Heidi and I set our wedding date for August 30th, 2008. It’ll be on the Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend. We’re having it at St. Paul and the Redeemer Episcopal Church in Hyde Park. (This was Heidi’s local church in Chicago after she became Episcopalian and during her time in seminary.) Heidi and I will finalize many more of the details in the upcoming months, but here’s what we’re currently excited about:

• Because it’s going to be a Saturday morning wedding, many of our clergy friends, including out-of-Chicago ones can hopefully make it back to their churches for Sunday worship services.
• I originally planned to do CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) in a hospital this summer, but those plans switched and I’ll be doing it this coming fall. That lets me be more available for planning details and preparing for our marriage.
• SP-R is a beautiful church that has GREAT natural lighting through the windows on the sides. Our wedding pictures will be amazing! (And no, several of you have told me this, but I’m not crazy enough to think I can photograph my own wedding).
• We’re wanting to have a simple and inexpensive wedding. So the reception will probably be at the church and my extended family will hopefully help with the food. It’ll be a nice, end-of-summer barbecue theme.
• Because both of our denominations insist on regular Communion, our service will definitely have a Eucharist part. We haven’t decided yet whether the Episcopal priest or the Disciples minister will do that portion. (We’ll make that decision once I finally decide which Disciples minister to ask!)

Photo Play
My Divinity School curriculum has never been my sole area of study while at Chicago. The Div. School’s Ministry Program has had the ingenuity (and funds) to start recording students’ sermons to DVDs so they can watch and critique themselves visually instead of just audibly. I’ve created most of those DVDs and each time I make one, I learn something new in the software. Having a constant source of good content lets me learn the programs without the boring and pointless tutorials the software manufacturers always include. This work is important – and it seems to make learning more enjoyable as well.

Besides the video learning, I’ve also grown addicted to a blog called Strobist. The addiction started when I moved to Chicago a year and a half ago. The author is a photographer on-leave from his Baltimore paper and he’s written a full series teaching how to do off-camera lighting for photography. In addition to the accompanying flickr community (with >86000 pictures with lighting set-up descriptions and diagrams), I absolutely love the DIY (do-it-yourself) projects for good lighting.

Many of my church members do woodworking as their creative, hands-on activity. Some of them are managers at companies and work in offices all day — but they still feel the need to create something physical. Living in a communal house in the city, I don’t have the space/equipment/money to have such a hobby. This is why Strobist is so perfect. I can create small light modifiers and scratch that metaphorical itch. For instance, this past month I created a Macro Studio (for taking detailed, zoomed-in pictures of objects) and a grid-snoot (that focuses a flash beam into a tight circle):

Other Blog Entries
Heidi was giving me a hard time about my snack habits, and then introduced me to a delicious healthy snack: baked snap peas. In addition to finding healthier habits for my hunger, I’m working with my church on helping fight global extreme poverty and hunger (1, 2). All the fun of my field parish works in tandem with the fun I have at the Divinity School; last Tuesday we had our annual Ministry Banquet with catered food and great parodies of life at the Div. School (read through to the end of the post for the accounts and pictures — the beginning is more of my rambling). It’s even better when the hilarity of the school isn’t strictly confined to our skits. Take, for example, our Lilly program’s Music conference in January: speakers, music presentations, and … a fire alarm! — it was hilarious watching the intellectual hierarchy instantly flattened by seeing many of the smartest people I know debating whether they should go directly outside or go up to their offices to get their coats. I love the funny ways we can remember the great gift of life and all the funny illusions we read into it.  Oh, and in addition too all those activities, I also photographed the Installation and Ordination of Chicago’s new Episcopal Bishop.  (I wrote about it, and posted a gallery!)

Thanks for reading – and remember, the wedding is on August 30th!

Props to Panera Manager Colin (W Boughton in Bolingbrook). Heidi and I ordered dinner there a couple of nights ago. I’d been searching for much of the afternoon for black drinking straws. You wouldn’t believe how hard they are to find. Target doesn’t have them. The Jewel-Osco grocery store doesn’t have them. Even the Factory Card Party Outlet doesn’t have them — and they have full sets of black plasticware for “Over the Hill” parties. I couldn’t find them … until Panera.

So seeing cups and cups of these straws around the restaurant, I decided to ask the cashier if I could have about 100 of the straws. I even offered to pay. She said, “Hold on, I don’t think I can give out a box without my manager knowing about it.” She went to the back as they prepared our food and then came out with an anxious-looking guy. (I don’t think he’d ever had such a request). He pulled out a box of the straws from a cabinet, came up to me, and said, “You want 100 of these?!?” Then he counted them out halfway and doubled it. (I ended up with 121).

“Can I pay you for these?” I asked him. After thinking about it for five seconds, he asked us if we had family in the area that ever needed catering. I said “No, but she’s a local priest” and pointed to Heidi. He gave us the catering brochures and asked us to use their service at some point. And I’m pretty sure we will!  This Panera is already Heidi’s default place to meet her parishioners, and if St. Benedict’s ever did cater (instead of eating pot-luck style) they’d probably use Panera.  But when Heidi and I were walking to the car and talking about how smart and friendly of a manager Colin is, we realized: we’re going to need food for the rehearsal dinner for our wedding! This is the start of a beautiful case of patronage to our local Panera …

So the straws are for a very particular project – a project that makes me feel like Clark Gilpin. I’m making grid spots for my external camera flashes. Grid spots are honeycomb shapes you put on the end of a flash to give it a circular shape (rather than a widespread fill) and a directable beam of light. In Joe McNally’s book, The Moment it Clicks (one of the new crowd favorites), it seems most of his pictures have at least one light with a grid spot. I wanted this effect, but I didn’t want to have to pay $137 for set of 4. Thank goodness for Strobist and the other DIY (Do-It-Yourself) blogs.

For those of you who don’t know, Clark Gilpin is an American Religious History professor at the Divinity School. He’s not a photographer, and not an “artsy” type — so no, he wasn’t the one who showed me how to make these grid spots. But his incessant use of a ruler is very memorable. I still remember first time he gave us a copied reading for class with his underlines still in the text. Gilpin doesn’t underline while reading in the car or on the bus; there are no squiggly lines in his text. He reads and underlines USING A RULER … with exact, parallel lines underscoring his points. When I think of a ruler, I don’t think of Canon, I think of Gilpin.

Which is why I felt like Clark Gilpin while creating these grid spots. To make them, I had to borrow Heidi’s ruler. (I haven’t had a ruler since high school … there’s a reason I’m going into ministry!!!) With the ruler, I made the precise measurements – first, on a Raisin Bran box, and then, on a Trader Joe’s pesto pizza box after I’d messed up the Raisin Bran version. With enough super glue and electrical tape to go around, the grid spots are finished and I’m anxious to test them!