Month: March 2003

In looking up more information about Xenia Pokrovsky after reading about the upcoming Icon Writing Workshop in Lexington, I found a site that shows the Synaxis Of All Saints Who Have Shone Forth In North America icon that she wrote in 1994 for Metropolitan Theodosius. The site has closeups of the saints faces and events depicted. Unfortunately the scans are not the sharpest, but it’s still a nice resource to this beautiful icon. There’s also a somewhat clearer version that includes nice closeups of St. Raphael of Brooklyn.

I’d previously seen the Synaxis of Saints Who have Shone Forth in North America icon by the hand of Diane Plaskon Koory, which appears to be quite similar, but with a broader color palette.

It’s wonderful to look at these icons of the founding and forming of the church in North America.

By the way, work on the High Bridge Rail-trail, lenten services, and some extra hours at my day job have led to the recent lag between postings. More on all of those later.

James pointed me to a very interesting blog, St. Stephen’s Musings. I haven’t read that much from it, but the debate and discussion about open and closed communion practices have been fascinating.

Surprisingly, I found out that Simeon also has a blog. Ah… more good readin’.

I’ve observed that those, especially Christians, suffering from terminal illnesses will often make a genuine effort to resolve broken relationships and to seek forgiveness from others. This is a way of preparing for death. I suspect the closer you are to death, the clearer you can see how precious life is.

Participating in Forgiveness Sunday vespers last week and contemplating the experience, I’m struck that this is how we should be. Every evening before going to sleep, we are reminded to prepare for our death. In the evening prayer of Saint John Damascene, our bed is compared to a coffin. We should live every day as though it were our last and spend our time in repentance.

I pray that this practice of forgiving those in my parish will help me learn the harder task of forgiving others and doing it more frequently.

I found the article Of Death and Dying to be helpful and challenging.

Why are France, Germany, and Russia opposed to war with Iraq? Follow the Money.

I’ve been waiting with much anticipation for the final release of Mozilla 1.3. I expect this will be an excellent Mozilla version and a highly recommended upgrade. There have been a number of terrific changes, including ones that allow web developers to create rich-text edit controls like htmlArea by interactivetools.com. Profile switching is another recently added feature that will be very nice for those that share computers.

In other Mozilla.org news, the Chimera browser for the Mac has been renamed to Camino™ and has a new 0.7 release available. They were forced to change the name due to trademark infringement. Shame that they picked something so bland. Camino is a Spanish word meaning “path” or “road”, so at least it has some loose relationship to a web browser.

EasyRGB’s Color Harmonizer makes it easy to find color complements and harmonies. It uses the full RGB palette to find the colors, so it’s not web-safe or even web-smart. Still very useful, even if you have a good eye for design. This would be visually stunning and powerful if combined with the moreCrayons tool I mentioned earlier.

The Nollau (Louis Edward) Railroad Glass Negative Collection has photographs of the bridge and station during the rebuilding, starting around photo no. 1123 of the bridges section. The quality of the online versions are not nearly as good as the ones I mentioned before.

The general structures page also mentions a photo of stairs on the side of a cliff. I suspect this was taken near High Bridge as well. And could this be the tunnel?

I also found a photograph of log rafts on the Kentucky River near High Bridge. It is from the Arthur Y. Ford albums at the University of Louisville.