask in church, and had no intention of taking it off for the kissing bit (about 70 other people had already done it, finding an untouched spot was unlikely). So glad I didn't have a mental image of tiny you licking your way up, I might have had a totally inappropriate fit of giggles.