On Friday, Oct 12, 2007, I had the pleasure of offering prayers giving thanks for the birth of Lola Grace Andrews, daughter of life-long friend Darryl Andrews and his wife Sara. It was privilege to be part of this special moment in their lives.
“Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, ‘Children, you have no fish, have you?’ They answered him, ‘No.’ He said to them, ‘cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.’ So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the lake. But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.” (John 21:4-8) When we preach on this, the last of the Resurrection appearances in St. John’s Gospel, we rarely stop to ask the question, why was Peter fishing in the nude? After all, the story from which this short excerpt is taken contains so many wonderful images on which we might otherwise preach: the multitudinou...
After we stripped the cloth off the reservoir and exhausters, we sanded them down so that they were nice and clean with no glue or material residue remaining The bellows had been recovered in 1905 and the restorer had left a penciled note on the inside of the reservoir. The exhausters, however, were original. They were "harmonium style", that is, with large ribs with leather hinges and leather gussets. The conventional wisdom as that novices like us should not attempt to recreate these on the first go-around. We decided we would just recover the exhausters using bellows cloth (more on that, below). We cleaned off the old ribs and sanded them down so that we could use them again in the exhausters. We then set them aside while we moved to work on the main reservoir. We rehinged the bellows board to the movable reservoir board (for some reason I didn't take any photos of that) and then while waiting for the hing...
The Portrait of my Grandfather, Frank Rason Sketeched during the Second World War at the Astoria Club in Amasterdam by W. Sealtiel, 44 Paramaribost On my wall hangs a portrait, sketched in charcoal and coloured pencil. It is a portrait of my maternal grandfather, Francis James Rason (1923-1997). During the war he was stationed in Belgium, the Netherlands and in England (the latter being where he met my grandmother). In the 1940s, while in Amsterdam, he had his portrait done, twice in fact. I first learned of this portrait when I was a teenager and began to ask my grandmother about our family history. She began to show me old photographs, particularly photographs of her family back in England, photographs of her parents and grandparents, some of which have now come into my possession. Then she told me she wanted to show me something special that she thought I’d find interesting. She reached into her closet and pulled out a cardboard paper ...
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