"Goin' on a TRIP"

The #1 granddaughter is getting equipped for her new status as a Conscious Traveller later this summer.  You see her above, getting into the skin of the role.  I hope travel is as much fun for her as it has been for her Grandma.

Just home yesterday in the small hours from a cross-country jaunt to a major ecumenical conversation.  A new venue that I hadn't visited before, a style of hospitality I already knew very well.  And we had a very fine time altogether.

I have a suspicion that when the time finally comes for Shady Pines, I am going to have a very fine time there also.  Ecclesial gatherings often mean we are assigned rather small, spartan, sparsely-furnished rooms for our sleeping and ablutions -- and invariably I am as happy as a clam therein.  Maybe because a dorm-room was the first space I  thought of as MINE?  who knows.  But it's quite funny, I think.

This was an especially challenging jaunt in some ways because of various symptoms that appeared about 24 hours before departure...despite the lapse of 64 years since the chicken-pox, and the Zoster vaccine a couple of years ago -- SHINGLES.  So the day of departure along with a haircut and a midday church meeting I found myself speed-dating both my own physician and an optometrist (shingles being particularly bothersome around one EYE, where complications can be serious).  

And then picked up a prescription for formidable big blue pills, finished packing, hired the little boy next door as cat-feeder,and off down the highway to the airport. 

The plane was full and I had a centre-seat, between two genial types returning home to Newfoundland, so conversation was very brisk until they worked out "who they were" with reference to each other, and just exactly how crazy HE had been over HER youngest aunt, and like that.  Then they went to sleep, and I tried to, and by about 2 a.m. I was thinking if someone would just open a door maybe I would try walking home--but the cabin attendant brought me some water and I got my little air-blower turned on cool, and managed a little bit of shuteye with some comfort...

Then a limo to the conference centre, and a rendez-vous with a friend of fifty years' standing, and breakfast, and a bit of a nap, and we were into our ecumenical deliberations.  Part of the work at this session was making videos of each of us reading our essays on very basic questions.  Challenging!  I hadn't worked with a teleprompter before -- and of course this was scheduled on the day that the shingles were most conspicuously LEPROUS.  But I had a little sit-down with myself on the topic of Vanity~~and the lovely young woman directing our videos was equipped with face powder and a big brush~~so that went off all right too.

A very special group of people -- theology nerds, to start with, but there are also aspects of "book club," and "writing group" and heaps of benevolentia mutua animorum as the poet Petrarch called it.

The shingles are (is?) improving.  Feeling quite pleased with myself that I thought of taking my good old-fashioned icebag with me--our hosts showed me where the big icemaker stood in their back kitchen, and on the way home a kindly bartender filled the icebag one final time,so that I could keep everything happily numb throughout the four-hour flight.  I had a row to myself this time, so could stretch my legs and wriggle about as I pleased.

Now emptying bags and working at re-organizing the permanent "go kit" in each of them, and then it's time for the post-trip paperwork...and, in due course, back to the rhubarb fields!

 

All you hungry campers...

"Today is Wednesday, Today is Wednesday, Wednesday SOU-OUP..."  according to the old campfire song, anyway.  No actual soup on the menu at Tether's End today.

An undecided sort of day -- brilliant sunshine very early, then heavy, racing, threatening clouds, now some of both.  Do I go out for a walk!??  Do I seize shovel and get all seriously gardinacious before my poor bedding plants die of sheer boredom??? Do I go out to the kitchen and cook and eat accordingly?  Do I burrow into this impressive heap of library books?  Do I go back to my desk and attend to the now-definitely-due thank-you letters I need to be writing?

Retirement is challenging (Platitude of the Day). On Sunday at noon I wrapped up the most recent interim appointment after three months of half-time duty in a small parish in a small town ninety kilometers from home (exactly ninety kilometers, and exactly fifty-seven minutes, every single trip).  At this point, beyond a single Sunday-supply appointment on Pentecost in another small parish, in a small town, rather more than ninety kilometers from home, there is no word of a further interim assignment.

So the cassock has gone to the dry cleaner, and the surplice is in the laundry "whites" pile downstairs, and the stoles are up on a hanger in the spare-room closet, and the prayer books and the communion kit are tucked away on a shelf, not too high. 

And I contemplate the possibility that I may now, in the fifth year after retirement from full-time parish ministry, really be, really and truly, RETIRED.  Which gives a bit of perspective on the exercise of ministry, perhaps even some of that 20/20 hindsight stuff.

I was a curate, part-time, for about four years; ten years in full-time ministry as Rector, Head of Staff, Senior Pastor~~whatever your nomenclature~~and I've been an interim parson since February 2010.  Since then I've served six parishes, part-time: three in the city, three in the hinterland.  And the difference from full-time ministry has been staggering.  I've been relaxed; I've been comfortable and unanxious; I've been -- happy! (I KNEW there had to be a word for it).

And there has also been a difference in the climate, the ethos, of the parishes I've served.  The folks have been warm, and friendly, and appreciative.  Now have I been happy because the people have been different?  Or, as I very much suspect, have the people been different because I've been giving off a very different vibe?  And if that's the case, where the heck was that vibe during the previous ten years!?!?

When I took leave of St. Thaddeus, on Sunday, we had a potluck lunch of ESCHATOLOGICAL splendour--you know, where everyone finds what s/he most enjoys--and there were PRESENTS -- a photograph of the church, and a bushel of flowers, and a beautiful hand-crafted pen -- it looks like byzantine jewelry, but it's decorated with tiny little electronic components I couldn't even name -- and a little trousseau of hand-knitted things, hot pads and dishcloths and a SCRUBBY which I can use on my saucepans or my heels, whichever needs it more. 

There were also speeches, on the general theme of "We've tried to figure out how we could JUST KEEP YOU ALWAYS" and there were very elderly retired farmers saying very quietly, "You know -- we JUST LOVE you" and the wives of elderly retired farmers telling me how much they and their husbands have enjoyed and been moved by the sermons ("You reduce him to tears, every time, Crimson").  And finally one Mother-in-Zion who leaned in close and said, "I probably shouldn't even say this, BUT -- your HAIR looks WONDERFUL."

Somehow I could not dredge up any impulse to re-assert my Personal Boundaries under those conditions.  I just sat down and mentally rolled around in the ambient goodwill and affection and praise.  Perhaps that means I really am somehow "too far gone" to exercise ordained ministry with appropriate professionalism.

But I don't really think so.  Now I will go and write some more thank-yous.

Novelty

well this is all new territory-- I tripped on an uneven bit of sidewalk yesterday afternoon and came down like a sack of coals with my right hand under me "somehow"...a certain  amount of grazes and laceration and bruising and HURT.

Was walking at the time with Daughter Unit and Grandbaby-of-my-Heart...the walk came to an abrupt end. 

After restorative tea and visiting, I made shift to drive home where I dug out the old arthritis thumb/wrist brace.

It helped ... but early evening I departed from my lifelong I'M FINE, I'M FINE policy and went to the closest hospital. --as the HURT factor was getting just stupid.  Then, TRIAGE and all that that entails.  Eventually,  X-rays, reassurance that "nothing's broken--ice, rest, and Tylenol"...came home again and so to bed.

Drove to work this morning w//o undue awkwardness.

During the day the medicoes had another look at the films.  OOPS, they said.  Kindly get yourself back here.

So I am in plaster, or rather in fibreglass, for a fractured thumb.  Dratted cast goes nearly up to my elbow.  Six weeks.

Did I mention I don't take frustration well?  But I must admit I like the "protected" sensation....

I had a phone call from a nurse at the hospital to see whether I would need HOME CARE.....What am I, OLD?  well....I guess.

Friday don't tell me what number

aka, "A woman is gotta DREAM."

Please note total absence of rainfall in this photograph.

Awoke to the gentle trickling sound of rain this morning at 5:45...shortly seguing into gentle roaring sound of wet-dry vac in the basement. This is very boring, I am not going to blog about it any more.

Much to be done today before take-off tomorrow.

I spend too much time trying to sort out the task-chains...every thing that needs doing comes with a great PROBOSCIS of prerequisites aka "But FIRST, I oughta..." until the whole living project begins to look a lot like gridlock, and "teh urgent" once again drives out "teh important" not to mention "teh fun," and so forth and so on.

The weather forecast is "light rain." Light rain, my Left Behind. The sky to the west is the unappetizing colour of a wet wool work sock.

Back downstairs to the levees.

closing ceremonies

Watching -- entranced -- the Russian presentation, some of it in Vancouver and much of it in many other places, all brought into one experience for the audience by technical means I can't even guess at.

Despite my inherent and ineradicable non-sportiveness... I have loved watching these Olympics... I have enjoyed the "human interest" stories, the courage of the Canadian figure skater whose mother died suddenly the day before her daughter performed; the courage of the Slovenian cross-country skier who slid off the piste into a 10-foot ditch, broke four ribs, collapsed a lung, and still won bronze (as did the figure skater). I have revelled shamelessly in the Canadian victories. I want to holler and blow horns, make loud vulgar triumphant noises in celebration.

I have taken great joy in watching the Canadian athletes and artists with their gold medals, singing the National Anthem. Not well, perhaps, not loudly, but by the Lord Harry when the national anthem is played, WE SING.

I loved watching the Mounties tromping to and fro in their iconic uniforms -- I love the women officers' little regulation hair-dos...

We had a minimum of truly annoying commentators on the Canadian Olympic broadcasts.

And we even saw some brilliant, amusing, touching, durable commercials...the Tim Horton's ad with the immigrant family arriving at the airport in winter; the Superstore ad about nourishing the athletes; the Chevrolet ads with the vehicles talking over their perspective on the games; the Royal Bank ads with the little bowler-hatted banker participating in all sorts of unlikely sports, in the great tradition of the deadpan clown.

Regrets? probably only that Canada 2 did not medal in the four-man bobsled. And perhaps that we have to be subjected to speeches in French by people who don't speak the language.

A very long day for the Rambler -- preached on the hen-and-chickens gospel at St. Curious at both services this morning, with Fab Bishop visiting and former Rector departing, potentially a very fraught occasion; then a reception, and then mid-afternoon a splendid 19th century Romantic piano concert, a parish fundraiser, in complete conflict with the men's hockey final...the turn-out was encouraging despite the external distractions... Some pretty swift updates via PDA at the Intermission, mind you!

I don't think bedtime will be long delayed tonight.

Friday, Friday

I may look at the Friday Five a bit later as the last few days have indeed been quite Olympic hereabouts.
Where I am AT, at this moment...I woke up betimes and turned off the alarm, I worked the hard Friday crossword (Thanks, friend!) on my calendar, I said Morning Prayer, two nice chunks of Ps. 119, Jacob's Last Will and Testament, the conclusion of the Passion in Matthew plus the usual 'common supplications.'
I have checked the email, lovely poem by Mary Oliver sent by inward/outward this morning; I have checked the Facebook, Olympic triumphing and weekend plans and pics of new babies (all good); I am contemplating writing a a snotty letter to the Times Literary Supplement--they don't often nod, but the editing has been a bit whoopsie in recent weeks, and in the last issue a reviewer (of Walking to America by Roger Hutchinson, which sounds fascinating BTW), describing the deaths--in Arizona--of two infants in this immigrant family, says, "the exhumation of their newly buried remains by hungry jackals marked the nadir."
But I'm having trouble starting a letter with some phrase other than, "Listen, clothhead... not jackals, nor dingoes either...we're talking KIYOOTS here, you post-colonial ninnyhammer." (See above, coyote howling in chagrin at being mistaken for a jackal)
You understand that next to defeating Americans in hockey, catching a Brit with her facts down is almost the very favourite Canadian thrill...
I have a memorial service to attend this afternoon...for an old, old lady, classmate, BFF, and sorority sister of the Rambler's late Mum. She was gathered peacefully to her rest out on the Left Coast, but there's a memorial here in Prairie Metropolis where she lived for sometime as befit that special creature known as an "Oil Wife." There was a foursome of these women, and I think there is now only one left...I'm a bit haunted by the feeling that I may be the only person left who remembers that they were friends! They scattered to the four winds after graduation in 1937...but were all great letter writers all their lives. Anyway, praise God for their mutually sustaining friendships over these many years.

still here.

Internet connection is a bit uncertain this morning so I'll post now but as I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet I can't vouch for eloquence or even coherence.

Yesterday -- I activated a new credit card and shared the glad news with PayPal (of such small triumphs...) -- next I'll drop a billet-doux to that effect on Amazon.ca and that should accomplish THAT.

Went to the bank, banked pension cheque, paid bills, which accounted for rather more than 1/2 of pension cheque, but no matter. Bills all paid, including a semi-annual one which allows me to feel, however hollowly, AHEAD OF THE GAME for the moment at least.

DROPPED IN at grocery store and raided the loss leader department for green grapes, toothpaste, and frozen chicken, all prudent purchases. Received in change a $5 bill and various bits of coinage (from the change dispenser, which always stimulates Daughter Unit to exclaim, "We won! We won!"

[ominous minor chords very softly in the background, hold the thought of that $5 bill, 'kay?]

BETOOK myself to unfamiliar Evangelical Post-Secondary Institution to suss out the venue for tonight's discussion group on the Four Passion Gospels and the method of lectio divina. (Keep me in prayer tonight, please!)(And don't forget the $5 bill. DID you forget the $5 bill, O Best Beloved?)

EXECUTED crafty driving manoeuvre and accessed Mega Building Supply store where there was so little difficulty in finding an omni-battery charger AND rechargeable 9 volt batteries (in aid of St. Curious sound system), that I took a little soul-refreshing paseo through the greenhouse. SIGH. Admired the orchids, however settled on a Pothos (yay) and a poor orphaned marked-down $1 African Violet to join the motley crew here at Tether's End.

PRESENTED myself at the cash-desk [minor chords, louder], where I paid for the electronics on credit card, but what the heck, it's only a couple of bucks, I'll just pay cash for the little plants, right? Using my newly-acquired $5 bill?

NOT ON YOUR LIFE. Please tell me, somebody, WHO would go to the trouble and expense of counterfeiting a $5 bill? A CANADIAN $5 BILL? Ok, Ok, I know, anybody who has figured out that $50's and $100's get checked at the till, $5's don't.

Except mine. Very assiduous young salesclerk.

We parted friends, me with my plants and funny money.

GNASHED my way up the freeway toward home, and decided on the basis of my being a PENSIONER, doggone it (= Poor Old Lady), and knowing perfectly well where I got it, that I would REVISIT the grocery store with my $5 bill and COMPLAIN.

Which I did. And they swapped it for me. Bless their hearts.

Expect me in future to scrutinize all paper currency AT LENGTH to the infinite annoyance of my fellow shoppers. And if they mutter too loudly, I may bite the loonies and toonies also.

High time for some lectio divina, I can tell.
.. opening with Morning Prayer, "O Lord, open thou our lips..."

hello again

...now blogging from home base.
I think perhaps I may blog a series on "temptations of the newly retired" -- starting with the temptation to surge back onto the scene of former glory (or of the crime, depending on one's POV), and slap into righteousness all the folks who are taking action at this point to put to rights ... various trivia.
And I am hearing about it, in my little inbox, yes I am.
It isn't the S4B crowd, it's when the intelligent and kind are overcome by "teh dumb" in their dealings with each other, that one is tempted to rise up and blaspheme.
Or just play another round of Bejeweled Blitz.
Which is its own kind of blasphemy.

blogging later about the leave-taking, which was a good, good day.

feline helpfulness...

Today, this is the only image that does justice to my state of mind...

the ultimate bane

I am distressed by the number of blogging friends who seem in the last recent while to have come to the parting of the ways with their parishes -- and not on friendly or peaceful terms, either. It is most sad. Also irritating--and stimulates my desire to "get mediaeval" on the parishes in question (I stumble about the office muttering, "burn that sucker DOWN... and sow it with SALT... and commit a NUISANCE in the ashes..." -- not really the Great Tradition in pastoral spirituality; but so it is).

In the last twenty-four hours, however, I have come on the total, ultimate, retaliatory curse upon recalcitrant, stiff-necked, hard-hearted, ungrateful, acting-out, terminally stupid parishes.

and it is this--this, friends, will make them rue the day they were born.

THE SELF-STYLED PARISH POET.

Now we've had a couple of innocuous specimens at MH & U over the years -- many of them very elderly, so that one can apply the Nonagenarian Factor to evaluations of their efforts; "Well, Gladys is SUCH a sweetheart, and SO brave, what with the arthritis and the yaws and all...it really is lovely of her to write us yet another poem about the dear Queen, isn't it?"

But I've run head-on into a far more virulent embodiment (rather like running into the edge of an open closet-door in the dark)...

The only comparable work I can refer you to would be the poetry of Emmeline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn. Or, if you must have your "Canadian content" -- the oeuvre of the immortal Sarah Binks, Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan.

Examples will follow. From the Binksiana. Stay tuned.

And may your parishes, if they love you, be safe from poets.

remedially speaking

Well I have been working on a number of remedies for the Advanced Mully-grubs which have been afflicting me for the last week or ten days.

The sight of dapper, blue-blazered elderly gentlemen (with rows of gongs halfway to their elbows), coping with the ravages of arthritis and the like...helps. Especially when recollecting that they were very much present, though in less festal garb, on Juno Beach on the 6th of June, 1944. (Juno Beach is the one John Wayne DIDN'T liberate, in case you wondered.) The South Prairie Province Regiment Veterans were in our midst on Sunday morning, as part of their reunion weekend. They unveiled a plaque. They laid a wreath. They beamed at the preacher. It all helped.

The Rambler had said grace at the regimental dinner on Saturday night. This helped too.

What else...large unexpected donations from persons who are happy with the way their mom's memorial service was conducted. They help.

And it's no bad thing to have Baroque Trumpet as going-to-work music on the CD player in the morning, either.

Topped off with some very demanding teaching, well received, and a healthy chunk of chocolate cake at lunch time today.

Health is on the horizon.

kvetching again...

...but at this point, NOT about the weather.

Not that it doesn't offer opportunities.

But this moan is on the subject of How Hard It Is To Find Good Help...liturgical subsection.

I officiate at two Sunday services at MH & U, including the early one, at 8:30, with a tiny congregation, the old Book of Common Prayer, a splendid volunteer organist, and a "Lay Assistant," sort of a sub-diaconal role, with responsibility for carrying the Gospel book in procession, "handing things" at the Eucharist, and so forth.

At the early service there is a rota of three or four volunteers who carry out this role, according to the light that has been afforded them.

And there is ONE...who was on duty this morning...and now I'm going to whine, folks, because she manages to be across my hawse, that is, "test my vocation," every step of the way.

I usually arrive about 7:30 or 7:40. At 8 a.m. I unlock the front doors and set out the "church open" sign. At 8 a.m., she arrives at the BACK door, approximately half a block from the front door, and rings the doorbell for admittance. So I run back to "buzz her in" and receive the reproachful looks.

Once in, she sets about constructing herself a little nest in the chancel for her private devotions...in the process, she flits about the church turning on about HALF of what needs turning on...never the same pattern twice, and getting under my feet.

I worked myself out a little "route" through the premises, turning on lights, attending to the front doors and the sound system, taking down the hymn boards ready for the early morning hymn numbers, marking the lectern Bible for the readers, "setting" the pulpit, adding last-minute names to the intercession list, putting batteries in the mics, generally getting my feet and mind--such as it is--set for the liturgy.

But when Esmeralda is on the premises...she turns on HALF the lights...can't find the batteries for the mics (that's cuz they're in the CHARGER, sweetums, WHITHER you never, ever, return them), runs off with the intercession sheet (into her little devotional nook) before I've emended it... insists on carrying extraneous items when she's ALSO officially carrying the processional cross or the Gospel Book, insists on hiking up the slack of her alb in one hand in procession like 'Liza crossing the ice (while carrying the cross and extraneous baggage)...and placidly ignores all cues, commands, and corrections.

Isn't this childish. But I want to take her by her two ears and pound her head on the wall. Pray for me.

The True North Strong and Free...

...and alas,Largely Misinformed.

We are having us some Constitutional Crisis, here in Canada, and unfortunately the Average Voter is very much in evidence.

When the Rambler was a little girl in school (about the time the ink dried on Magna Charta), there was an overall theme to the way national and (gasp!) imperial history were taught. The idea, the theory, the myth, that is "the lie which it is useful for the people to believe," was that the march of British constitutional history was one long, continuous, cumulative triumph for the ordinary citizen in the struggle not only to overcome specific tyrants but also to make tyranny itself, whether by despots or by mobs incited by demagoguery, less and less possible. Hence splendid developments like habeas corpus, and the secret ballot, and universal suffrage irrespective of property qualifications, and a bi-cameral legislature, and so on and so forth. As such things go, it was a benign and hopeful and inspiring kind of national mythology.

And it came with a prudential dimension also -- that governments inevitably were tempted toward tyranny, and must be kept wisely and firmly in check by responsible opposition, and by constitutional mechanisms for removing them from office when they ceased to enjoy the formal "confidence" of the people's elected representatives.

Whatever else the level of public discourse reveals this week -- it is sadly evident that the thread of that narrative has been lost...and nothing of equal, or any, value has replaced it.

I see England, I see France...

(not actually the Rambler)
...and where the HANOVER do they get off, charging ten dollars retail for a pair of ordinary underpants?

Just askin'.

The up, the down, and the circular...

Arrived at church this morning in a clatter of conversations going in different directions..."artiste" departing after an early morning appearance on Breakfast TV; retired bishop waiting out his regular car-maintenance appointment...phones ringing, and so forth.

The Wonder Secketry is still on post-op rest at home.

And I am saying "Yes" and "Hello" and "Good Morning" and "don't mention it" and "that's nice" and "oh good" and "thank you so much" and "not at all" and "you're welcome" and "take care" in all directions, and I hear....

"peep"

and I think -- "pager -- that's its 'you haven't looked at me yet' peep -- but when did it go off? I didn't hear it..."

And then.... I try to find it. Into the handbag, grope grope fumble, unzip all the little pockets. No pager.

"peep"

Turn handbag upside down, everything falls out except...a pager.

"peep"


Aha, turn to book-tote, fumble grope fumble, snatch out several overfull file folders, scrabble scrabble: nothing.

"peep"

Fling down book-tote in disgust and commence digging like a badger in the midden of papers on my desk. Slam hand, palm down, on several suspiciously bulging "dunes" of odd bits of stuff. Nada.

"peep"

Pause to catch breath and take thought. Check voice-mail box, retrieve pager message, and deal with it.

"peep"

Allow brain to re-settle on its base-plate, and pick up phone, page self. (The problem was that the single "peep" didn't give me enough time to home in on where it was coming from.)

Sure enough -- pager uttered its full jolly yodel, AHA! Found you, you little....

Not enough to keep the mind alive, is it?

In which the Rambler confronts her ISSSSS-sues. Or some of them

It has been a very gruelling day, and I am feeling thoroughly gruelled. Also in deep need of re-gruntling at the first possible moment.

Wedding this afternoon at one. Guest officiant, good colleague, the bridegroom being his son. Gospel and sermon to be covered by moi. So OK fine, I can read the Beatitudes and then weave them together seamlessly with FIRST CHRYSANTHEMUMS as it was called at another recent wedding. I can even Rise Above the performance of the reader of First-Thirteen, there, in spite of her seizing the moment to weep loudly On Mike. Well if I'd been reading the intensely lame translation she chose, I might have felt like weeping too.

My powers of forbearance and Christian Meekness already in short supply after witnessing the rehearsal yesterday afternoon. I give good rehearsal, I think. I give DIRECTION. And I tried so hard to keep my big cake-hole shut at this one because I WASN'T the celebrant. But oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. So many things needed to be made clear, and weren't. Like what the photographer's limits were, where she would and would NOT be allowed to go.

And the celebrant, being father of the groom...had buck fever to a certain degree. So that when I had gospelled, and processed myself back up the aisle and actually into the pulpit, before I could utter, the poor dear man was into the "Wilt thou, Jehosaphat" and that pretty much put paid to the homiletic moment, there. SIGH.

Hilarity, less than totally suppressed, on the part of Daughter Unit and SIL, who were also present in the chancel, SIL as organist and Daughter Unit in charge of Schubert "Ave Maria" and "One Bread, One Body" during communion (and nicely too).

Anybody need a perfectly good like new sermon on First Corinthians?

Oh, the tedium of it all.

So this was one of those maniacal, super-maniacal weekends: funeral yesterday, with a reception, long unbloggable story attached to that.

Then a wedding rehearsal -- at 7:30, why did I ever agree to such a late one? -- with musicians practising for a recital a week hence right until the very last minute. About 50 people turned up for the rehearsal, some of them even on time. It was basically our modern-language wedding service, with South-East Asian cultural embellishments. After an hour and a quarter of rehearsal, "Oh, we forgot the candle part, we have to do that too..." An inter-cultural compromise of sorts is forged.

Meantime our new cleaning persons had decided this would be the week they would strip and resurface the Upper Hall floor, assuring one and all that it could be accomplished in the twinkling of an eye.

Well, no, because the scratches and gouges turned out to be much deeper than they thought, and long ineffably boring story made short, it meant that TODAY, with this very large wedding at 12:30, they had to resort to the old-fashioned drum sander...so the Upper Hall is off limits, and the upper corridor is impassible with stacked furniture, and everything, but everything is covered in sander-dust.

Picture, if you will, a bridegroom and four groomsmen in black suits. Yes.

In the meantime there are complications with the wedding families' post-wedding lunch set-up in the Lower Hall;

And just to keep the pot a-boiling, visiting choir is in intense rehearsal mode for their Monteverdi concert tonight.

They swoop back into the church as the last notes of Mendelssohn are dying away, neck and neck with the Altar Guild who need to change all the paraments back to GREEN; for tomorrow...and here come the wedding party, "it's too blusterous out there to take pictures, can we take them in the church???" Halt the taking down of white hangings.

And somewhere in all this FUN...the Rambler's handbag went out of her office. Yes. Again. This time with ALL its contents. Some of them valuable and some of them precious.

I'm tired of this, tired of this work, tired of this place, and frankly, tired of these people. I'm going home.

EWWWWWW

Fighting the Mouse Wars today. Emptying the desk and scrubbing all the drawers etc. with disinfectant.

Not just "a" mouse, more an infestation.

Good side -- throwing out a lot of things! I'm hoping momentum will carry me forward to some more overdue cleaning up in this work space!

But in the meantime, there are distinct moments of IIITBTW, WDIL...

Rain!

We woke up this morning to the rumble of thunder, not so usual at that time of day. It has been raining steadily since first light.

Lunch out with friends yesterday, a treat...and a minimum of ecclesiology involved!

Letters to write...proper pen'n'paper letters to write...and phone calls to return.

Question arose in recent conversation re: the place of etiquette in clergy formation. I mean the basic, "this is a knife, and this is a fork, take one in each hand" kind of stuff; "this is a parishioner approaching the front door of the Rectory; and this is what you say when you open the door."

The question arose in terms of different generational preparednesses for the day-to-day stuff of parish ministry...and how the gaps, where they appear, are or are not dealt with in seminary, in internships...

What's your experience? What's your thinking?

(My interlocutor and I also talked about professional self-presentation in terms of garb and grooming; the things that people need to be told...and sometimes aren't...)

The Reading List

OK -- this comes to this blog by way of The Owl's Song--thanks, Owl! And I've seen it on a number of other blogs already this morning.

The instructions are to cut and paste it into your blog, and "embolden" the titles you've read...so far!

Comments welcome! (Comments irresistible, I suspect). Enjoy!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Hmmm, for a total of 62 out of 100. (I have NO life...) Some I'd have left off this list also; and where's the Willa Cather? and why isn't there more of George Eliot? And where is Mauriac? and Bernanos? and Goethe for crying out loud? and Dante? and Defoe? and Walter flippin' Scott? and Margaret Laurence? and...
OK, time for lunch and a cooling-off period!!!