A Good Day for Chicken Soup

Good afternoon!!

It's a gray, cold, very windy Southern California afternoon.  It was and is supposed to be raining, but it is not.  We Californians do get cynical about predictions of rain; it's understandable when they miss the mark so often.

A radio talk show host, Tim Conway Jr, was betting people last night that not one drop of rain would fall in Los Angeles today though the prospect was 100% for rain.  I'm with him, but maybe not quite so drastically.  When it says 20% chance of rain, however, I always feel that the chances are better than a prediction of 80%.  I don't know why it should be true, I just know it so often happens that way.

I am fighting, not a cold, but an attack of the Flowering Ornamental Pear Trees.  They are beautiful small trees, and in February they're covered by a snowstorm of white blooms, tinted with chartreuse here and there.  Lovely to look at, but don't get too close (some in every block is too close!)

So I decided to get some chicken and make a soup for tonight.  For some reason I can no longer buy a reasonably sized package of cut up chicken. There are either large packages of thighs, large packages of legs, or packages of boneless breasts. I LIKE BONES.  So I bought a package of about twenty wings, yes, wings--bought in desperation.  Put them into a saucepan with a quart and a half of water, a large carrot cut in six pieces, a large piece of a large onion cut into small pieces, a clove of garlic minced, a few dried herbs, a shake of garlic salt--and about a half cup of cut up tired celery.  All of that boiled gently away, and then I went in and took out the wings with my tweakers and laid them on a plate. Then I cut up a largish Mexican squash and put those pieces in.   When the wings cooled off enough to trim, I took out the bones and took off the skin.  I had a pile of scraps about as big as the meat, but que vale? The meat was bite size and succulent, and I put it back into the pot with a couple of small handfuls of twisted pasta, and then I forgot about it. Oh, and I cut some cilantro and some parsley from the yard and threw those in. The soup is delicious and it will make a great supper in about two hours. 
Wing-skin is greasy and I have been trying to skim a lot of fat off the top of the soup with a large spoon.  It's hard to do but I have to because "I had a heart attack," you know.  Simper.
I can't tell you how yummy that soup tastes. I have had perfectly good chicken soup that tasted bitter from black pepper, or lacked salt, or had that thin feathery taste that it can get--but this soup has none of the above.  It is perfect. YAZZYBEL

Silent Prayer? --or White Noise?

Some Sundays, you go into church, sink down onto your knees, and--draw a blank.

It's true. Sometimes I just kneel there in the chill gloom of an early Sunday morning, and I can't think of a thing.  Nada.

That's why standardized, written out prayers are good.  Sometimes spontaneity just doesn't work. I think it's because, unthought-of  by us, our brains in this modern world are often so full of junk-images, junk-thoughts, and other distractions: have to's and forgot to's and don't want to's....that we are incapable of forming even a simple few words into a prayer, no matter how much we need to.

But then we can't even remember our simple prayers. The only one that ever springs to mind for me is:
      Good bread!  Good meat!
      Good God!    Let's eat!

And that is not appropriate or useful at ten of eight on Sunday morning either.  The Lord's Prayer should come to mind, but for the life of me I can't get it started at that point.

So here's what I prayed today:

Dear Lord, please forgive me for letting my mind and life to become so clogged up with trivia that I can't even think what I needed to pray for.  I am sorry that I can't think of a suitable prayer for this morning.  I can't even stop to reflect or meditate at this point because my mind will just fill up again with rusty nothingness and we can't call that praying. (At this point I sometimes can remember Jimmy Swaggart's injunction  as to what God wants of us...{1} He wants us to thank Him, and {2}He wants us to praise and bless His holy Name. )  So I tack on those two thoughts, say Amen, and sit back to read my bulletin until the clergy some processing in.  
Today was Candlemas, a special blessing of the children day.  Candelario, en espanol.  And, says the church bulletin, Candlemas marks the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox; and in the days of agriculture as a way of life for most everybody, it was a very special time because it meant that planting time would be coming up.  Get out those seed catalogs and celebrate Candlemas, everybody!!! Amen. YAZZYBEL