But Not in My Tea

  I, generally speaking, like bugs. It all began with an appreciation for the butterflies and lady bugs in our garden and was confirmed by Charlotte’s defense of a spider’s work in the world. I find their tiny lives interesting and heroic, but not in my tea. My tea I like clean, sweet and robust. Imagine my disgust when the peculiar off taste in my tea was a bug, a stink bug no less. The best I can figure it, it had been there for a while, and I was nearly done my tea. It was the not happy kind of surprise.

Spiritual Sprinkling

 

One of the fun things about being Catholic is that we get sprinkled with holy water as part of the service sometimes. Father takes a bowl of holy water and the sort of a round whisk broom and splashes it over us as we sing something about baptism usually. I’m one of those people who gets a little tense over things like this, so I tend to make a face until it’s over. It’s not because I’m not enjoying it. There are so many unexpected things that could happen. Mostly it feels like being a kid in the sprinkler again, a holy sprinkler intended to wash your sins away. You Protestants ought to try it.

Matt Price: Mr. Make It Happen

Seafood is where he bagged me. I grew up close enough to the shore to enjoy it, and far enough away for it to be special. The occasional New Year’s shrimp feast, the here and there summer crab pick, and the grand splurge at a seafood restaurant all made shellfish precious to me. Now that I live in the midwest, seafood is nostalgic, so when Mr. Make It Happen was making it happen with crab meat he had my attention. A lot of other chefs don’t use crab so much, Marylanders like me can’t get enough.

The exciting thing was that Matt knew the way to flavor and cook these items in a way that makes me homesick. After  a while I looked him up. He’s from Virginia, just down the road. His momma raised him right.

If you want to do seafood right, and lots of other things, check out Mr. Make It Happen. He’s got the goods.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBW5KiJa8Ft42-XNIz4HCgg

Sequestering Carbon

 There are things in my life I try to protect other people from. Things that I am, things that have happened to me, I try to bury them deep inside myself for everyone’s good. But it’s terrible for me. I’m not so sure it’s good for the people I’m protecting either. They are robbed of the chance to grow and to learn more about love whether or not they would take the opportunity. So many of my relationships are stale beyond eating because the parts of me serving that are long dead.

Normally I’m a real cheerleader for mitigating the consequences of past mistakes, but perhaps it’s better to knuckle through them.