It was another wild whirl of social events for us this weekend. No, really. Friday, we went out for sushi at Kampai, a local favorite kind of place. It’s the kind of place that really floats our boats when we want a lot of good sushi fast, or relatively fast. We’ve been going there for 10 years now, and it’s one of those places where we don’t even have to communicate in complete sentences – or with words, even. Sometimes, all that is necessary to indicate a desire for sushi is an arm, extended in expectation that it’ll be twisted. Friday night my husband David and I actually agreed in advance to go out for dinner, but “soosh” was the arm-twisted determination of where and what we we would eat.

Saturday was a big day – we had a gift to buy for a niece who graduated from high school, Melissa. There’s a lot more I could say under cover of a password, since there’s a lot of family stuff involved, but we’re happy for Melissa and proud of her. She was in a special program up until a few months ago, when there were a lot of changes and stresses, and she ended up in a good situation in a group home. The nice thing was that she still went through the graduation ceremony yesterday, along with one other classmate from her program and all the rest of the other kids from her senior class.

We were stumped for a gift, but ended up giving her a “memory kit” in a tote box with disposable cameras, photo albums to filll, some older prints we had from a lot of family gatherings, a journal, pens, and so on. We wavered on getting a more souped-up camera but decided to see how she does with the disposables – she also got a DVD player Saturday, so a simple digital camera was not out of the question – but nobody makes a truly “simple point and shoot” digital camera anymore. Other than the single use ones, of course. We were in a bit of a panic, and I’d looked at dozens of “simple” digital cameras online before we decided to keep it simple and get her disposables, and turn it into a theme gift.

We plan on going to visit her periodically with our own cameras (she’s living several hours away now) and take her for photo safaris. She really does like taking pictures and doing photo albums, so the gift we’re actually giving is that of time – we hope to spend more of it with her now that she’s settled and has a routine. She has a job and is very proud of her paycheck; her face lit up when I asked her “how much was your paycheck again?” That got a bigger smile than asking her about her graduation ceremony. The exciting thing was that we were able to buy everything at Target in just under 90 minutes, get home and put the things together in the tote (including 8 disposable Kodak cameras with flash), put stick-on letters on the lid, and wrap everything. I also included a fabric-colored photobox to hold prints until she gets around to putting them in albums. The photo box just had a band of the wrapping paper around it so the whole thing looked very cute and colorful.

The party was fun but we stayed longer than we should have – it was an open house and we were there until the end, practically. It was a nice time though, and the funny part was we found that David’s parents were taking Melissa to see Shenandoah at the Marriott Lincolnshire Sunday, and we have season tickets and were going to be there, too. And as today was David’s birthday, we were already planning on getting together with our friends Steve, Earle, and Sandy for our regular “dinner and a catch-up” after the show (it’s a 5pm matinee). So we made reservations for nine instead of for six people (Steve was bringing another friend of ours on his extra ticket, Jim).

So Saturday had already been chock-full of stuff, and Sunday was no different. In the morning, yes, church. But also, church annual meeting. And anticipating that the person who normally takes minutes would not be there (Betsy, the clerk, is moving to Texas for veterinary school soon), I was ready with laptop and notebook to take the minutes. It went fast – only an hour and 15 minutes – but then there was no financial statement since the new treasurer recently had emergency surgery. We’ll get to that later, but we’re in good shape at the moment.

We had to vote on a number of items, but most interestingly, we’re taking a bunch of functions that had been all on the Bishop’s Committee plate and spun them out to the congregation. It may sound all corporate-speak, but there will now be 4 teams that cover the 4 main “bullet points” of our focus as laid out on the OneBreadOneBody website. Everyone was invited to sign up for one or two teams that were doing the things that most interested them – whether it’s “welcoming” or “nurturing” or “giving” or “inviting.” These four teams relate to churchy concepts but rather than saying “stewardship” or “membership” or “pastoral care” Steve and the executive committee came up with these concepts.

New addition – is still being discussed by the diocesan Bishop’s and Trustees. They move very slowly but we are still hopeful of getting ground broken this summer. There are ideas afoot for beautifying the outside of the existing building with nice landscaping and possibly a memory garden. We have a goal of doubling membership within 5-7 years and we need the space, and need to increase our spiritual curb appeal, I guess. Having come from a now-closed church that presented its back wall to the street, disinviting visitors by having access up a narrow sidewalk that went only to the parking lot, I have to agree with the notion of making our building and ourselves more open and welcoming to visitors.

Name – there was substantial consensus toward changing the name of our church completely! There are 3 top choices, and we’re pretty much evenly divided between the three for now.

• Good Shepherd (170)
• One Bread One Body (0)
• St Mary Magdalene (9)

Frankly, I’m stumped on the third one. I know the first two don’t sound very Episcopalian, but at least there’s 170 Episcopal churches named “Good Shepherd.” OBOB is derived from a pretty much Catholic hymnal that St Nicholas uses, and many of the parishioners are former Catholics. But many of us are former Lutherans and Congregationalists too, so there. At least my reading tells me that St Mary Magdalene is often depicted with long, flowing red hair (yay) because this was artistic shorthand for a sinful, promiscuous woman (erk!! Not that again). We’ll decide later about the new name.

After the meeting let out, I visited with people for a while, brought home some delicious gazpacho soup for David, and kicked around for a bit. Then it was time to see Shenandoah. I’m pretty much in agreement with the reviewer in that linked article – it’s a good show, very though-provoking, and David Hess as rugged individualist and paterfamilias Charlie Anderson is powerful in the role. But there are no “sing on your way out the door” songs – nothing sticks in your mind, although the scenes and emotion do. There are more reviews here.

Then all nine of us met up at Big Bowl on Milwaukee for dinner, and we had a chance to see Melissa one last time before she went home with her grandma and grandpa. They only had her for a night and then had to leave early to meet up with the staff from Melissa’s group home, at a halfway point.

She was still glowing about her big day, and also showing off her new watch, which she bought with her own money. She had a new purse, too. She’s grown up a lot in the last few months and her future is pretty secure. So we’re happy about that.

Happy birthday to David! We uncelebrated today by having a nice salad with chicken and some orange/ginger/miso salad dressing. Yum. After all the hoopla, it was nice to take it easy.

Garden note: it rained a lot this weekend, and when I checked on the tomato plant, it’s growing like crazy. I’m not going to go nuts and try to raise “$64 Tomato” but maybe an 89¢ tomato cage is called for.