Wentzler Wednesday Whips By

This Saturday, we celebrate two Confirmation ceremonies with a total of 81 8th grade candidates being confirmed. So far this week has been consumed with Confirmation rehearsals and other details [ordering a catered lunch for the Bishop and other celebrants, flowers for the altar, contacting the ushers, assigning altar servers, correcting the Mass booklet with an errata sheet], with the finalizing of the registration mailing, final exams for the grades 3-7, progress reports and other end of program year business. I look forward to June with the relative calm of actual registration for 2011-12, textbook and supply inventory and ordering, catechist recruitment for the new year and so forth.

But Wentzler Wednesday is becoming sacrosanct ... so here is the latest progress photo. Four hours of stitching on Section IV yielded satisfactory progress, especially when you consider that I am OCD about my floss, using just one needle for my TW projects, and threading it with just the one blend at a time and returning all floss to the bobbins when I am done stitching with each blend. I used to park my needles on sheets labelled with all the symbols but found that I ended up with a lot of knotted and wasted floss. I am now content to work more slowly but much more methodically. I am hoping to finish up the cross-stitching on Sunday and perhaps start the beading on Monday. The plan is to have this particular project completed during the next Wentzler Wednesday and get it to the framer on my day off on Friday. I had toyed with the idea of having a Jill Rensel frame for this piece but decided against it. This will be a gift for my daughter who already has two Wentzler companion pieces, The Spring Faerie and the Lily of the Valley Faerie. I think I will try to frame the Autumn Faerie in similar fashion to those.

Reverting to my first topic: My students never fail to surprise me. I had been dreading the Monday and Tuesday rehearsals for Confirmation to such a degree that I was mildly hysterical and a wee bit manic the entire weekend. Anticipating the Monday one in particular was playing havoc with my equanimity since my four biggest discipline problems would be attending that one. I even went so far as to warn the pastor so he would expect to be scandalized by their raucous behavior in Church. So what do the little darlings do? They behaved like perfectly sedate, mature and reasonable young people. There were several theories floated as to why this happened: transportation to the Twilight Zone, alien abductions, faerie switches, parental threats involving death and dismemberment ... but my favorite was put forward by my assistant, Josephine, who thinks my guardian angel decided to cut me a break and patrolled the church with the spiritual equivalent of a cattle prod. It's her theory that said guardian angel knows just how close I am to running screaming from the office never to return and also knows that no one else wants this job and probably has orders from on high to keep me from retiring until I find and train a replacement. Note to self: at next year's rehearsals, when explaining to the young ladies what shoes constitute dress shoes and what do not, DO NOT use the terminology of my youth: thongs now refer to underwear not beach shoes. The current term, apparently, is flappers, which in my youth referred to the wilder sort of young woman from my grandmother's time. I do believe words should mean much the same thing for at least four generations. It would avoid so many awkward moments!