Cooking with Tripp

My high-school classmate, Tripp Hudgins, and I were chatting back and forth on Facebook some time ago, discussing the possibility of him providing a posting on my (now defunct) cooking blog "Food in the Balance."

In the run-up to Easter, life got very busy for Tripp (as a working pastor) and for me (as a temporarily "unencumbered" pastor who was working hard to get ready to pull up stakes and move to Connecticut). As luck would have it, Tripp managed to carve out a little time to shoot a video blog post for the food blog that no longer existed, but I failed to see it until just today, when I was sitting down to catch up with my various electronic responsibilities. Sorry about that, Tripp.

So, here is Tripp's posting on vegetarian and celiac friendly corn chowder, along with some of his commentary on the value of building community by eating together. Thanks, Tripp!

Two Weeks In

This Saturday marks the second week since my family moved to Norwalk, CT (and, yes, I'm only just now getting around to posting about it...).

After picking up our U-Haul truck in Paterson, we brought it home and started the process of loading it with our worldly goods, a process which was greatly eased by the advance-work of our friends Evelyn and John, who had brought a truck and trailer down twice in the previous week, to help pack and to move many of our books.

On the morning of the move, several friends from the River Edge church turned out to help load, along with a group of Ian's friends from school, along with Victor from the Modified Academy of Fencing and Hyo-Jung, a ministerial colleague from the Haworth United Church of Christ. With all of these folks helping out, we managed to get everything loaded up by just after lunch time.

When we arrived in Norwalk, there were more than 30 folks waiting for us. They had arrived hours earlier and spent the morning cleaning the house, getting it ready for our arrival. Once the back of the truck was open, it only took an hour and five minutes for the fantastic church folks to empty the truck and get all of our stuff in the right places in the house, fold up all of the moving blankets and have the truck swept and ready to return to U-Haul. It was simply amazing to see so many people working together as a team -- there's probably a sermon illustration in there, somewhere.

After a busy Sunday, I returned to New Jersey to meet the professional movers who were showing up at 8:00AM on Monday to pick up our piano, our massive sofas, and a few other items that we thought would be better to have big, strong people handle. I spent the rest of the day cleaning up the old house, getting ready for the some of the trustees from my old church to come by for what turned out to be a blessedly uneventful walk-through. By the time I made it back to Connecticut that night, I was bushed.

The last two weeks have been a journey, with Kimberly unpacking boxes and setting up rooms while I've been hard at work at church. She's amazing! Every day, she's made huge progress in getting the house put together. Though we don't have anything hung up on the walls, yet, the place is really feeling like home.

Connected: Carrying Amistad's Legacy

I just came across this video produced by Amistad America about the Atlantic Freedom Tour. It opens with footage of the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race and has some great shots of the schooner's construction and launch, as well as the footage of Amistad's time in Sierra Leone that is the focus of the video.