Situation and Prayer Request

First, Happy Easter.

Second, for those of you who know us personally and are wondering where we have been for the Easter Vigil and Sunday Mass, we had an emergency with Melanie's grandmother. She is 88 and has congestive heart failure and started having internal bleeding on Saturday morning. We came up here to Redding expecting the worst, but (deo gratias), she seems to have had a miracle of some sort, and the bleeding appears to have stopped, placing the need for a procedure that would require general anesthesia off the table, at least for now. With her heart and fluid retention, causing kidney problems, that could have been more than she could take.

However, she will probably be out of the ICU, which is good, but whether she will be able to come home in the near future (or ever), is up in the air. She has been living with Melanie's parents for the last few years, but she might need professional medical care around the clock.

Obviously, these sort of problems are going to always be there, so any prayers you could throw this way are appreciated.

Since we are in Redding, without DSL and busy with family stuff, any blogging after this post and the quick update, will probably be nonexistent until we get home to Oakland.

I will check email every evening, so if you have a cooking question, as someone did earlier, feel free to ask it in the comments box or to email me. I will do my best to answer it, either personally, if you leave an email address, or publicly, if you don't.

If you are just wondering what my Easter menu was, since I had already purchased all my food, we did have the planned Easter feast, we just had it up here. The menu was pretty close to what we had last year: green garlic soup, pasta with peas, pancetta, balsamic vinegar and reggiano parmiggiana, roast leg of lamb with a yogurt/herb crust, ragout of fava beans, sauted pea shoots, asparagus, and colombina with strawberries and creme chantilly. If you need recipes for any of this, please look in the archives. If the recipe you would like is not there, drop me a line and I will oblige.

Happy Easter and God Bless.