Christmas swag

(These look kind of funky small. I would recommend opening them up to see them for reals)
Pics of stuff June and others got for Christmas. Blocks that Martha played with all night long.
June got a Dora the Explorer baseball mitt. I was very excited.
She also got her first Slinky. Pretty sweet.

Kyle, Angela and the baby

If I were a carpenter, and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby? Kyle's my brother, and Angela is my sister in law. I took their pictures on Christmas at my grandmas, and took the baby's first pictures.

PIcs from the Christmas party

every year we gather with out distant relatives and have the most stereotypically wholesome, Norman Rockwell Christmas party, complete with a Nativity play, talent show and private Mass. Here are some pictures I took with my new camera. Abby plays "Silent Night" on her saw. The time lapse makes her look wavy gravy
My attempt of a portrait semi failed of the Obersts. I think I'm going to try and shoot portraits in the Old Market in a few days, just for practice.
The Nativity play came complete with cute little angels and shepherds.
This one came out descent of my parents and their neighbors.

My favs of the day

We done made us a picture taker...

Tom Brush and I took on the project today of making a camera that we made in Make Magazine (the grrrrreatest magazine I have ever read EVER).

We made this doozie that has become my pride and joy.
We got the scanner off of a creepy Scientologist in Bellevue this morning. The we attached to boxes, Gator Bord and magnifying glass and took some pics, son.

So long, Ben!

This was Ben Amdor's last night in town (Niemann is in the background winking at me). It was a sad night. He is moving to Ireland tomorrow for 3 or 4 months. So sad. So sad.

This is the memorial for Ben at Hotel Frank. We'll miss you comrade. Don't get killed protesting.

After a few beers, I thought I would make my mark at Hotel Frank. Guess which one I wrote I wrote (after I wrote a 10 page Theology paper and drinking a few beers).

Final for film photography

These are some of the final prints I made. I won't show them all right now, because some may end up being Christmas presents.

This was a still life done in the studio. That Jesuit behind the skull is my professor.

This was my other still life in the studio.

This was Fr. Schlegel at the Mass of the Holy Spirit at the beginning of the semester. This is a ceremony for the new semester at all of the Jesuit colleges.

In other news, I am <-----> this close from being done with my redesign. It's looking pretty good, I think.

Under construction

As you can tell, I'm reworking the blog for my Web design class, so it's going to look a little iffy for about a week.

Anywho, this is a print I made and sent as a postcard to Niemann.

Leo the Virgo

I made my nephew Leo a lion pillow on Friday for his baptism on Saturday.


He looks so sad... Poor Leo with the cute pillow.

Crosses

Creighton at the SOA

Creighton students, faculty, staff and Jesuits stand near the front of the memorial procession at the Gates of Ft. Benning, Ga. Each carried a cross with the name of someone killed by a graduate of School of the Americas, now called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

The Rev. Paul Coelho, S.J. holds a cross saying "presente" to the names of those killed.

The Rev. Roc O'Connor, S.J. places his cross in the fence of Ft. Benning, where the SOA/WHINSEC is located. Over 20,000 people participated in the procession.

Fr. Roy Bourgeois: "I can not recant"

Fr. Roy Bourgeois stands with Dennis Kusinich at last year's march to the gates of Ft. Benning.

The Vatican has informed a Roman Catholic priest in the United States that he will be excommunicated next week for participating in a ceremony it considers illicit and invalid: the ordination of a woman as a priest.

The priest, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, 69, has been a member of the Maryknoll religious order for 36 years. He said he was anguished at the thought of excommunication, but could not disavow his actions. (read the full NY Times story here)

Thousands gather to remember those killed by graduates of the School of the Americas, renamed WHINSEC, this year. Fr. Roy Bourgeois, the founder of SOA Watch, addressed the crowd to talk about why he started the protest, but he could not avoid addressing what was on everyone's minds: his excommunication from the church.

"Over the years you have heard me speak of injustice in in Latin America, and injustice in this war in Iraq, but now I must talk about the injustice in our church," he said to a silent audience.

"The exclusion of women in our church is a great injustice," he said. "I was told that by tonight I must recant my belief in women's ordiation in public, or face excommunication. After much prayer and descernment, I have decided that I can not recant."

With those words, Bourgeois left the stage. The crowd burst into applause and tears for his decision.

Ignatian Family Teach-In kicks of the weekend SOA/WHINSEC protest

I am blogging for the Creightonian this weekend, but can't get it to post through our server, so I'm posting it here for now.


Maria Theresa Gaston, director of Creighton Center for Service and Justice, spoke to the crowd of students, faculty and staff form universities around the country Friday night at the annual Ignatian Family Teach-In. She focused her dialogs on what the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, highligting what it meant to this group of social and poltical activists.

"We travel in the path taken by Ignatius, to find divine life at the depths of reality. Ou mode of proceeding is to trace the footprints of God everywhere," she quoted from GC35.

From this cogregation, she said all Jesuit educated people, who their lives for others are called have four main vocations in life:

1. Be a healer.
:The planet needs healing and it is going to take all of us," she said. She quoted the GC35 when saying "POisoned water, polluted air, massive deforestaton, deposits of atomic and toxic waste are causing death and untold suffering, particularly to the poor."

2. Be a geographer.
"We need to actually study the world, and get ourselves out there through immersion trips and service and justice work of all kinds," she said. "This requires us all to be social analysts and to learn the issues and challenges."

3. Be an excersize scientist.
By this point in our Creighton education, we are all farmiliar with the Igantian excersizes.
"we have marvelous facilites on all of our campuses, trainers and coaches, Jesuits as well as lay men and women who acn share the movements of the Spiritual Excersizes of St. Ignatius. They're for all of us, no matter what body type."

4. Be a community organizer.
"The social reality of our world, the desire of God for our well-being, the stirrings of our hearts and rallying of our gifts will call many of us into leadership. We, who have been educated by the Jesuits havebeen entrusted with a ton. We are called to serve in a way to cooperae with God and empower others."

GOCU!!!!

It may actually be spelled Goku, but who cares??? For anyone who is reading this who isn't Abby, let me explain. Gocu is a fake word that Abby invented and taught to Baby June, my little niece (pictured left). The word has become part of her vernacular, which is amazing... I've also been told it's the name o a Pokemon or something? Can someone verify that for me?

Below is an ad that ran in the Creightonian.

Take a closer look to the coupon on the ad:



IT IS EVERYWHERE!!!!

In other news, my site will be "under construction" for a few weeks. I'm redesigning it for my Web design class.

this is the last thing on the election, I swear

So I finally talked the special sections editor into letting me something on Nader for the election section... but then she said if I was going to write up one 3rd party candidate, I'd have to do them all. Fuck.... Abby, remember that guy from the Constitution Party? Yeah, he's pretty creepy. I posted my little package I did for page four of the section below... somehow the Qs got off kilter when I transferred it over to PDF it, but you get the idea.

In conclusion, congratulations Bob Barr, you fucking nutcase, for getting your name in the paper.



Click here for a good time.

My best story

Written for an internship application:

She was still in high school, living with her baby in a trailer without electricity in a rural area of the Mississippi Delta. How did I, a middle-class white intern from a Jesuit university in Omaha find myself interviewing this woman? Simple. I was writing a series on infant mortality that eventually won the Louisiana-Mississippi AP Managing Editors award for interpretive writing. It was an indelible growing experience for a reporter.

It was part of my first internship at the Vicksburg Post, where I covered everything from a trial of a Ku Klux Klansman to dog shows. At the Post, I wrote my best story: “Hope Amid Despair,” a three-part series on infant mortality in Mississippi. While writing daily news stories, I was given six weeks to work on this on the side. I spent hours interviewing people who were all in different situations trying to find out why the babies died, and if anyone was at fault.

This story taught me how to tell individual stories to point out a bigger concern. I collected information on agencies helping low income families find assistance and highlighted efforts to combat the epidemic.

Mississippi is accustomed to being last in many categories: last in healthcare, last in income, first in diabetes and infant mortality. In this story I was able to point out a problem while highlighting the steps that state government was taking steps to make it better.

Writing this series was also a lesson in time management and organization. Agencies gave me binders of information about case studies and statistics, and I made sure I could rapidly find what I needed. While I was writing this story, I was also driving 60 miles every day to Jackson to cover a murder trial. I had to find time in the day to report on the trial while setting up interviews and researching infant mortality.

Since then, I interned at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writing arts and feature stories. I also spent a semester working on a multimedia piece on Creighton in 1968, where I interviewed former students and professors on the 40th anniversary of the year Bobby Kennedy made a historic speech on campus, George Wallace caused a riot in downtown Omaha and Creighton students were arrested in the streets of Chicago. I wrote the story and edited video clips for the Internet.

“Hope Amid Despair” only strengthened my resolve to be a reporter. I hope to do more in-depth coverage and investigative reporting and I’ll work every day to write good, solid stories.

Vote your hopes, not your fears

That title was a sign I saw on the way to work everyday in Seattle. It was spray painted under a bridge. For everything that Seattle lacks, its graffiti was better than ours.

That said, I figure I'll share this with you. I sent an email to 30 different news rganizatons to tell them what I think about blacking out third party candidates.

Here's what I said:

"Dear Editor,

My name is Molly Mullen. I am a journalism major at Creighton, and I love the media more than anything. I fight in support of it on a daily basis, standing up for us journalists for doing to the right thing and having outstanding morals.

It saddens me, then, to think of what has been happening this election season to third party candidates. For my college paper I have been working to interview every candidate on the ballot in Nebraska, not just the ones involved in the debates.

If I can do it, a student with two majors, 50 hours of work a week and the news editor of her paper, so can you.

We are the people's people. We work to give voices to the voiceless. We can change the world. Remember? All those reasons you became a journalist? Keeping the focus off third party candidates goes against our beliefs as reporters of truth.

As for your audience, the American public would love to see things get shaken up. They would love to see coverage and read reports of these candidates. That too, would force the two main candidates to answer harder questions, to look at their real differences and similarities.

As a newswoman, I urge you in these final weeks to give coverage to all candidates for the presidency, so the American voter can make an informed decision in the voting booth."


Sure I'm biased. I want Nader to get votes. But don't you think it's wrong that we're not allowed to make our own decision? Sunday will be a debate for third party candidates at Columbia University (McCain and Obama are also invited) but no news station other than C-Span will pick it up.

Roaches have infested my life

Remember the days when I could come home from a hard day's work, crawl onto my nice, warm air mattress and kick back to a little Doogie Howser and Mario? Well those dreams have died. Now when I come home I have go roach hunting, finding them in m drawers, all over the kitchen... I even hound a dead one in my bed just now.

I hope we can start a circus act, or else they aren't allowed to stay here anymore.

A little something to tickle your tastebuds

Abby and company made this for me while staying with me in Vicksburg two summers ago. I found it in my documents while I was looking for newspaper clips for my portfolio. It's been a Mississippi kind of day.

Photos that sadly will not become prints

So it was another fun-filled week in my print photos class. I took some that I liked, but for one reason or another I'm not going to take the time to turn into prints. Either I didn't shoot it right, I effed up the developer or they just don't fit the assignment. Bee Tee Dubs, I'm going to make my very first print this week, so wish me luck.

This one I took while eating my tasty Chuck Berry pancakes at the diner. I just turned around and practically has an All-American orgasm. These two guys, both in great hats, wearing blue jeans and suspenders, reading the paper and drinking their coffee in a diner on Friday morning. Perfection. Unfortunately, the assignment was for portraits. In fact, my teacher is more or less against taking people's photos without their permission, and is pretty anti-newspaper, so we're already butting heads.

This was at B & G's because apparently I eat out at diners too much. Cute little kids eating at a counter, but I don't think the cuteness translated when it printed. I just didn't want anyone to see me snap the shot of the little kids and get ideas about what i was up to...

This is all kids of wrong, photography speaking. but also... all kinds of right.