It's a new year, and I might as well start a blog -- or revisit an old one. I'm on personal sabbatical this year, so there's no excuse not to write a whole lot this year. Some of that writing should make it out to this blog.

This morning, when requesting my donor advised fund to send money to send money to the Episcopal Church USA to support the General Convention this summer, I struggled to find the Tax ID for the national church. To find the number, I turned to the Wikipedia, specifically Episcopal Church (United States) - Wikipedia to learn the following tidbit:

The full legal name of the national church corporate body is the "Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America", which was incorporated by the legislature of New York and established in 1821. The membership of the corporation "shall be considered as comprehending all persons who are members of the Church". This should not be confused with the name of the church itself, as it is a distinct body relating to church governance.

For my future giving to various Episcopal organizations (which all have distinct Tax ID numbers), I compiled the following table:

In my mother-in-law's backyard.

Email I sent to citycouncil@albanyca.org

To make the meetings of City of Albany more accessible, please turn on auto captioning for all the city meetings that are streamed via the Albany KALB YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/AlbanyKALB/videos). With automatic captioning, even when it is not perfect, viewers can then more easily make sense of many hours of meetings by searching and reading transcripts.  It's a helpful measure in the absence of high fidelity transcripts or minutes generated by a human note-taker.

What experience do you all have in collaboratively editing Word documents in late 2019?

Yesterday, a group of collaborators and I were making the final push to submitting a grant proposal to the NSF due yesterday (spoiler alert: we made it!) Until the very last day, we were all using Google Docs and Google Drive, which is a fantastic collaborative environment. Then to get the documents formatted, the Google Docs were downloaded to the lead collaborator's computer. This move then made collaborative editing/copyediting of the document tricky. For a while, we were confused about which document was the most recent. We couldn't see easily see what other edits people had made. It wasn't clear that the approach that some of us took (to use Track Changes in Word) and then send our version of the document to the lead author) was actually the right -- and consensus -- approach.

Are others of you taking a similar approach: do a lot of collaborative editing in Google Docs and then do final editing/formatting in Word? How about using Microsoft Office for the Web for the entire writing process? I'm wondering how compatible online Word is with desktop Word, especially for detailed formatting.

I'm pleased that on the first full day back at home from vacation that I made two healthy and delicious meals, which I consumed in moderation. Only one chicken leg, a small serving of Israeli couscous, and a heap of broccoli. Alas, I magically forgot my diet when I indulged heartily on spicy pistachios that a friend supplied to us at a meeting -- so watch those meeting snacks!

A photo from Monday morning. I love looking at Albany Hill from the El Cerrito Plaza BART Station while waiting for the train.

I've spent many years now at All Souls Parish in Berkeley. So it tickles me to notice how utterly transportive Sunday morning workshop is to me -- if I notice. As I stood at the railing to receive communion yesterday, awash in music and light and surrounded by other parishioners, I said to myself: yes I'm blessed.