Blogkeeping Notes for Fall 2025

Hi friends,

This isn’t a real post. This is just my every-few-months blogkeeping post, to help you keep track of what I’ve been up to and how to follow and support me.

This summer has been quiet and beautiful, with a trip to Moundsville to see the ancient burial mound and trying to keep peace among the neighborhood children. I have been reclaiming my love of reading. Jimmy’s boy has been visiting to help me in the garden and teaching me what it means to be a family. I daydreamed of my favorite house on Assumption Day. Politically speaking, I’ve unfortunately had to talk about the horrors of eugenics, about the Trump administration’s shameful abuse of immigrants, our culture of mass shootings, and the moral panic surrounding the murder of Charlie Kirk. Now, coming up in the Autumn, we’ll have Adrienne’s birthday, my return to helping with after school classes, and hopefully more field trips.

I was honored to be published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette again, and any time you read and talk about my articles there it helps me to get invited back!

If you follow me on social media, you probably already know that I became infamous on Twitter, but I don’t post there as often as I used to now that Twitter is X. I just check in once a day or so, and I may eventually stop doing that. Nowadays, I am most active on Bluesky and I’d love for you to give me a follow there. Also, please remember that I have a second blog on Substack, most of which is free, but if you’re a paying subscriber you will get some members-only posts and some video meditations on the Sunday Gospels for your money. In general, this Patheos blog is for my writing about my day-to-day life, about Catholicism, and my political posts that are more directly related to my Catholicism. My Substack is for written posts that are political but not directly to do with faith, and also for my video posts.

And now, of course, the boilerplate.

My husband works in a restaurant, and my work is my writing. Capitalism being what it is, Michael’s hours change every month, and my pay is extremely variable as well. I get a tiny check for clicks in the United States from Patheos, sometimes as much as three figures, and I get a tiny royalty check from my books which is often good for paying the car insurance. I get paid per article when I publish other places. My family is still very dependent on people who subscribe to pay me a bit of money every month through my Substack or through my tip jar here on Patheos, and by people who just pay me a tip now and then when they can because they love my writing and want me to write more. But the current economic downturn means that I’m losing a couple of subscribed tippers every month. I’m making less by writing than I have in a couple years, and Michael is trying to get more hours to fill in the gaps.

We’re pulling in enough to keep from disaster a lot of the time, and then a surprise happens like the one with the car breaking down last month, and we have no way to make up for it.

So, as always, I ask: if you like what you read, give me a tip when you can! The leanest times of the month are around the tenth and around the twentieth, so those would be great times to subscribe to tip regularly. I have a paypal and a venmo. If you want to subscribe to my Substack, click on any of the written posts and follow the “subscribe” button. The name on my paypal is “The Little Portion” because that’s the name of an etsy shop I used to have, and it looks like a charitable donation but it’s not. I report them to the IRS as tips and pay taxes on them.

And now back to writing worth your time!