with thanks

 For life and love, for rest and food,
For daily help and nightly care,
Sing to the Lord for he is good,
And praise his name, for it is fair.

For life below with all its bliss,
And for the life, more pure and high,
That nobler life which after this
Shall ever shine and never die.

-  from Magnificat, November 2024

ready enough

 My brother: Tomorrow's going to be rainy, rainy all day.

Me: That's all right; we'll be cozy, cozy all day.

It has been gloomy every other day, it seems, but we need the rain. So it's all right. 

I was busy, busy all day. The squash pie is made, the bumbleberry pie my brother bought from a customer is cooked. I made the gravy from a very nice recipe through pinterest. The beds are changed, the laundry is done and things are clean enough, I suppose. 

We are ready, ready for Thanksgiving.

gluten-free ginger cookies

 The recipe for yesterday's ginger cookies is here. But I'll write it up, anyway.

2 1/4 cups buckwheat flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. cloves
1/4 tsp. salt
3/4 to 1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg

Stir together the first six ingredients, then mix the rest well with the mixer, to ensure all lumps are gone from the brown sugar. Add the dry ingredients, then roll into one-inch balls. Roll in granulated sugar and bake at 375 for 9 - 10 minutes. 

The original recipe says bake till the tops are cracked, but mine didn't crack, or get ginger-snappy. They are really tasty, but seem kind of dry-ish, so I wouldn't want to bake any longer than I did. I used the lesser amount of brown sugar. 

from bungalowofblessing.com

in a day's work

 Today, I made some cookies, roasted the butternut squash for the pie, and mixed up the pie dough. With cleaning and laundry in-between, and dishes, oh, so many dishes it seemed. The cookies are a buckwheat gingerbread, called gingersnaps but they are soft. The squash - well, that's a story. A blogger I like just puts hers whole in the oven, so I did. It took an hour and a quarter on three seventy-five and it was perfect. But I forgot about the seeds and didn't cut it in half afterward. So, when it was cool I began peeling the skin off and there everything got mushy and the seeds were embedded in everything and oh what a mess, trying to pick them out, so many of them!

I then got the idea to put it all through a sieve. Well, I've never done that before; it was a bit of work and I was tired. But on the other hand, now the seeds are out, and it's all smooth as can be from the sieving. 

Time to rest.

the real King

 It's the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the feast of Christ the King. This would be celebrated at the end, because proclaiming someone a king would be a culmination of their life. And next Sunday begins Advent, which is the beginning of the liturgical year. It would have to be the beginning, because it is the quiet, reflective time before Christmas, the birth of Jesus, and we know that life begins, not at birth, but before that, at conception. So, we honor that presence of him in his mother's womb for the three or four weeks before Christmas, waiting and preparing with her for the birth. 

It's nice for the merchants that Advent starts on December first this year, since all Advent calendars I've ever seen seem to think it always begins on that date. But Advent is not something invented by those who sell Christmas decorations. It was observed by the very early Christians and officialized in the fourth century - that's pretty early! They observed it practically from the beginning. 

Christ's reign is a conquest not over political enemies
but over the powers of sin and death.
His rule is redemption.

- from Magnificat, November 2024

Put no trust in princes,
in mortal men in whom there is no help.
Take their breath, they return to clay
and their plans that day come to nothing.

- from Psalm 146

late November

 We had plenty of wind yesterday; today, most of the Japanese maple's leaves are down. I was wondering when that would happen.

A few hang on, trembling in the chilly breezes. While I took pictures, Leo came through - he's often coming through.

Something caught his eye.

Then, I guess I caught his eye.

yesterday, next week and tomorrow

 I went to put away the conditioner and there was a stink bug on it - the nerve! And he didn't want to get flicked outside. Well, it is raining. Thank God!! I think it's been dry for two months. This two-day rain we'll have probably won't do enough, but it's blessed, all the same.

I got an intestinal bout of something or other, and was wanting some soup. Then I saw a recipe from a youtuber with pumpkin, wild rice, and chicken broth and I got an idea. I made it my way.

Onion, and celery, chicken stock and pumpkin, wild rice mix, marjoram, thyme and parsley, and some leftover chicken. Just what I needed, easy to make, and I was able to resist the box of chicken soup with all the additives.

The stomach issue caused me to rethink the Thanksgiving menu, though. I was going to make a gratin. But, a week before the feast, I can't stand to think of that. Simply flavored vegetables are what call to me. I did a grocery order, and got some packaged green beans, and some whole frozen ones. The problem with green beans often is the strings. Hopefully, more than one option will solve the problem. I'll cook one batch at a time, of two different brands on Wednesday and see how they are. I'd rather not use the frozen ones.

Here you can see number 5, my missing skirt piece; it's slightly a-line. I will measure the bodice from side seam to side seam, and two seam allowances ( 1 1/4" total), and 4" for the tucks. I will be cutting the pieces in half lengthwise and adding another seam allowance to each (5/8").  I'll angle the pieces out a couple of inches on the way down to the bottom, and that should settle it. Maybe I'll cut it tomorrow.

"As the season turns toward December, we are settling in. ,,,as I watch the still, cold night sky deepening, and see the quiet brilliance of the stars, I like the feeling of impending change."  - Gladys Taber. And we might have a few flakes fall on Saturday.

what's in a name?

 Or, what IS a name?

I was reading in Exodus, chapter twenty-three. Verses 20 + 21: I am going to send an angel in front of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him.

I find this so interesting, and puzzling. What does that mean? 

Why does God say we should call upon the name of the Lord?  Why doesn't he just say we should call upon him?  If I see you at a distance, and call, I call you, not your name. I am calling to you, yourself. I may call out your name, or to put it differently, I may call you by your name, but I'm not calling on your name, so what does that mean?

Somebody recommended a book to me called God Has a Name, by John Mark Comer - it was somewhat helpful (although I don't remember how - guess I need to reread!), but I still have the question. And today in Exodus, there it was again, "my name is in him". I really feel that this is something we don't understand; that there is more to a name than we realize. 

But I'm not the one to figure it out.

progress, and forgetting

 I was waiting for the cold nights to kill off the rampant weeds in my garden; I thought they might be easier to pull up. But we are also having a long drought - every day brings a fire warning. So, nothing is easy to pull out of a hard ground. 

Still, I went out today in the beautiful breeze and was able to remove some of it, and I guess I've got all winter to get it out of there, even till March. We'll see how diligent I am. 

I was noticing how the Japanese maple hangs on to its leaves when almost all the other trees have shed theirs. Some of the leaves look dry and deeper-colored, others look garnet with the sun shining through them.

"It is very often painful when the lovely images in the mind will not compose themselves into even reasonable facsimiles, in words. It can be so painful that I long to throw the typewriter out of the window and scrub floors all day. With a floor, I feel, you can see progress, you get somewhere."

                                               -   Gladys Taber

Oh, I was going to wash the bathroom floor today - forgot! 

the case of the missing pattern piece, and other things

Not the temperature they predicted, but Monday was sixty-five:  mild, hardly breezy and wonderful for a day off. Now we have finally gotten into the forties for the daytime. Outside, everything is burnished. That's November.

I picked up a biography of Samuel Adams, cousin to our second president, John, and according to British officials of the time, "the most dangerous man in Massachusetts". Considered by Paul Revere, John Hancock and cousin John Adams as their "political father", and called "truly the Man of the Revolution" by Thomas Jefferson; it's a young adult book, but full of information and interestingly written. I really knew very little about him; now I know he failed at every job he undertook. He only seemed good at "talking and writing about the rights and liberties of the people". I love reading about this era.

I have returned to a dress I was planning to sew a year ago; I don't remember what happened. I had started on the bodice, and - ?  So, now I'm ready to attach the skirt part, but I soon realized I hadn't cut them out. Okay, there's plenty of fabric there, so I looked for the pattern piece. All the pieces were there, except for that one - it was nowhere! But, looking at the shapes from the layout examples, I am sure I can just make a guess. There are center seams front and back, so - four pieces, and they're a-line. I just have to figure out how big the tucks should be and how much fabric to allow for them.

My brother had a birthday. I gave him a book of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He is liking it, and surprised at how interesting the observations are. 

The Christmas cactus at work is setting buds.

Things are getting more intense in Tolkien's The Two Towers, with Gandalf and Pippin flying away on Shadowfax, his tail flicking in the moonlight. Then he leaped forward, spurning the earth, and was gone like the north wind from the mountains.

a post-election reminder

 "Because we know that nothing finite is ever our final good, we are seduced by the inflated claims of the politicians, social theorists, philosophers, and bureaucrats who promise a paradise that will come if only we change the system or modify that economy or rearrange that society. Because our eyes are fixed on the city below with greater precision and judge it more critically."

                                              -   Bishop Robert Barron,  from a commentary on Romans, chapter 8

rereading

 "There are many wonderful books which are fine to read, but there are very few that are better reread, and still fewer that should be reread every year. 

For me the test is, can I bear not to read this again? A fine book is like a mine. You get down strata after strata until the very deep loke is reached. This takes time and thought and isn't a business of skipping through once. On the other hand, a book may be pleasant as a shallow running stream and still worth reading. But the ones to keep, to carry with one wherever one goes - these are precious cargo."

                                                -   Gladys Taber