PIETY, PEARS, PASTA FRIGOLE AND PROFITEROLES

This has been a very busy time in our household. We have just finished the 26th Annual Convention in the Diocese of Fort Worth. The children in the Diocese made this banner for the Convention. I think it's wonderful.

We, as Orthodox Episcopalians, have taken a major step at this time toward trying to reach a point where there will be a healing in our beloved church. I'm sure that many of you have read about the controversy or have seen something on the news on TV about it. The past year has been a very stressful time for all of us.

This is what our Bishop, the Rt. Rev'd Jack Iker, presented to the convention. By voting to change our diocesan Constitution and Canons, we have withdrawn from the General Convention, dissociating ourselves from the moral, theological, and disciplinary innovations of The Episcopal Church. We have realigned with another Province of the Anglican Communion. This is a change in affiliation, not a change in worship or doctrine.Our Bishop, clergy, and congregations have been received into the fellowship of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. We are deeply grateful to Archbishop Gregory Venables for this provision, which he has made on a temporary and emergency basis, in response to the crisis in The Episcopal Church. We now look forward to the formation of an Anglican Province in North America.On the first night of convention there was a glorious celebration of the Holy Eucharist and the guest preacher was The Rt. Rev. William Godfrey, Bishop of Peru.

It's always a real blessing for me to see all the clergy from our Diocese gathered together in all their Liturgical "finery" as they process down the aisle with incense and a full choir is singing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." It's like a little foretaste of what I think heaven might be like. I love all the pomp and circumstance that accompanies the liturgy in the Episcopal church and always wish that everyone I know could be there and experience these special times of worship with us. The service was held in our Cathedral, St. Vincent's, which is in Bedford, Texas.

Our Diocese covers a lot of territory and Bedford is centrally located in the Metroplex.The Convention started on Friday and was held in the school's gymnasium.

We were there from 2:00 in the afternoon on Friday until about 9:00 p.m., and then we reconvened Saturday morning at 7:30 and didn't finish until around 3:00 that afternoon. This is a photograph of Bishop Iker's wife (on the right) with the Bishop of Peru's wife. They are both beautiful women.

Before I became so involved in the Convention, I found a little spare time to paint. My daughter in law, Beth, is having a birthday this month, so I wanted to paint something to surprise her. I had several free days, so I went out to my studio and started to paint. I had told her that I was going to paint some lemons for her kitchen, but since I know so much she loves pears, I decided that would be my subject. My grandson, Nicholas, is so talented, and once the paintings were complete, (there are 5 of them) He made a frame for them. He also made all the frames for the ones I painted for him and for his sister, Rachel. Here they are unframed, along with a couple of close-ups.

He was unable to frame them right after I had painted them as both he and I were very busy and he lives in Dallas now. Consequently, it's not quite as easy for us to get together as often as we used to. I really miss having him "next door". If you remember, I painted these three gumball machines several weeks after I painted Beth's present.

Once I was through painting these little gems, I still was on a roll (or in the zone as I sometimes refer to it), so I wanted to paint some more. This painting is entitled, "Espresso Break with Prayer Book and Pear".

Once that was finished, I decided to attempt painting glass. This was a real challenge, but after several not so successful attempts, this is the end result. I like it! I call it, "Fruit of the Vino" ;-)

In my spare time (is that an Oxymoron or am I just a moron???) I have been doing a lot of studying and reading. I just finished a delightful book entitled "Same Kind of Different Like Me".

It is a book that is factual but could just as easily be fiction, tells the unlikely story of the unlikeliest of friends—Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Told in two voices, the book alternates between telling the story from the perspective of Ron and Denver.Ron Hall is a wealthy international art dealer who travels the world buying and selling rare and expensive works of art. He has grown rich but has also grown selfish and has grown away from his family. When Ron Hall reluctantly volunteers at a homeless shelter (at the insistence of his wife) he soon comes into contact with Denver, a man his wife is convinced is going to change the city. Denver grew up as a sharecropper in Louisiana, living a life that seemed little different from the life of his ancestors one hundreds years before. He eventually walked away from the cotton fields and found that, while life on the streets of Fort Worth was difficult, it was easier than being a sharecropper. It was here, in a homeless shelter, that the two men met, one serving food and the other being a reluctant recipient of this charity.It is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it to everyone. It will truly touch your heart.

And now on the other side of the coin, I have been studying a book in out church book club on Islam.

One of our Priests at St. Alban's, Father Matkin, selected this book and even though I am not enjoying the read (it's a very disturbing subject), at least I'm educating myself about the Islamic beliefs and Muslims. This book is more than a Christian description of Islam. It is also something of a story. Unveiling Islam includes an incredible, captivating, bittersweet story about two devout Muslim brothers who made Jesus Christ their Lord. A relationship with Christ cost them a relationship with their Muslim father. Acar Mehmet Caner reluctantly disowned his sons as an act of submission to Islam's Allah. Ergun and Emir Caner not only became Christians, they became Christian pastors and Christian academics that equipped themselves to help others do what they were not able to do for their hero and father.

I have become so fascinated with the study, even though it disturbs me, I ordered the History Channel's documentary on the subject. I feel as though in today's society we should all be informed as much as possible.

I'm a very visual person, so if I can see it, I can comprehend it better (I always detested math in school when we had stated problems .... give me the numbers and I'm fine, but I don't care how many miles Johnny rode on the bus in how many minutes it took to get a dozen bananas to an undetermined number of people before they spoiled! :-)

Today is the day that I've been waiting for. Frank left this morning to go fly fishing with a friend from the church in Oklahoma, so since tomorrow is Beth's birthday, we decided to have lunch together. Don't feel too sorry for Frank as the cabin he's staying in has 2 bedrooms, 2 baths and a jacuzzi. I think fishing just might be a sideline! He certainly isn't roughing it!!

The reason that this day is so special is because I can finally give Beth her painting. I am not excited because Frank is gone!
I haven't been writing much because I was waiting until I could include these photographs. She came over around noon and first of all ... she surprised me with a new haircut. Even though she has always looked great, now she looks absolutely ADORABLE!!

You girls can understand how a new look can make you feel 100%. After she read her card, I took her into the den, made her close her eyes, and then I surprised her with this painting. It was great!



We then went to Piccolo Mondo for lunch




where we enjoyed Pasta Frigole as a starter




followed by Spinach Ravioli with tomato sauce and basil.




When we had finished our meal, Antonio, the owner, surprised us both with complimentary Profiteroles to celebrate Beth's birthday. As you can see, it was a pleasant surprise indeed!




It was a perfect time. I was just sorry that Frank and Franklin couldn't be with us.
I want to close this entry on a serious note. This past weekend has been one of mixed emotions for me and Frank where our church is concerned. It is with great sadness that we watched as some of our church family have decided to take a different path from those of us here at St. Alban's. It is also with great joy that we have stood up for what we believe and can now move forward to serve the Lord.
The following is something that I saw in an Episcopal Church in Texarkana, Texas many years ago. I copied it off of a placard on the wall and the words may not be an exact quote, but they express my feelings more than I could ever express them myself.

A LOVE SONG TO MY CHURCH

I know the dangers of "denominational pride". But it happens that I love the Episcopal Church, and despite of the desirability of the onrushing ecumenism, perhaps I secretly love her, not conditionally or with calculation, not with careful reservations, but freely, joyfully, whole-heartily.

I love the stone and brick Victorian stateliness of her old city parishes, even when they get down at the heels because "the neighborhood has changed". And her little small town churches, smelling faintly of mice and damp, kept going somehow in the face of great difficulty by devoted, self-giving souls. And her gleaming, spanking fresh suburban churches, too, whose self-conscious cautious modern architecture speaks of tearful compromise.

I love her high - church places with their clouds of smoke from the incense pot and their ranks of statues. And no less do I love her low - church parishes, all furniture polish and the restrained but curiously exuberant dignity of choral Morning Prayer.

I love her doctrine, her emphasis on sound learning, her devotion to scripture and tradition, and the glorious Elizabethan periods of her language. But I love her freedom which she grants her children, her openness to the new, her breath of humanity.

I love the bright young families proudly arranged in the pews on Sunday morning, and the sparse little congregation on weekdays whose hushed devotion to the Lord is an almost palpable radiance. And her old priests whose eyes show the compassion taught them in a lifetime; and her young priests who are so sure that the world can be won in five years at the outside.

I love the names of her heroes - Laud, Hooker, Pusey, King, Gore, Weston, Seabury, Brooks, DeKoven, Kemper, Rowe, and a hundred others including some private ones of my own.

I love letters to the 'Living Church' which begin "Dear Sir: It is high time..." and the solemn nonsense with which the Executive Council launches a new project; the billowing sleeves of the bishops' rochets and the whole mad range of possible head-gear that clerics can wear. I even love the battered Prayer Books in the pew racks that so often turn out to be Hymnals.

I love the eccentric old ladies in the city parishes who dress in liturgical colors. And the uproarious stories about departed dignitaries that are told whenever priests are gathered and have time for small talk.

I love the hands of young and old reverently raised to receive the Sacrament. And the dusty dry tracts in the church vestibules offering earnest advice that nobody wants. All the portraits of bearded ecclesiastics, long dead, on sacristy walls.

I really can't help it. I don't know if everybody ought to be an Episcopalian; it may be that other people feel as strongly about their church as I do about mine. I do know that I love the Episcopal Church, that I am sworn to her, forsaking all others. I'm glad of it. And it isn't denominational loyalty or sectarian or party fervor. It's love.

James H.P. Pearson

The church that I have loved and worshiped in for the past 72 years has changed, but my love for the Lord has not, and this wonderful tribute will always bring tears to my eyes and will tug on my heartstrings. My God bless each of you.
Pcasso

DOCTORS, THE DIOCESE, SPORTS AND ALL THAT JAZZ!

The past few weeks have been busy, busy ... BUSY. We didn't have many "spooks"at our door, so we had to be content just sitting in the Pumpkin Patch.







I've gone to every doctor known to man the past week (that's what happens when you're in your Golden Years). I've seen my Internist, Dentist, Gynecologist, Cardiologist, Dermatologist as well as having my annual Mammogram. The good news is that I got a good report from all the above, so I'm good to go for another year ... Praise God!
There were also a couple of firsts for our family. Our great-grandson, Ethan went to the Cowboy game with his Grandpa for the first time

and I went with Frank to my first hockey game to watch the Dallas Stars play. It was the first time I had been to the American Airlines Center and the place is wonderful.

You really have to bundle up at a hockey game as it is very cold in there! I had no idea it would be that cold as we were in the upper deck, but it was!

The American Airlines Center is an arena located in the Victory Park neighborhood near downtown Dallas, Texas that is used for hockey games, basketball games, football games, concerts and various other events.
The Dallas Stars are a National Hockey League team based in Dallas. They are members of the Pacific Division of the Western Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). They play their home games at the American Airlines Center.
Our whole family is very sports oriented (with the exception of me), and they all have their "uniforms" that they wear when their team is playing.

Our eldest grandson, Nicholas, even made this T-shirt when we were playing Washington. They're all ardent fans.

Ian could name all the players on the Stars team along with their positions when they won the Stanley Cup. He was not quite 3 years old at the time, and the Security person was so impressed with him that he let him have his photograph taken with the trophy and he also let him touch the Cup without wearing gloves which was a big time no-no!

Since both Franklin and Ian are musicians, I decided to paint these guitars for them. Like I said, I've been in a painting mood the past few weeks.

If you compare Ian in the following photograph with the one with him and the Stanley Cup, you'll see how much he has changed. Time really flies when you're having fun. Where have the years gone???

Two weeks ago the boy's school celebrated Grandparent's Day, so we took their lunch to them and visited with them while they ate. It was a beautiful day, so we were able to sit outside for their lunch.

We opted to go to a restaurant after the lunch period was over as we've never been much for school cafeteria food.

Several weeks ago I received a letter from a gentleman in Florence, Italy, who had read my blog. He is a fellow artist and was interested in the time that I had studied with Charles Reid. We have started a continuing correspondence and he sent me some photographs that he had taken when he studied with Mel Stabin in Italy. I decided to drag out my watercolors again and this is that I came up with after having been inspired by the photographs he sent me. I haven't painted in this medium in a long time but I think I still have fairly a decent handle on it!

I have spent the past few days painting gumball machines. I subscribe to a painters web site, and when I saw a gumball machine on there a long time ago, I got the idea to try to paint some myself.

I started with one, but as time went by, I was so carried away and it was so much fun that I ended up painting 3. I hope that you like them.
Frank will be going to College Station this weekend to see the A&M game. He will be staying with a young friend of his, Robert Davis. He's such a big Aggie fan that he bleeds maroon if he cuts himself! I'll stay home and might even paint some more. I've really been in the mood lately and this will be a good time to do it.

Our Diocesan Convention will be the following weekend, so please keep us and the Church in your prayers. I have been keeping a 11 day Novena for the Church with prayers for spiritual discernment. This is going to be a historical meeting and we need all the Divine guidance that we can get.

I hope that all of you had a happy Halloween and will have a good few weeks now that we are back on Daylight Savings Time and have more hours to play :-)
I look forward to hearing from each of you soon. Email is a wonderful way to keep in touch. You are always in my heart if not in my sight,
XOXO, Pcasso

CELEBRATION, CLEANING, CHARACATURES AND CLOSETS

The time has finally come for a celebration! Let's pour a glass of champagne and make a toast to change and a job well done!

As some of you know, we have had to have a lot of work done on our home. It all started with spring storms in Texas and water damage from our sprinkler system.
Due to a leak in a pipe in one of our bathrooms, we had to have walls taken out, a new floor put in and cabinets rebuilt to remedy the challenge.







Once that was taken care of, they started in the kitchen and dining room. They had to remove all of our large glass windows in the kitchen and replace all of the wood around them due to water damage. That was a MAJOR job.





Once that was finished, they started tearing out our wooden floors which also had water damage. They were unable to match the wood planks, so they had to replace all of the floors in both the kitchen and the dining room due to the fact that they are adjoining rooms.






This also meant moving all of the furniture out of both rooms and draping everything else in plastic in that part of the house.



No matter how careful you are, there is no way to escape the dust. There's no way to escape the mess either, but the people working here were very careful. As they would tear out sections of the old floor, they would carry the broken pieces out to their truck.





When they were finished we had beautiful new floors in both of the rooms. What a treat. I didn't even want anyone to walk on them, including myself!





Even though the kitchen windows are on the North side of the house, the constant indirect light had caused things to fade over the years, so we decided to have the windows tinted. One of the advantages of our kitchen is that you feel as though you are outside, but you don't have to suffer the consequences of the elements. My favorite time of year to be in there is in the winter when it's cold. We might even have a little skiff of snow on the ground. It's delightful to be nice and toasty inside and watch the blowing snow just on the other side of the window pane.
I watched them put the protective coating on the windows and it was a fascinating process.



They were able to do the job in several hours and now we will have 87% of the damaging light eliminated and the room will also be much cooler and energy efficient. The film is transparent, so we can still see both out and in without any problem, but we will not have the problem of heat and colors fading. We have to have a 3 ton air-conditioner just for that one room because the Texas summers can be do grueling.
We thought we were through with all of the interior challenges, so we thoroughly cleaned the inside of the house to eliminate any construction dust that had occurred. We were wrong.
Three days after the work was completed, I heard water running when I walked down one of the halls. It sounded as if the pool water was on or our drip system outside was working, but it was the wrong time of day for that.
As it turned out, we had a slab leak, so we had to have plumbers out immediately. Fortunately there had been no actual water damage ... YET!
Once they found the leak we had to move all of the furniture out ... AGAIN ... and start making more messes. We also had to take all the crystal down from the bar because the vibration from the jackhammer might cause the shelves to fall and break and we didn't want that to happen.








As it turned out, the leak was under one of the etigere's in the den, so we had to completely dismantle it so they could take out some of the carpet and start digging through the foundation to get to the leak. We also had to drape things with plastic sheets because we knew that this was really going to make a major mess.






I won't use the words here that I thought when I saw the dreaded weapon come into our home. All I could think of was "We just cleaned all of this and got things back in order and here we go again!



After many buckets of dirt, much LOUD noise and even more digging, they finally got to the trouble .... a pipe with a crimp in it.







If you look closely, you can see both the crimp and the water coming out of the hole. Apparently the pipe had a crimp when the built out house over 50 years ago and it finally broke through due to the pressure from the water over all the years. All I can say is that we were truly blessed that this happened while we were in town. It could have been a total disaster if we'd been gone on one of our lengthy trips! After a 3 day nightmare, we were finally back to normal again.




We had to have our carpet cleaned and stretched because it had gotten pretty grubby through all of this and it looked as though we were back in business again.
My good friend and designer, Kay Ashton and her husband dropped by to see how the house was coming along and also to share a little of the Russian Vodka that we had brought back from our trip.




She's always such a dear and she brought these lovely roses for the table to celebrate the completion of the work in the kitchen.



We asked her about a painter for the outside of the house and while I was serving up the plates for dinner, she said that I also needed to have my microwave raised. We had bought a new one a few months ago as the old one had died, and since this one was larger, I had trouble getting large stock pots on the back burners. You can see the difference in these before and after photographs. We eliminated the cabinets about the stove top, raised the microwave and installed shelves for some of my cookbooks. Now I can use my huge stock pots until my heart's content!







You can tell by where the handle is on the tea kettle how little room we had before and how much room we have now. It's glorious!
Kay gave us the name of a painter and we decided to wait to have him start until after they had put the new roof on the house. When we were in New Mexico this summer, we had a dreadful hail storm and all the houses in the neighborhood, including ours, have new roofs.


Santiago and his crew arrived week before last on a Tuesday morning and were here for over a week. They scraped off all of the old paint, replaced any wood that was suspicious looking, sanded everything and then began to paint.



They removed all the windows, screen doors, shutters, etc, and really did a superior job.

If anyone in our area needs to know a good painter, give me a call. We've never had anyone who was more conscientious about their work. They were wonderful and very thorough and I might add .. they were also very reasonable.
Once the outside was finished, I decided that we needed to clean the inside from top to bottom again because of all the drilling from the jackhammers and as always, I got carried away. I also cleaned all of the closets and drawers and donated 17 bags of my clothing plus household items to the Salvation Army and Mission Arlington.



During this cleaning period, I ran across these old paintings. The caricatures of Frank and me were painted in New Orleans
in 1969



and the portrait of me was painted in 1973.



They were all done by street artists. It's always fun to look back at these things. They always evoke a lot of fond memories.
As I said in the beginning of this lengthy blog, it's time for a celebration. We have an almost new 56 year old house (at least it looks like new after the "face lift" that it just received) and closets and drawers are straight AGAIN.
Have a Happy Halloween and you'll be hearing from me again soon.




CHEERS!!!
XOXO, Pcasso