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Many years ago, when she was a fine young Catholic carnivore, my daughter was parade queen for the IDES Gloria Council No. 3. (She’s the one on the left; that’s my son on the right.)

The Irmandade do Divino Espirito Santo (IDES) and Sociedade do Espirito Santo (SES) are fraternal benefit societies that hold Holy Ghost festas every spring in Portuguese enclaves throughout the world. And in Portugal and the Azores, of course.

Each festa committee selects a big queen and a little queen to lead the parade that starts off the festa. The parade marches from the hall, loops through the neighborhood to the church, then after mass returns to the hall where everyone lines up to eat sopas, a watery beef and mint soup poured over bread. (It tastes much better than it sounds.) The sopas is served free to everyone in honor of a sainted Portuguese queen who said, “Let them eat bread.” (Sort of.)

And if you want to make your very own sopas, you can find the recipe here. (I set up the printing but don’t receive any profit from sales.)

The festas are scheduled in conjunction with Easter; a particular festa might be held every year the fifth week after Easter. Here’s the California festa schedule.

The history of the festas is pretty interesting, but I’m no expert and not even Portuguese. Better information can be found in The Holy Ghost Festas. It’s apparently out of print, but Sacramento’s Greenhaven/Pocket Area — look, parade queens on the cover! — is still available.

There is a doom upon you, but of what sort I know not.

Completely unrelated: When my daughter was younger and I tried to share my copious experience in an effort to stop her from making the same butthead mistakes I did, she didn’t exactly cover her ears. What she did, instead, was declaim loudly, “Doomed! I’m doomed!”

I bought this chair in a Goodwill thrift shop circa 1979. It was covered in nubby pink fabric woven with metallic silver threads. The fabric was worn so thin in places that the white stuffing showed. I made a temporary cover out of some lovely fake leopard fur, and it matched our decor quite well while the children were in their feral stage. Later I had the chair recovered, as shown in the photo. But since the children moved out the chair has been sitting in an out-of-the-way corner of the living room, forlorn and forgotten.

It needs a new home, I thought, with someone who will treat it better than I have. Surprise — my daughter needed furniture to fill out her new apartment. A new home! Alas, not even a week and the chair was again crowded out by a couch. Here you see it relegated to temporary seating where visitors can remove their shoes. Sad, sad chair.

And those are my stylish shoes in the lower right.

A lovely bike, finely crafted by Steve Rex, with a Lynskey titanium frame. I hear it rides well. I haven’t been on it myself.

That headless man? Some guy who volunteered to hold the bike for me while I took a photo. Don’t you know it’s all about the bike?

I love the torso-only look made popular with recent book covers. I think I’ll crop the heads out of all my photos from now on.

Cinder was the first cat I had after becoming an adult. She was a good cat.