Finished by Friday: Wine Bottle Covers to Hide our Cheap Wine

We're about to head up to my parents' house for the weekend. We're taking along some cheap (really, REALLY cheap) wine and some Martinelli's sparkling cider because my parents and we will probably spend part of Saturday afternoon visiting sukkot. My parents are members of Beth Immanuel Sabbath Fellowship in Hudson, Wisconsin, and this is Sukkot, so many of the families in the area will have "open sukka" this weekend, and we'll probably be sukka-hopping. I am not sure anybody will want our wine, as it is not marked kosher. There are varying opinions on how kosher one must be in that church. But the cider is definitely parve.

The bags are made of fall leaf printed fabric and are simple bags with a tie around the neck (the tie is stitched into the seam so it doesn't get lost). I'm hoping they will look nice enough to turn everyone's attention from the rotgut vino they will contain.

Spring or Mud

Saturday it reached the 20s, which was a huge relief; Sunday it hit the mid 30s! Everything is melting. We're at 34 here on Monday morning and the sun is shining and the snow is dripping off the eaves.

I took the children up to St. Paul for a brief visit with the grandparents Sunday afternoon, stayed overnight and got home Monday afternoon in time for Miss B to work at 4:00. It was a good, though very short, visit. One highlight was visiting the building their church bought and has moved into, in Hudson, Wisconsin.

It was warmish and lovely up in the Twin Cities, plus they either didn't have as much snow to start with as we do or most of it had already melted, so it was not so sloppy. When we got home to New Albin, the town was a sea of mud, with snow floating around in it. Lil Miss A commented in disgust, "At Grandma's house it's spring. Here it's just mud."

Most of the way home, Lil Miss A sang to us. Two songs over and over again. One was "The Old Gray Mare," only she sang, "The Old Grand Mary." She refused to listen to our insistence that it was a song about a horse. No, it's a song about a grandma named Mary, she said. The other song was "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean." She could never remember the start of the line, so it was, "Mumumumble OVER THE OCEAN", where she really belted the part she could remember. She had Miss B and me laughing so hard I almost had to pull over to the side of the road to recover.

New church home

No, no, not for us - we ARE home.

No, this is my parents' church, Beth Immanuel (House of Messiah, more or less), a church they helped to found in the Twin Cities. It is, for want of a better term, a Messianic church, a Christian church in the Hebrew tradition. Anyway, it was founded... I'm gonna say 5 years or so ago, and was somewhat of a church plant from another Messianic congregation, Sar Shalom (Prince of Peace). My parents have been involved in the guiding of this church since day one.

I was startled to learn that the group had put in an offer on a church building, a wonderful old brick Presbyterian church in Hudson, Wisconsin, of all places. This afternoon their offer was accepted, and soon this



will be the home base of their church.

It looks like a super place. Theirs is a very active church, and every inch of the building will be put to use.

I'm thankful for this blessing on them!