Category Archives: Day to Day

For those of you who would like to see what kept me so busy last week, I have posted some wedding pictures down in the photos section.  Enjoy!

This was one of the squares made for the wedding.  I promised to put the recipe for it on this site so here goes:

It is basically a shortbread to which chocolate chunks and orange zest ahs been added.  You could probably adapt this to any favorite shortbread recipe.

3/4 cup butter
1/2 cup icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp salt
1 1/3 cups flour

1 tsp orange zest or orange peel
1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate chunks or chips

Beat the butter till smooth, add the sugar and orange peel and beat till light and fluffy.  Add the vanilla and salt.
Stir in the flour and the chocolate chunks

Bake in an ungreased baking pan at 300 for about 30 to 40 minutes – till light golden brown.

By yesterday afternoon at the gift opening, the accumulated fatigue of the weekend hit.  All of a sudden I could hardly keep my eyes open.  Had to fill up on caffeine since we still had clean up to finish.  The cars were loaded up with the leftovers, the decorations, all the containers, and carted home.  Most of it sits in my kitchen still. 

When I got home I went and slept, even missing the Grey Cup. 

Now it is Monday evening and I’ve had a full day of work.  The guests have all gone home and things should get back to normal again.  Just have to put some large trays into storage for the next big event which won’t be for awhile – although Grace caught the brides bouquet.  But since she is only 16, I hope I have a few years to get ready for her wedding! 

Now we are working at getting photos printed, etc.  But all of these things can take some time getting done.  Tonight, Leo and I are going out to a movie.  It’s been a long time – in fact, I haven’t yet gone to the new cinema we have had in town for about six months.  We’re going to see Radio.  Our kids say we will like it – and they know just about everything!!

Yesterday was a day.  I was tired by the time we got home at 2 am.  And we didn’t even clean up at the hall very much.  But we had a great day and the end result was just what we had wished for – a very happy couple. 

We have so many pictures.  I’ll put some on here in an album later. 

We still have a gift opening today and lots of food to finish up.  Tell you more about it all later too.

There are still many things to do.  There are still flowers and hair and make-up and dresses and pictures.  And a CD – but I think it is ready.  It will all come together I am sure.  But what a production a wedding can be.  My son seems to have inherited my rather casual approach to organization – that is not always a blessing to those around us.  However, I am sure that the event will happen however it comes off and we will all have a good time.  We may be exhausted but we can always recover later.

So to bed.  Tomorrow is the big day.

Today was busy and long.  I forgot to change the alarm setting from 5:30 am to a bit later hour so due to our force of habit and the alarm we got up and got going early.  But I did get coffee in bed.  I was supposed to be taking a day off.  Frankly it is easier to go to work but I am so glad I did take the day off.  Otherwise I would probably be back to my anxious state of last night. 

Today was better in spite of all I had to do.  Even the housecleaning went well.  I got most of my errands done and was able to get all the food purchases taken care of. 

Tomorrow will be spent getting decorations, setting them up, cutting all the cold cuts, etc, etc.  Everything needs to be ready by tomorrow night.  We will have a lot to do I suspect. 

We will end tomorrow with wedding rehersal and then supper.  By then we should be able to relax and enjoy ourselves.  I hope that Saturday will be just a great and wonderful day that we can all enjoy. 

I doubt much blogging will get done but we will get our kids started on their married life.  And that will be a joy for all of us. 

Today was my last day of work this week.  Wedding preparations and events are going to occupy my time for the next few days up till Sunday.  Tonight Sara and I did some more baking.  Tomorrow will be housecleaning and stuff like that.  All stuff that in all honesty I mostly hate doing.  Especially the housecleaning.  I am not sure how some people like doing it.  I like a clean and tidy house but I hate the work – I think it is partly an organizational thing and that is not my forte so I do a lot of spinning my wheels. 

The other thing that I am not good at is having a lot of people around.  They encroach on my space and I begin to feel trapped.   I feel like there is no where I can go to just be by myself.  And I am worse when I am anticipating the full house than when my house is actually full of people.  I manage fairly well once they are all here – it is never as bad as I anticipated.  But I never seem to deal with this well.

So tonight has not been a good night.  I have had one little meltdown and I hate that.  I know why I get so uptight but it seems as if knowing is not enough to handle things.  I just can’t seem to keep my feelings from exploding at the wrong people at the wrong time.  And I live with a bunch of extroverts who do not “know” how I feel and never will be able to really.  And there is always a bunch of stuff that would be fun to do and that I would like to be in on, so I probably take on more than I should say yes to.  And then one of the extrovert social types that I live with will suggest having a friend over who shouldn’t be any trouble at all and I explode.

It’s stupid really and I hate when it happens.  And after my little rant at everybody in my way then I end up having to apologize.  But I am afraid sometimes that in my wild and rabid state that I probably hurt the very ones I love the most.  This is the me I most dislike!

Maybe I will have gotten most of this out of my system and the rest of the weekend will be wonderful.  I want it to be a very happy occaision for my kids.  And if it is stressful for me, it must be way more so for them.

Oh! God, give me a very large, extra big helping of patience with everyone around me!

I recently bought a book of poetry called Divine Inspiration; The Life Of Jesus in World Poetry by R. Atwan, G. Dardess and P. Rosenthal.  It follows the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings in fairly chronological order from birth to death, resurection and ascension.  It is not your usual sappy kind of poetry that one often sees in a “Christian” book.  And the poets are from around the globe including a couple famous Canadians – Atwood and Leonard Cohen.  The diversity of the authors struck me as well as the quality of the expression. 

In the book I found a couple of poems by Léopold Sédar Senghor.  If you are not familiar with Senghor, he studied to be a priest in colonial Senegal, went on to study in Paris and chose to follow a career in writing and poetry rather than in the priesthood.  When Senegal gained it’s independance, Senghor was elected President.  He continued to write and was elected to the French Academy – the first African to do so –  in 1983. 

He writes in French of course.  The poem I would like to share with you was translated from the French by Melvin Dixon.  The poem speaks not of the great world wars, but of the oppression that the African continent has known.  It was written more to speak to the promise of “Peace on Earth” offered by Jesus at Christmas time than to speak to the promise of the ending of war that we think of at Remembrance Day. 

Much of todays conflict is taking place in Africa.  We need to remember that continent and the millions whose lives have been lost or devastated by war in this area of the world. 

And as we remember we, like Senghor, need to learn to forget the wrongs inflicted on us by our enemies.  Maybe then we would have a chance to have “Peace on Earth”.

Snow in Paris     by Léopold Sédar Senghor

Tonight we are going out to supper with a Muslim couple.  It is Ramadan so we will wait till after sunset and then prayers.  We are fortunate the sun sets so early here in northern Saskatchewan!  The couple are friends and collegues.  They have recently moved to Ontario but returned to visit another collegue whom they worked with in Carrot River.  He is dieing of cancer of the pancreas and our friend wanted to come back and visit him one more time before he dies.  Love does not restrict itself to the Christian faith. 

In our group of women studying Yancy’s book The Jesus I Never Knew we were discussing the chapter entitled ” Beatitudes: Lucky Are the Unlucky”  There is a lot to discuss in that chapter so we did go on a rather long time. 

One of the examples cited by Yancy in this chapter is the story of Henri Nouwen and Adam as a living out of the parable “Blessed are the merciful”  Nouwen cares for the severely handicapped Adam, showing incredible mercy, something few of us felt we could accomplish in the same circumstances.  I guess few of us will ever be called to that kind of ministry, yet, we have people God puts in our lives that we care for simply because we love them.  We do this for our children and they can return very little to us that compensates us for our efforts.  Still we love them and continue to care and provide for them simply because we love them.  And God does this for us as well.  He simply loves us because we are his creatures, not because we can ever repay him by our behaviour or intelligence.  He shows us incredible mercy.  This is kind of a circular truth – if we show mercy we will be shown mercy.  God has already been merciful to us and that alone should compell us to be merciful in turn.

We also got off on a bit of a digression but it took us in an interesting direction.  We shared how we felt that Nouwen must have had a sense of calling to serve in a place like Daybreak.  That took us into the question of how to discern if a decision to do some type of service or work is a response to a “call” or simply doing a job.  We could see where there are people who have definate calls and others who are simply doing a job.  Not that those who are doing jobs with no particular sense of call are not doing the right thing.  Just that not everyone is called by God in this way. 

And then we shared our various concerns about our lives – especially as we face decisions regarding jobs and changes in that aspect of our lives.  We had a good sharing time and it is good to know that we can pray and are praying for each other.