there's no place like gnome.

This happened.  Sara bought me pumpkin cream liqueur because, well, why not.  We weren’t quite sure what to do with it.  We thought it might be akin to Bailey’s, a la delicious in coffee.  Negative.  Never, ever, ever put pumpkin cream liqueur in coffee.  We lost sixteen good ounces of coffee that way that we’ll never get back.

This happened.  [photo credit: sjs]  Did you know that Austin, MN is Spamtown, USA?  Home of Hormel Foods and the SPAM museum.  I hadn’t visited the famed museum yet; I was waiting for my Sara to arrive.  We easily spent two hours in the museum and spent a combined $30 in the SPAM gift shop.

This happened.  There was a puppet show AND a game show.  [Not to mention a cooking show, packing demonstrations, a movie, and Monty Python references.]  Come visit and we’ll visit the museum dedicated to the canned pork product.

This happened.  Mabel killed her baby.  It was a massacre of stuffing.  She looks pretty satisfied about the murder.

It was fun having Sara as a visitor.  We talked, roasted chickpeas [yummy], and ate chocolate frozen yogurt malts for supper.  We created a theme room in an upstairs bedroom [come visit and you can have a tea party in the Room of Confusion] and shopped mainstreet Austin.  It happened and it was awesome.

The fear of trying something new is the fear of failure. *nods head* I experienced that today.

I had a funeral yesterday; it wiped me out. I got home around 1:30 and ended up asleep on the couch, slightly accidentally. I still had a Sunday sermon to write and very little energy/creativity with which to do it. It wasn’t my best. At all. But as Kendall would tell me on internship – you can’t hit every one out of the park. True story. I’m living, preaching proof.

In my sleepy state last night, I added a “turn to your neighbor” section of the sermon. I’ve put them in sermons before but when I’m in the pulpit, I always make the split-second decision to leave it out. David Lose, a professor I had in seminary, writes a weekly column on workingpreacher.org about the texts for the week. Lose is huge on the congregation participating in a sermon and I whole-heartedly agree with the reasoning and proposal of it. So I tried it, and even – quite literally – wrote the encouragement to do it in my manuscript.

It’s okay though because the failure of the morning sermon quickly was forgotten and made way for a perfectly pleasant afternoon and evening. First up – Kendall, Emily and family popped by for a brief visit! It was beyond fun to welcome Dawson friends and show them around the place I call home and church. They were en route to another destination but I was so thankful they made the brief detour.

Next, I drove to Owatonna to meet up with Paige at the movie theater. We took in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Foregoing any book-to-movie comparisons, it was entertaining, although graphic. I liked Daniel Craig’s coat. On the way home, I began a 1.5 hour phone conversation with Joel and Melissa in Montana in which we talked about ministry joy and celebrations, television shows to watch, and the art of ping-pong on dining room tables. It was great to catch up [as always]!

And now I must retire for the evening. Between a funeral yesterday, church this morn, and a two-sermon weekend, I’m exhausted. And think I won’t be working tomorrow, or, for what little work I will do, I will do it in sweat pants from home [with the exception of the evening meeting I have]. I’m in need of a sanity day and, recalling that self-care is not selfish, will take the sanity as best I can.

I entered this weekend [my wkend = Friday and Saturday] with two goals.  First, to make english muffins from scratch.  Second, to give my dog a bath.  Done and [kinda] done.  It’s amazing what I can get accomplished besides/instead of that funeral sermon for tomorrow and Sunday sermon for regular worship.

I don’t know if you know this about me but I love english muffins.  In fact, I don’t buy bread.  I buy english muffins.  Love them.  I wanted to try my hand at making them from scratch and, lo and behold, they turned out.  They are, however, much more time consuming than going to the store and buying a pack.  The drinking glass I used to cut them from the rolled dough was a little small so they are mini-english muffins but just as delightful.  I may need to try it again in the future with whole wheat flour.

And second.  I talked to Banana Kim on the phone Wednesday night and she mentioned that she gives her lab puppy a bath once a month and it seems to help with the shedding.  [The shedding is off the charts on the disgusting meter lately.]  I guessed it was something I should do [We had outside dogs growing up.  We never gave them baths.  I’m clueless with this sort of thing.] even though I have her signed up to be groomed when I have to board her later this month.  I bought doggy shampoo and then tried to barricade her in the bathroom.  It didn’t turn into much of a bath because I couldn’t figure out how to get her in the tub.  Dumb, right?  Totally!  But how do you make a 90 pound dog get into a bathtub they don’t want to get into?  I gave up rather quickly and then attempted to give her a scrubdown on the bathroom floor.  Four soaked old bath towels later, she was a little bit cleaner than when we began.  She did not like it one bit so in the future, I think I’ll leave this task to the professionals.

And so, my two goals for the weekend are more or less complete and I still have two sermons to write.  I suppose my next goal should be to finish those … or to finish the second disk of season three of HIMYM?  Hmm.