I see more sunsets than sunrises at this stage of my life. Tonight, I stepped out of the kitchen to take a short break just as the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Just above the silhouettes of the rooftops, the sky was still bright, but as my eye moved upward the brightness turned to…

Ginger and I left for work about the same time this morning. She went to be a part of the town ecumenical Good Friday service and I went to work to get ready for a wedding tomorrow and the Easter Brunch on Sunday. While she read through the last words of Jesus, Alfonso and I…

Of all of our services of worship during the year, the Maundy Thursday service is perhaps the most meaningful to me, and the most disquieting. At our church, we share Communion and also have a Tenebrae service, which is a liturgy that has roots all the way back to the fourth century. The word tenebrae…

Over the past couple of weeks, Ginger and I have had a couple of movie dates over breakfast. Both our schedules have pulled us out of the house in the evening, so we have fed our film habit in the mornings. This morning we watched an amazing piece of art and prophecy: Children of Men….

I talked to a friend today who had just returned from a workshop on using “emotional intelligence” in dealing with conflict. The term was new to me, but is a rather well formed theory and/or practice it seems. I’m struck more by where the idea of emotional intelligence took me than learning what the whole…

I wrote before I went to bed last night and I’m back at it this morning because I’ve got a deadline. According to the counter on my desktop, the Red Sox take the field in Kansas City to open the 2007 baseball season in less than six hours. LESS THAN SIX HOURS! In the steroid-ridden-unconscionable-salary-giving-over-the-top-loss-of-perspective…

Since today marks the beginning of National Poetry Month, I have a statement to make: Jesus was a poet. Why not? Vaclav Havel was a poet who became president of his country; why can’t a poet be Messiah? Jesus thrived on metaphor. His “I am” statements, as we’ve come to call them, are among his…

One of the crucial elements of the function kitchen is timing. Most everything is done in stages and needs to be finished just before it is served, so the food is fresh and attractive – both of which can be difficult when you’re trying to get the meals to two hundred people at the same…

Today held a small and important victory for me. One of the challenges in cooking for large functions is figuring out how much to make. We have a “banquet and event order” or BEO that delineates how many people are eating each entrée offered, but how many pounds of mashed potatoes we make is up…

Of my two days off during the week, Thursday is usually the run-the-errands-and-hang-out-at-Panera-with-Ginger day. Not his week. I met with my spiritual advisor this morning because he’s going to be gone for the next couple of weeks, then I went to work because there was a function this evening (I was off yesterday), and then…