The entire building is Green, with many recycled materials and this lovely wooden staircase. I like walking up and down stairs fairly regularly, usually I have to sit most of the day working at a computer so it is a welcome change.
After seeing the old Novitiate house, the morning prayers made a lot more sense. The chapel there is like the ones in Oxford colleges– there are basically two facing sets of walled off areas facing each other. Now, we sit in a little semi-circle. What I am talking about is the fact that most of the prayers are said switching off between different parts of the circle. It can be a trifle confusing and odd, but once I saw how the chapel used to be set up it suddenly made perfect sense (thank you Kat!).
It was Colleen’s feast day last evening, so there were decorations and special food preparations. Sister Sally was in charge, but everyone that was present helped here and there where it was needed, I did some of the flowers– the Iris in the main jar. It turns out several of us have some floral experience.
Oh on an unrelated note, there goes Father Bob walking to mass– I can see him outside the window. Good thing it stopped raining for a few minutes for him! I went to mass there yesterday with the elderly sisters. They have a gorgeous chapel with huge windows looking out on a forest. But I digress.
I learned a great deal about community from the decorating process. Decisions about decorating always tend to excite strong feelings, so I saw a slight disturbance in the community and how it was resolved, which I thought extremely helpful and more demonstrative than dozens of explanations as to what is done would have been.
Here is the dining room during the beginning of the decoration process, it looked quite gorgeous at the end!
Kat reading out of one of the recipe books. There seems to be quite a store of them and lots of sisters who have their own recipes and are always happy to help. Several people often go to the local farmers’ markets in Marin to purchase vegetables and things.
Part of the extensive kitchen area. It is so large that they divide up who does what part of it (one to do floor, etc) I have a general idea where most things are, though there are so many cupboards that I can still get lost. There are two refrigerators as well, to paraphrase Pride & Prejudice’s Mr. Collins in an impressed voice, “I say refrigerators…because there are several.”
Some lovely brownies made for the feast day celebrations. Almost all the Dominicans I’ve met have been avid bakers, I’m not sure why, but I think it is fantastic. I’m quite fond of baking myself. We had a lively discussion over dinner about nuts vs no nuts in Chocolate Chip cookies.
A typical view of the kitchen, taken by yours truly, stealth photographer. Iphones take pictures perfectly silently. I wanted to show what a scene looked like during the day that was what it generally looked like. As you can see there are multiple people all helping out in some way. Usually there is an assigned person to cook dinner, but they can always ask for assistance (I helped chop on the first day I arrived, it helped with my working knowledge of where things went in the kitchen).
