Open Hearts, Open House

On the “low” Sunday after Christmas, we decided to attend worship at Lovely Lane, the “mother church” of Methodism in this country. I had visited 30 years ago on a field trip with my confirmation class, when the building was in disrepair. They have since restored the beautiful starry ceiling, wooden auditorium seats, and stained-glass windows in the round sanctuary. The scripture passage was about Jesus’ parents finding him at the Temple in Jerusalem, and the sermon was about how we’re preparing ourselves to find God in the new year.

Then it was home to finish getting ready for an open house with many old friends from church and growing-up.

Recipe:  The hands-down star of the show was my SIL’s cranberry salsa, which you spread over cream cheese and eat with Wheat Thins or other crackers.

Ingredients:

If you're serving a crowd, use 16 ounces cream cheese = 2 standard blocks at room temperature.

Otherwise it's a more even ratio to use only 8 ounces = 1 block.
12 ounce bag fresh cranberries, washed
2 jalapenos minced (adjust according to taste)
½ cup sliced green onions, roughly chopped
¼ cup chopped cilantro, roughly chopped
½ tablespoon lime juice
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup sugar, plus more to taste
Wheat Thins or some other sturdy cracker

Instructions:

• Set out the cream cheese to soften.
• Finely chop cranberries, jalapeños, green onions, cilantro, lime juice, salt, and sugar, in a food processor.
• Add salt and sugar to taste.
• Chill in fridge for about 2 hours or more. 
• To serve, spread room temperature cream cheese evenly in a pie plate or other shallow serving dish, like an 8×8 pan. Spread salsa on top and serve with crackers.

N. stayed for dinner so we could keep talking, and afterward we played Baltimore in a Box, the Monopoly knock-off. There’s a one-hour version that involves handing out properties at the start and limiting the time of play. At one point, three of us were in a traffic jam together! Daddy Money-Bags won.

Our Greek Vacation by the numbers

Now that Dear Husband and I are home again, and Rosamunda has forgiven us for abandoning her to the doting care of our next-door neighbor--who not only feeds her wet food, changes her water, and scoops her poop but leaves treats every day(!)--I can post the numbers I collected while we were gone, illustrated with some extra photos, like the hand-painted keepsake from Santorini above.

Days of vacation: 8 + 3 travel days

Cities: 5 (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, Newark, Munich, Athens, Fira/Firestefani, Oia)
Islands: 1
Cars/vans: 10 
Airplanes: 9
Buses: 6, including ones at airports

Metros: 1 in Athens 
Trains: does the one at the Pittsburgh Airport count?
Boats: 0 due to high winds :-(

Funiculars: 1 out of 2 (Fira Old Port, but not Lycabettus Hill in Athens)
Donkeys: 1 for each of us

Street cats: at least 15
Street musicians: 4 (including a guy playing accordion on the Metro)
Books read: 2/3 (Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It by Greg Marshall and The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, by Lizzie Collingham) (I didn't make it to How He Died, about our friend Steve Shoemaker)

Work emails checked: 0 for FrauDoktorDoctor; DH had to square some things away shortly after we arrived

Lost items: 3 (several bottles of water, sunglasses, sports coat)
Found items: 1 (sports coat)

People who threw up: 2 (food poisoning for me, airsickness for him)

Broken cellphone screens: 2 (both mine, since I didn't get a screen protector for the new one soon enough after shattering the old one)

Flat tires: 1.5 (our cars clearly missed us while we were gone)

Since I had mixed up the dates of our appointment to be pampered at a Turkish hammam, and the other museum we wanted to see was closed on Tuesdays, we had a low-key last day. In the late afternoon, we took a walk in the neighborhood around our hotel. First stop: the pretty little church above was across the street from our hotel, and we could hear the bells when they played. Loudly. At 7:30 in the morning.

Second stop: the Panathenaic Stadium, the first stadium constructed for a modern Olympics, in 1896.  We're now 100 days from the opening of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris!

Due to rain the first night, food poisoning the next two nights, and Saharan dust that turned the sky orange like Mars the night before our departure (the picture doesn't do it justice), we could only use the hot tub on our hotel balcony once. Reflected in the glass, you can see that I figured out how to log out of the previous occupant's Netflix account (in Dutch??) so we could watch something before bed. We settled on the pilot episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. It was just okay, like our trip, which DH and I have decided was "a mitigated disaster." While not the "dream vacation" I had hoped for, there were definitely enjoyable moments, like eating meals overlooking the caldera on Santorini, basking in the sun on the Aeropagus (Mars Hill), and using my extremely rudimentary Greek in the taxi on the way to the airport. In the end, the important thing is that we did it together, the two of us.

Christmas 2023

Editor's Note: If you're following along in real time, this post is dropping one month after the big event due to general busyness of mixing family/friend time with a half-week of work over the holidays, followed by jumping into the new semester with both feet. Also, I was waiting for my new storage items to arrive in the mail, and I wanted to show them to you, because this post is dedicated to the suburban wife I have become. Cheers!

Dear Husband and I had a lovely Christmas 2023, in part because for the first(!?) time in two decades, we did not travel. Instead, his immediate family came to us. Unsurprisingly, I made very ambitious plans for cooking and activities, beginning with a great new taco place. Christmas Eve breakfast was waffles with a warm, homemade cinnamon pear compote topped with walnuts and powdered sugar that looked like something from a Williams Sonoma catalogue, but I was too busy serving and eating to photograph it.

(Moravian star visible in front window.)

(Yes, that is a flock of flamingoes; alas, their days may be numbered--

they really should have flown south for the winter, as snow and ice do not agree with them.)

Since buying our house almost 2 years ago, we have been purchasing more Christmas decorations. Last year was a reusable wreath with matching garland for the light pole in the front, and a sparkly light-up deer for the back. This year I discovered "urn fillers" for the concrete containers on either side of the driveway and scoured the internet to find a set that DH liked with battery-operated timers that didn't require a second mortgage. (Our first picks cost $170! EACH!) I also leaned into some kind of country kitsch with two oversized black metal lanterns with battery-operated candles to hang in the back yard--for ambience? DH seems to like them.

For Christmas Eve lunch (DH would already be at church by dinnertime), I decided to re-create that phyllo pie recipe. This time I made chickpea-with-spinach and chicken-(leftover from chicken soup)-with-peas, served with homemade cranberry sauce and my in-laws' German cucumber salad. Demerits for forgetting to defrost the frozen dough sheets overnight, although it turns out you can nuke them in their plastic wrappers in the microwave for 60 seconds (thanks, Alan Brown!).

Christmas Day breakfast was cinnamon rolls with grapefruit. More demerits to me for hustling us out of the house at 9am to be early for the 10am service at St. Paul's Cathedral, when actually we wanted to attend the noon service with the special music that started at 11:30am (whoops). So we gave up our spot in the parking lot and drove across town to Homewood Cemetery, where we hunted for the grave of a distant relative, then dawdled over hot drinks from the Starbucks that was open in the Jewish neighborhood. It felt so nice to give ourselves the gift of "no stress." (Kudos AND TIPS to the baristas who were working hard!) We were in good time for the brass, choir, and organ music and came home to a late lunch of phyllo pie with my MIL's raspberry pie for dessert.

There was jigsaw-puzzling, various rounds of card games, and we visited the large train set that is up in the living room of the older couple next door. The husband grew up in our house, and that train set used to be in what is now our living room.

Christmas Day dinner was London broil with this excellent marinade (not shown), mashed potatoes with my in-law's mushroom gravy, and Brussels sprouts that I thought would continue to cook while they rested on the stovetop but didn't (whoops).

On Boxing Day I took two meals off and only cooked for dinner, since DH's brother had come to town. I made this Martha Stewart "Cajun shrimp" recipe (above), except I swapped out the Andouille sausage for water chestnuts to lower the salt and fat content for my FIL, and I skipped the celery altogether, since only my MIL and I like it. I also tossed in the green pepper chunks last so they would stay crunchy. Served with roasted carrots and cumin. This filled our stomachs before we headed out to the Holiday Lights at the Phipps Botanical Garden.

Finally, this year I tired of storing our ornaments in torn, decades-old tissue paper and a mish-mash of cardboard boxes, so I invested in a set of plastic tubs and red-and-green canvas storage containers with cardboard inserts. Here you can see Rosamunda "helping" me sort everything into their new containers. There's a little space to grow, but we have more than enough ornaments to fit on a standard-issue live fir tree, so it's mostly about being able to see what you're looking for when you're decorating and feeling neat and tidy when everything is put away. 

Happy Easter 2021!

Dear Husband gave me permission to rouse him if I woke up before dawn on Easter morning. My internal clock went off promptly at 6:30am, so I nudged him awake. By the time we were dressed, the sky was already well lit, 10 minutes before official sunrise. Nevertheless, we had the streets and Frick Park mostly to ourselves for a hike.

An hour and 15 minutes later, we came home ready for breakfast. While the sticky buns baked in the oven, we "dueled" with the hard-boiled eggs we had dyed Saturday night and enjoyed one of the pears that--miraculously--was already ripe.

After sticky buns, it was time to clean house before Zoom church. It was a lovely service, punctuated by a "music video" DH put together of him playing the Widor Toccata with shots of the beautiful sanctuary stained glass windows. (Make sure your sound is on when you click the link!)

We had a vaccinated friend and his 7-year-old daughter over for dinner. The highlight of the weekend was probably preparing for and conducting a 34-plastic-egg hunt in our house, complete with the reading of the jokes and bits of philosophy tucked in the eggs with the jelly beans. For instance, "Q. What do you call 10 rabbits walking backwards? A. A receding hare line." Yuck yuck yuck!

Dinner was ham we baked with spinach salad and beer bread from our guest. Dessert was a pink-frosted carrot cake that our youngest table partner proclaimed was "the best" she had ever had--and she should know, because her family loves carrot cake. It was delicious, although next time I think I would increase the oven temperature by maybe 5 degrees to see if I could get rid of the touch of sogginess at the center.

After-dinner entertainment was ukelele music and singing, including "Auld Lang Syne," "Over the Rainbow," and the Disney/Pixar hit "I Lava You."

We hope you had a safe and blessed Easter. He is risen! He is risen indeed!

Holy Week 2021 (2 of 2)

The first labyrinth I walked this Lent was in a communal lot in Wilkinsburg. The second labyrinth was in the parking lot of Third Presbyterian Church. The third and final labyrinth is located is hidden on the campus of Chatham University.

Somebody in my Sunday School mentioned it one morning. The university's website has very little information, but with persistence, I was able to locate it on Google Maps. There is also a YouTube video. It is dedicated to Jessica G. Davant (1962-2006), sponsored by her family, and designed by Matthew "Brody" Little, a Chatham graduate student. At 60-feet wide, it is larger than the famous labyrinth on the floor of the cathedral in Chartres, but it shares the same four-leaf clover design.

After I helped Dear Husband capture clips for his Easter organ video on a gorgeous spring afternoon, we hiked up Murray Hill Avenue, kibbitzing about the big, fancy houses. Although the shady, rolling campus is not designed for walkers, we managed to find the labyrinth atop a small hillock across from Berry Hall.

We removed our shoes--this was holy ground--and walked the path, one after the other. Occasionally we moved in synch on parallel paths, but mostly we moved in different directions, apart yet together on this journey. I gave up the burden of house-hunting and instead prayed the Apostle's Creed. I considered the relatively minor yet repeated suffering of tiny bits of wood or gravel under my bare feet. I watched the flowers dance in the sunlight and listened to the birds and to the wind in the trees. I thought about the discipline of walking back out the long way after having walked in the long way, about "stealing" an hour of work to be "no earthly good," and yet connecting with and enjoying the earth this way was heavenly.

Holy Week 2021 (1 of 2)

Even though our church has not met in person since mid-March 2020, the leadership has tried to build community. They dropped off Easter lilies last year, and when they brought poinsettias, the pastors filmed themselves lighting candles for a Christmas Eve video. The deacons have sent cards for major holidays, and for Holy Week this year, they painted a labyrinth on the church parking lot. That way, anyone can stop by to pray or meditate as they walk the path to the center, where the medallion reads "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." The kids made decorations that now hang in the trees, brightening up the space for us and our neighbors.

Walking the Labyrinth: Guide My Steps, O God

Today I walked a labyrinth. It's a spiritual practice I have tried before but now the Adult Forum at my church is reading Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. In one of the chapters we discussed this morning, Taylor describes the spiritual discipline of "walking on the earth," of being connected with the ground that holds us up. We had also discussed how easy it is to fall into "cow paths," worn ruts that are direct but also unimaginative.

The most famous labyrinth is probably the one in Chartres Cathedral. Our church is having a competition for local artists to design a temporary labyrinth that can be set up on the lawn for Lent. It reminded me of the Franklin Community Garden and walking prayer maze that Dear Husband and I had discovered on one of our many daily quarantine walks way back last spring. I decided to check it out.

As you can see, the setting isn't much, especially this early in the year. But the half-circle, quasi-mushroom-shaped path was clear. I prayed before I started that the stress of house-hunting would be lifted. And then I walked. Not too fast, not slowly, just steadily onward, looking at the ground. 

I could see that other people had piled small stones on top of the brick painted "LOVE" at the center of the maze. Probably they had picked up a rock on their way in and left it--and the burden it represented--before spiraling out of the center.

I was not carrying a burden today so much as practicing the discipline of walking in the prescribed path. I could have easily stepped over the low brick markers, of course, but I chose not to. I found myself praying, "Direct my steps, O God."

On my way out, however, I couldn't help but notice that some of the bricks had fallen slightly out of line. I nudged them back into alignment with my foot. Then I picked up a chunk of brick to one side and carried it with me to a spot that no longer had a stone. This meant I deviated a somewhat from the path, but no one was waiting to take their turn or to pass me, so it seemed undisruptive, maybe even helpful to those who might come after me.

A charitable reading of this would be to say that it was like I was co-creating with God and the labyrinth builders. The bricks were out of place, and I was able to re-place them. A critical reading would suggest that I can't help meddling, that I assume my ideas are the correct ones, and that I can't leave well enough alone.

I can't tell you which is the correct answer, and maybe there isn't one. But I spent a short half hour in the thin sunshine, and I plan to walk the labyrinths at Chatham University and at Third Presbyterian Church later this Lent.

What spiritual disciplines are you practicing?

Palm Sunday under Quarantine

This Palm Sunday Dear Husband and I celebrated Palm Sunday with Third Presbyterian Church via Zoom. Despite the occasional technical difficulties (we got kicked off twice!), it was really nice to see our church family. You can see our Communion set up here: tea in appropriately Pittsburgh-themed black and yellow mugs, and Lenten pretzels on a ceramic sand dollar paten from my parents. The Miracles of Jesus in Galilee place mats are from DH's parents' trip to the Holy Land. It was a beautiful service with plenty of time for meditation. I hope we can have singing next week; at the very least, I suppose DH and I could sing together at the piano here.

I have spent the last two weeks basically home, and I expect the same for another week before taking my turn at the hospital for a week. Being off clinical rotations has let me cook more than usual. So far I have made scones from a mix, an old favorite, Bean and Potato Casserole with roasted Brussels Sprouts, and a new recipe, Creamy Tuna Pasta. DH complained that the sprouts with olive oil, salt, and rosemary were too bland, so I spiced up the leftovers with red pepper flakes and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked them that way. This week he will bake a pie out of mixed frozen fruit, and I want to make chocolate chip cookies.

On the left, I am pleased with how well my spider plants are doing. There is another little group on the mantel in the front room, and the "giants" are now out on the front porch. On the right, snuggling up together on the couch to stream a movie on my laptop. We have been holding a disaster-themed film series every Friday evening. So far we have watched Contagion (2011), War Games (1983), and Cast Away (2000). Also Dial M for Murder (1954), split up over two other nights, if you want to count that. DH gets to choose next week; he is thrilled(!) to finally get to show me The Shining (1980).