Hello Blog Friends!
The above post title used to be standard designation for the Sunday before the start of Lent. These days, churches tend to use more prosaic titles such as “Last Sunday of Ordinary Time”.
At St. Matthew’s, the church where I grew up, our long-time Sexton, Mr. Pieters, would climb a step ladder every week and labouriously add the correct title for the coming Sunday, followed by a list of Hymn numbers. He had a box of large numbers and letters, printed on heavy cardboard and he would travel around the nave, usually on a Wednesday morning, updating all the hymn boards. He always wore his black sexton’s robe and small children in the church, myself included, were convinced he was a vampire! All of which is a long explanation of this week’s post title 😊.
This past week included, on Wednesday evening, our monthly Day Camp committee meeting so, most of my work centred around making notes all over my copy of the agenda, scribbling more notes on follow-up points during the meeting and finally ending the week doing as much of the follow-up as possible 😊.
One interesting development has sprung out of an email sent, last month, to me by Brett Cane (founder of CTM’s Day Camp Program and now a retired cleric living in Victoria BC). Ten years ago, after spending a year as a chaplain at Bristol University, UK, Brett convinced a young Theological student, Carmen Rogers, to come to Canada for the summer and join the Day Camp Travelling Teams. Carmen was made a Team Leader and travelled in Quebec and Ontario with her Team. Fast forward 10 years and she is now on the track to being ordained as a Deacon in the Church of England and is married with 2 young children. She specialises in children’s ministry and directs a charity called Pulse Ministries that provides youth and children’s resources to UK churches. Brett recently sent me an email with a link to Pulse and I reached out to Carmen to see if she thought there might be any way in which we could partner. Wednesday morning we had a video call and are now actively looking at sharing CTM Day Camps program resources on the Pulse platform. The collaboration is still in the early stages, watch for developments in future posts!
In more regular Day Camps work I have continued my mission of contacting at least 5 new contacts, per week, in the hopes of finding more communities that are interesting in hosting a Day Camp. This week surpassed last’s goal as I sent out 15 messages to potential churches. Let us hope someone answers 😊.
Alongside the actual Day Camp program tasks, Monday I met again with our Mini-Retreat Speaker, Michelle, in the hopes I can soon start distributing a flyer about that event and by Thursday, had received enough info from Michelle to create a draft that I sent to her for approval.
In the same vein, the quest continues for more families who would like to join the next Cook-along series. I have tried a number of Team Alumni who now have their own elementary school-aged children but, so far, have not had any replies. Sigh.
Away from my laptop, I have been dipping into a book gifted to me at Christmas by Jessica. For several years now she has been given me a book (top-favourite presentJ). Many of these have been books of contemporary poetry but this one is about a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and is extremely interesting.
Progress has been slow on my Swedish sock knitting but I have finally completed the first sock of the pair and have chosen to digress into making a baby gift for a Team alumnus whose first child is due in just three weeks! By Wednesday I had settled on the pattern and hope to choose colours from my stash and make a start before the weekend is over 😊.
Yesterday I had a lovely lunch visit with Jillian and baby Amelia. Jillian brings the baby between 2 nap times so the visits need to be quite short but they work out to coincide with lunch hour so she and I shared some Chile Crisp Linguine Alfredo while Amelia snacked on cucumber sticks!
Today, of course, includes the weekly Bake, which will include a Sourdough Boule, 2 GF loaves for my friend, Sue, a batch of banana chocolate chip muffins, a Lemon Loaf and lastly, a Breakfast Custard.
Time to roll up my sleeves and hit the kitchen now. I thought I would share the muffin recipe, as these are handy for breakfast or a snack treat 😊.
Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins
- ½ cup butter, softened
- ½ cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1½ cups flour
- 1 tsp. each, salt & baking powder
- ½ tsp. soda, dissolved in 1 Tbsp. water
- 1 cup mashed banana
- ½ cup bittersweet chocolate chips
Cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy then beat in the eggs. Whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder and stir into the butter mixture. Add the dissolved soda and bananas and mix well. Fold in the chocolate chips. Spoon into lined muffin cups and bake in a preheated 375ºF oven for 18-20 minutes. Makes 1 dozen medium-large muffins.