Working and Walking on Holy Thursday

Greetings, Dear Ones,

Tuesday and Thursday are my "dissertation days."  They have been for quite a while now, and I look forward to having regular, dedicated time to write up my thoughts and researches on three wild and wooly saints of the early medieval period in Wales, Ireland, and Anglo-Saxon England.  I sat down this morning with great hopes of giving the chapter on Cuthbert a thorough once-over for grammar, flow, and accurate footnotes before sending it off to my faculty supervisors.  It was, however, not to be.  Writing two days a week in discrete blocks  like this has left me with a very choppy manuscript. After a while it became clear that this chapter would not be heading anywhere for at least another week.

Sigh. I had so hoped.... Realizing that this relieved some of my self-induced stress, however, allowed me to look out the window with new eyes.  A surprise snowfall yesterday had left many of us in New Hampshire worried that Spring had abandoned us far too soon.  But today most of the snow and ice was already gone, and the outdoors was beckoning.

Spring Cleaning in the Household of God

Greetings, Dear Ones,

The temperature finally got up over freezing this past weekend -- warm enough to open the windows and declare a Spring Cleaning day. I did the three bathrooms and the three upstairs rooms.  My husband cleaned out the fireplace, the porch where we stack the firewood in the winter and enjoy the sound of the nearby stream in the summer, and scrubbed out the kitchen.  Oh, bliss!

The day before, I had just heard the news that an old friend had been elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church.  Evidently the election process was a bit messy, but looking at the ballots posted on the internet, it seemed as though the newly-elected bishop had in fact been the frontrunner all along.  And it got me to wondering, how do we 'clean up' in God's household?  It was a day's work for my husband and me to get our little house sparkling and fresh.  Now my friend has been called to be the head-of-household for over 100 congregations.  How does that get done?

A Meditation on Gratitude

It was a tough weekend.  I left work early on Friday with a very queasy stomach.  Had to miss a meeting with my supervisor to get trained on some new software that I need to know within the next two weeks.  But it just wasn't worth staying there to learn it.  After spending the rest of Friday enjoying saltines and ginger ale, I was starting to feel like myself a bit on Saturday.

There was some laundry waiting to be done, so on Saturday afternoon I put the first load in.  Midway through the second load I heard a strange noise, and looked over to see water gushing out from under the washing machine onto the carpet in the next room.  Stop the machine! The water kept gushing!  Turn off the valves!  Mop up the carpet!  Pull out the soaking wet clothes and get them on a rack in the upstairs bath tub.  And figure out what to do next.  We've had the washer for almost 10 years, and never a need for repair.  Who do we call?  No idea.