On our mini-vacation at the end of February we had the opportunity to study the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Our teachers, Kimika Soko Takechi & Larry Sokyo Tiscornia, welcomed us into their home for an introductory lesson. They walked us through the steps in preparing and serving tea in the tray ceremony. John and I bumbled our way through the intricacies of napkin folding and the ritual purification steps, but we had a most wonderful time.

One night's instruction certainly does not produce a Tea Master, and in my case, I look forward to many years of study of this fascinating aesthetic discipline. It extends into various aesthetic areas, including flower arranging, selecting and displaying art in the Tearoom, preparing meals to accompany the tea, and the incense ceremony. Being so far away from a qualified teacher does present a problem. Fortunately, Larry suggested a book written by the former Grand Master of the Urasenke School in Kyoto. This book covers the intricacies of the full Tea Ceremony, and covers all the steps that John and I practiced in our class. Returning home, I've assembled a few pieces of equipment I was missing, and I've hosted my first tea for a friend of ours.

John made me a granite tray for last Christmas thinking I'd find it useful to handle hot things in our Teahouse. I used it as the tray for serving tea, as you'll see in the picture above.

If you're at all interested in the Tea Ceremony, here are a few resources I've found:

• Chanoyu.com is Larry and Kimika's website. Chanoyu means 'hot water for tea', and is the Japanese term translated as Tea Ceremony in English. Larry and Kimika are marvelous teachers, and I look forward to have the opportunity to study further with them.
• O-cha.com exports tea directly from Japan to individuals. I've ordered both matcha (the powdered full-leaf tea used in the Tea Ceremony), and gyokuro, the finest Japanese green tea leaf prepared by steeping.Their teas are fabulous and their service is exemplary.
• Matchaandmore.com has a wide range of matcha and utensils and items for the Tea Ceremony. Their goods are of the highest quality and their service is fabulous.

Come on by for tea!

Last weekend we finished moving into our new great room. It's a project we've been working on since 2007 - and one we put on hold after the 2008 floods. 

John and I pulled the TV, sound system, and the rat's nest of interconnecting cables apart and trucked them into the new space. The basic setup went swimmingly, and then we had to recalibrate the sound system. Sony doesn't make setup very easy, and we spent about two hours cursing under our breath until we got it right.

The new space has high ceilings and concrete floors, so the sound is very bright. John pulled out some oriental carpets and we jiggered things until we got it just to our liking.

We had a great Christmas at home, but we weren't dozing much. Last year we'd planned to redo the back building (John's former shop space) as our library/great room. The flood intervened, and the project waited until late November and early December. 

We got a great deal on some used industrial steel shelving that John resurfaced. He cleaned up and polished the concrete floor, and we installed five units, each eight feet tall and eight feet high. 

John's been moving books from his cache inside the house for a week or so. I've been so busy wrapping up projects at work for the year that the first chance I had to work on the library was Christmas Eve.

And work we did! We moved our literature library and several sets of old encyclopedias (John collects 'em). I moved part of my metaphysical library; the rest of it I've completely reorganized inside my office inside the house.

The obvious question is: how do you ever find anything here? The answer: we catalog everything with some software that'll read ISBN number bar codes from books, look up the information from Amazon.com, and store everything – including location information - in the database. I've been recoding books like mad, because when I reshelve books I want to have current location information. For you trivia folks: we have about 5100 books under management so far, not counting multivolume sets like encyclopedias.

Here we're looking back from the far side of the new library space. The room is huge - maybe 800 square feet. We'll move out the big TV and the sound system. I had thought to move my piano out, too, but I'm now considering other plans for my music studio.

I began my Yule celebration tonight. For those not used to my doings, we never have a Christmas tree. Instead, I decorate a wreath with apples, which signify the passage of the seasons. I burn candles each night and hold some simple meditations on the passage of the year.

Rather than buy a wreath this year, I fashioned my own from yew and juniper branches from our garden. The apples are Rome Beauty from our garden. I was feeling a little badly about not getting any decoration before now. I'm very glad I waited for the inspiration to use our own evergreens for the season.

Our best Yule greetings to all! 

John's been a strong supporter of the African American Museum of Iowa here in Cedar Rapids. He built two benches for the Museum's main exhibition space several years ago. Unfortunately the Museum was badly damaged in last year's floods, and the benches largely ruined.

John built two new benches for the Museum's recent opening. I took a quick snap of the new work before he installed it – just a day before the opening. We were invited to the opening, and had a chance to tour the restored – and significantly enhanced exhibits. Sadly, the Museum's curator, Susan Kuecker, said her farewell at the party; she's joining her husband who moved to Pittsburgh for a great new gig. We'll miss Susan, but John's looking forward to collaborating with the new curator.

I took another trip last week back to North Carolina to visit my father and my sister's family. My posting last November told of Dad making it home from a rehab facility after recovering from a broken knee.

Unfortunately that's not all the story. In early November Dad was hospitalized with a bowel obstruction. Surgery to correct the problem (scar tissue) was successful, but he's just not thrived after the second surgery in four months. My sister and I were hoping that he might make it home, but he is still very frail. I thought I'd pay him a quick visit. Along the way my sister and I managed to work through some tax and estate issues - I'm doing a bit of homework with one of my CPA friends on questions that arose.

I suspect I'll head back to see him around his birthday in mid-March: he'll be 90.

With the wood moved out of our Annex, John's moved his shop temporarily into the Annex space. Our Annex is a second building - the old garage and a large (800 square foot) addition - that we're planning for media, music, and exercise. John rehabbed the old garage space into our cool gym space several years ago.

The large addition how houses John's shop, minus his new table saw. Because the table saw is so difficult to relocate, John doesn't want to set it up just yet. But he's gotten the rest of his new tools out and running. Here he's using his spiffy Festool sander and vacuum setup. Festool's a premium German tool maker. Their tools use a common vacuum system: the sander, for example, actually pulls dust through vents in the sanding pad, giving effectively dustless sanding. The vacuum is HEPA-filtered, so the place stays clean.

The big news is that John's gotten all the big lumber pieces moved from our Annex building (a 1200 square foot structure just in back of our home) to the place where his new shop will eventually be, in the Cherry Building - about ten blocks from our home. The lumber storage area is on the third floor of the Cherry Building where it'll be high and dry if any more flood waters come our way.

John's shop will eventually be on the first floor of the Cherry Building in an annex area that's filled with great light. The first floor of the Cherry Building was completely wiped out in the June floods. As with many projects around Cedar Rapids, reconstruction after the flood is taking much longer than one could have imagined. Because no one knows exactly when John may be able to occupy his new shop space, he's setting up temporary quarters back in the Annex where the lumber used to be. There's 800 square foot of clear work area, and he's assembling the tools he'll need to get going again.

It's the beginning of the return of light! (Though you wouldn't know it here in Siberian Iowa where the wind chill is below -20F.) This is my Yule wreath for this year. Taking an old English custom, I decorate a wreath with apples to symbolize the equinoxes and solstices.

All the best to you in 2009!