the week in review

[bronze_ribbons]

worked on various calligraphy samples and pieces. Hoping to finish two more this weekend, and I have a batch of invitations to address next week. [You might want to skip the links if you have a slow connection (or can't stand bad formatting)-- I'll work on resizing the scans when time permits.]

was surprised with a lovely acknowledgment in a book I copyedited earlier this year. Thank you, Jerry.

received my contributor's copies of Everyday Blessings (my poems appear on February 13 and March 14).

received my contract and check for a poem appearing later this year in an online magazine

helped nail down the logistics for my husband's company retreat

attended the first night of my church's board retreat. The exercises were good -- the first was to interview a fellow member and then introduce them to the rest of the board (as it happened, D. also grew up in the Bluegrass State -- when our turn came, I couldn't resist announcing, "Kentucky is IN THE HOUSE!"). (It also transpired that while there were two native Tennesseans, no one on this year's board was born in Nashville.) The second consisted of dividing the group by Myers-Briggs results -- it turns out the board is pretty evenly split between "J"s and "P"s -- and tasking each subgroup with a hypothetical situation (for this exercise, it was coming up with a dress code) and subsequently analysizing how certain personality types approached discussion, process, and decision-making. We have a good balance. We have very thoughtful and experienced people ... with significantly different approaches and attitudes towards policy-crafting. And that's as it should be.

(And if anyone's wondering, I am a confirmed INTJ married to an ENTJ. In plain English, we're both control freaks, but since I'm far more introverted than he is, I tend to leave parties far earlier than he does.)

worked on ongoing writing/editing thingies and cultivated various nests of unhatched poultry (TM ludimagist)

wrote some Sayers-inflected Snupin drabbles (HBP spoilers in the second link).

missed the cat. Terribly.

stayed up reading Roberta Israeloff's Kindling the Flame: A Woman's Spiritual Journey (loosely themed around her becoming re-involved in Judaism during the course of preparing for her older son's bar mitzvah). I marked several pages, including the ending:

[Carol] says that every institution has to evolve, or it dies. She asks me what the synagogue means to me.

I remember Eve Lodge's voice on the phone, her patience, her optimism that I'd find a way to participate. "I need the shul for a lot of reasons," I tell her. "It's a way for me to feel part of a community, to do good work, to pass along tradition to my sons. Sometimes I think that for me it's about everything but God."

"What if everything's God?" she asks.

What if.

Dear Grandma, you gave me the music, but the words you sang were wrong. The religion you bequeathed me isn't about what can't be, what shouldn't be done. It's about possibility.