Fall-ishy Quick-Takes

It's Friiiii-daaaaay! Time for Seven Quick-Takes!

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This weekend will be a grading weekend for me. I have a double-stack of essays from my Advanced Writing Class and the first five-paragraph essays from my Intermediate Class to grade this weekend. So I plan to be turning up the music--most likely the soundtracks to the three Twilight films--and spend the weekend with my fountain pen and a teetering stack o' essays. What fun!

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I plan to also spend part of today and a little bit of tomorrow catching up on this season's House M.D.. Unfortunately, House conflicts with Dancing with the Stars on Monday evenings, so I've opted to watch ballroom dancing while texting snarky comments to Elizabeth who watches it on the big TV in her dorm. Our record thus far is 84 texts in two hours. My thumbs definitely are quite sore on Tuesday mornings.

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We're making good progress on the Book of Common Prayer project. We've received permission to use the English Standard Version Bible translation, published in 2001, for the Scriptures. We're still smoothing out language, fixing formatting and typos, etc. It's a huge project but it's incredible to be involved in something so amazing. It should be ready for printing early next year. Then comes our big prayer request: adoption by bishops. We're treading fine lines between original doctrine, traditional content, and contemporary language. We pray that it can at least be an interim BCP while the Anglican Communion of North America works on their version--or that they'll really like it and want to use it themselves. :)

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One of my longtime prayers has been answered this fall. For the last ten years, I have been praying for a spiritual director/mentor, someone with whom I can share prayer requests and from whom I can receive encouragement, counsel, and advice. Our church of 17 years, Lake Murray Community Church, recently set up a Heart-to-Heart ministry for women, and I adore my new prayer mentor/partner. K is wonderful, a wise woman with two grown children (one in the mission field) and a love of deep, quiet places of the soul. We've e-mailed and talked on the phone as well as meeting in person twice; in fact, we met together only yesterday at a Starbucks. Each time we meet, we spend about two hours together, sharing, chatting, and writing down each other's prayer needs to pray about daily. I am so thrilled at the long-awaited answer to this prayer!

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The fall weather in Southern California has been, well, fallish. Often October is one of our hottest months, the month of devastating Santa Ana winds propelling brushfires through the county, like the ones in 2003 and 2007, both of which forced us to evacuate our home. But this past week brought us over 1.5 inches of rain--which is a lot for Southern California where even in the mountains, we're lucky to get 15-20 inches of precipitation per year. We've fired up the woodstove to heat the house a few times this week and last week, and I think we'll be doing so again tonight. The flannel sheets are on our bed, and summer sheets washed and packed up for the winter. I'm trying to ignore predictions of a Santa Ana next week and glory in true autumn weather this week.

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One of my great joys is listening to our middle son J practice the piano each morning before our home school opening. I have always wanted to learn how to play the piano as has Keith; we were both taught the organ in childhood. J had taken two years of piano then set it aside when we could no longer afford the lessons; he picked up guitar at that point with the Free Teen Guitar Class. But our piano teacher needed a writing instructor for her daughter, so we now barter lessons. While J takes piano lessons in the teacher's living room, I teach her daughter writing in the kitchen. Keith and I both enjoy J's exuberant playing each morning so much--it's such a blessing.

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Keith has been experimenting with baking breadsticks lately. This week we had a lovely pot of chicken vegetable soup, so he pulled out a breadstick recipe and made some pretty wonderful breadsticks from scratch, with herbs and garlic and topped with melted butter and Parmesan cheese. Oh, my! Amazing.

So have a wonderful weekend, all! Enjoy your families and the beauties of crisp autumn weather, unless you're one of my friends from the Southern Hemisphere, in which case I wish you a lovely spring!

Fallishly yours,