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!”

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 on the floor in front of the Pink Chair.

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 guards Ivory

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

Moon arising

Look what I found when I was cleaning up my desk. Those kids start disrespecting their elders just as soon as they can, don’t they? Only a year and some months old, and already she was mooning me.

There she is!

What could be more appropriate than a picture of a recent very long day? We awoke at 5 a.m. to drive to UC Santa Cruz for our daughter’s graduation ceremony, and arrived back home sometime after midnight.

See Ivory waiting for her name to be called? Of course you do. She’s the one with the yellow tassel. Okay, look for a person with a white blob near her robe’s neckline (which is really a giant daisy she appropriated from one of the campus flowerbeds), just above the straw hat in the audience.

Added: I have just created a business blog to celebrate the new year.