Month: February 2026

St. Jerome is my first patron saint.

I was listening to Lisa Cotter’s podcast on the Hallow app, called Hallowed Be Thy Day. As she opens her podcast, she says it is “your daily guide to history, feasts, and traditions, to help make your day a little more holy.” FYI- Hallow means holy.

Each of these podcasts are no more than 8 minutes long; she, too, has a family, a job, responsibilities, and doesn’t always have the time for lengthy monologues.

During her podcast yesterday, she mentioned that you could find the name of a patron saint, (if you were wanting to have one, which, as it happened, I was), on a website called saintsnamegenerator.com. So, of course, I opened that website, run by a female Christian comedian, of all things, named Jen Fulwiler. She is also a “programmer”, hence her ability to program a saints name search engine, I suspect.

The first saints name that came up was totally unrecognizable to me, and I, unfortunately, didn’t take the extra few seconds to read her blurb about him. I touched the “Find a saint for me” button again, and there he was; Saint Jerome.

This has significance for me for a couple of reasons. 1) our children went to their first Catholic school, St. Jeromes, in Houston, TX, when we lived there. It was the start, for them both, on their Catholic upbringing. 2) he was mentioned in the podcast as being “most notably remembered for his revision and translation of parts of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin that had been commissioned by Pope Damasus, creating an edition later known as the Latin Vulgate. Before this, only the Hebrew and Greek (Septuagint) translations were in existence.” This, in later years, allowed others to translate the Bible into multiple different languages. Thank you St. Jerome.

So, I now have, as my first patron saint, St. Jerome, a translator. I have prayed that he will help me, in these next few years, translate Spanish to English so I can become fluent in my adopted language. I understand quite a bit, but have severe trepidation speaking Spanish, though, those with whom I have spoken tell me I speak it well.

What an amazing gift. Thank you Lord.

Until next time, stay happy, and healthy in His grace.

Then there’s baking.

I have discovered, in this holiday season of baking sweet things for others, that I really don’t like baking sweet things. Things that need to be rolled out into specific shapes. A circle. Or a square. A rectangle.

I texted my sisters this revelation earlier today, and one of them texted me back, I won’t tell you which one but she knows who she is, that she didn’t like rolling out dough either,because she didn’t own a rolling pin. 😂😂

I texted back that I had several, but none of them worked. 😂

Yesterday, I made a Christmas Star bread, and gave it to the guards downstairs in thanks for their keeping us safe this past year. They enjoyed it. I didn’t have enough flour to make 2 more to take to Los Altos with me, so I made some curly things with the same dough, and the cinnamon/sugar combo.

My word sugar is addictive. I haven’t had anything with sugar since July, and I’m here to tell you I couldn’t stop nibbling on the curly things. Now, I’m so sleepy I find it difficult to type.

I’m going to take the curly things with me, though I won’t let them know how embarrassed I am. They need to be eaten, and my friends/families will be kind enough to do just that. They’ll probably tell me how good they are, and I’ll thank them. They’re good people who wouldn’t want to embarrass me to my face. Thank God.

Until next time, stay happy, and healthy in the Lord.

The curly things.