Soul Satisfying Week-end

It has been a good week-end.  I will spend this Labor Day holiday driving the short distance to Columbia, SC for a quick overnight visit to some grad school friends, first one, then another.  Tomorrow I will drive back, stopping to teach at Spartanburg Methodist College.

I looked at last year's blog posts to try to remember what I was doing last Labor Day.  One blog post mentioned listening to an interview with Jennifer Egan, and said, "If I ever teach a creative writing class about fiction and/or short stories, I want to remember this podcast. She gives great insight about how she arranged the short stories, about the different types of narration (first person, second person, that intriguing experiment with PowerPoint), about the other writing she's done."

So I listened to it again this morning, since I am teaching Creative Writing and wanted some ideas as we shift to writing stories.  She mentioned that the PowerPoint chapter from A Visit from the Goon Squad is available on her website (go here), and now I have some great ideas for the next few class meetings.  Hurrah!

It's been a good week-end, full of unexpected twists and turns.  I had a good last morning at Quilt Camp on Saturday.  I was invited to be part of leadership; I've been helping, and I'm happy to volunteer in a more focused way.  On Saturday, we did some planning for the next several retreats.

My spouse noticed that Saturday was Play Music on Your Front Porch Day, so we had an impromptu event for our neighborhood.  We have a Facebook page and a way to send e-mails, so we posted invitations for 5-8 on that very same day, and happily some folks said yes.  It was a perfect evening.

Yesterday was a good day at church.  We had three visitors, and at first I felt some dismay about my sermon, which I'd been revising right until we left for church.  I wasn't sure about it, but it seemed to work (you can view that sermon here on my YouTube channel).   The energy level in church was great, with a happy vibe, and I was glad.  It probably had more to do with the small children visiting their grandmother and great grandmother, and that's fine.

We had planned to go to the Apple Festival in Hendersonville with my spouse's brother and his wife, but when they arrived, the sky had opened up with torrential rain.  I had thrown a pot of soup together (frozen baby lima beans, a few potatoes cut into chunks, sliced onions, frozen corn with water to cover--boil, whirred with my stick blender, heated up with cheddar cheese and these spices:  cumin, basil, oregano, garlic powder), so we had soup while we waited to see if the rain would blow over.  The soup was yummy, and I was glad I had the ingredients on hand to make it.

The rain did not blow over, so we settled in.  I did a bit more stitching while we chatted and listened to music.  When our guests left, we watched the last episode of Back to the Frontier.  We've had a lot of fun watching that show, and I'm sorry to see it end.

I am happy that I don't have seminary classes that need my attention.  There's plenty of other items that need my attention, so let me get to those before I hit the road.