It’s still to raw for me to form a coherent remembrance of this good man that I loved.  But for now, I’d like to offer memories of him that keep bubbling to the surface.

I remember one night at some parish banquet or event, I think it was a new years eve party.  A waltz started playing.  He went and got Khouriya Anne and they danced.  They were both excellent dancers, I remember being surprised.  What didn’t surprise me was the look of deep and abiding love that passed between them.

I remember Father James’ gift for story telling.  He always had a story about something.  He could make the phone book interesting.  It never really mattered that the stories were often embellished, because we all knew it.  What mattered was the good humor and love and joy behind them.

I remember sitting down with Father James and a bottle of good Scotch (NEVER the cheap stuff) and convincing him to teach me to swear (but not blaspheme) in gaelic.  I also remember the hangover I had and he didn’t.  Unfortunately I didn’t remember the gaelic.

I remember him spending a lot of time with me after I first became Orthodox.  Weekly he had me over for lunch, always by his own hand cooking me a meal.  It was always on a Tuesday or a Thursday so we could have meat outside of Lent.  We usually had a steak, vegetables and a bottle of wine.  During those times, in many ways, he became the father I wished I had.

I remember one year when Easter fell on the same weekend as Pascha.  Some non-orthodox couple had decided that they’d do “Easter” at St. Elias because we had the latest service, not realizing our Resurrection Service was the night before and this was the Agape Vespers.  So they showed up in all their finery, and here was the choir and most of the parishioners in shorts and jeans.  And at the altar was Father James, in his cassock with black shoes and socks on, and his pasty white scottish legs sticking out, since he had black shorts and his collar shirt on underneath.  I remember Father James rushing out to explain to them, while the rest of us tried not to laugh.

I remember the mentor who tried to teach me wisdom, both by word and example.  I remember the careful and cunning thinker that he was, who brought home to me in his own person why God so loved Jacob because of his guile, not in spite of it.

I was his secretary for a couple of years.  Even after I stopped being paid by St. Elias, I was still running errands and doing things for Father James.  You just couldn’t quit the man.  I am pretty sure that’s one of the reasons he convinced Archbishop Michael of blessed memory to make me a subdeacon, was so he’d always have me available to run errands.  I never really minded.

As his secretary, I saw and heard things he expected me to keep in confidence and I always did.  But that gave me some unique insights into Father James and his sacrices.  He sacrificed so much of himself for his parish, much of which they never knew.  Those stories I’ll not share here.  Partly because they might open old wounds, but mostly because he wouldn’t have wanted me to.   He bore those sacrifices and those wounds, not always gladly, but obediently and prayerfully.  No better model of obedience and perseverence could ever be put before any young man.

I remember how unflappable he was.  During our wedding ceremony, a huge storm was raging outside.  During the reading of the wedding Gospel, the lights went out.  Father James did not miss a single beat, he simple dropped the Gospel Book down a few inches so he could read it by the light of our candles and went on.  And during the sermon, he used a particularly convenient thunderbolt to claim divine approval of the style of Orthodox marriage liturgies.

I remember how stoic and compassionate he was when we had to do a funeral for an infant killed in a car accident, because the mother had been holding it on her lap.

Most of all, I remember how much he affected me, how I wouldn’t be who I am today without him, how much I love him, how sad I am to know that he is gone from us, for a time.  Father James Kenna was like a force of nature, a bit of a divine tsunami blowing through all our lives, leaving change, growth, and in the end, Joy in his wake.

Very Reverend Archpriest James Duncan Kenna, 1934-2009.  Memory Eternal!

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For anyone who is not an Eastern Orthodox Christian, might as well do something more interesting.  This will all seem rather boring and tawdry.

Metropolitan +Philip needs to learn the first rule of holes.  STOP DIGGING!

Let’s list some of his major screw-ups:

1. Joseph Allen.  A man who shouldn’t be a priest.  He broke every rule in the book, and +Philip broke a lot of good men who pointed that out.
2. Demetri Khouri.  +Philip got his friend mad a bishop.  Demetri then proceeded to get drunk in a casino and sexually assaulted a woman.  Demetri was convicted and is a registered sex offender.   He was allowed to retire by his brother bishops as an act of mercy.  +Philip has apparently kept him on the payroll and assigned him work in Mexico.
3. Trying to demote his brother bishops in the US so he can act like a papal legate.
4. When that didn’t work so well, he arranged or allowed incorrect documents purporting to be from the Holy Synod of Antioch to be spread.
5. He sent a delegation including known criminals to represent him at the meeting of the Holy Synod.
6. He has appointed known criminals including a money-launderer to sit on the Archdiocese Board of Trustees.
7. He refuses to allow the books of the Archdiocese to be open, and refuses for them to be audited.
8. And so many lesser things I cannot keep track of.

One way or another, he won’t be in charge soon.  It’s time for him to retire, preferably to a country without an extradition treaty and give the Archdiocese a rest.

ANAXIOS!  ANAXIOS!  ANAXIOS!

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Over the next week or so, I’m going to split this blog into two pieces.  All the personal bits will stay here.  This will include posts on politics, religion, and anything else that belongs here.

The rest will be posted on my business website, which I am in the process of rebuilding.  My goal is to have a post every day on something related to the technology and business of systems administration.  I’ve set a goal of July 15th to have the site acceptable and the first post up, and to have at least 5 posts a week (1 per working day).  We’ll see how well that works.

I’ll post here much less regularly, but more regularly than I have been.  I expect at least one post here a week.  Please feel free to hold me to that.

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I spent a good bit of my spare time this week trying to get my task list life back under my control.  Needless to say, when you ignore anything like that for 3-4 months, things start to get missed.  Missed is only good when someone is shooting at you.

The first step was deciding once again what task management tool I wanted to use.  I’m  a geek, I love tools.  Bright shiny tools. I had been using Thinking Rock which I liked for its cross platform capabilities.  I was still deciding whether to make my primary workstation my Macbook, or my Thinkpad from work and Thinking Rock let me move back and forth.  The problem was I had to then keep track of updates and put them in later.  With me, not so good an idea since I tend to forget to do it until too late.

However, my beautiful wife needed the Macbook for her nursing studies.  So I went back to something I had tried and liked, but hadn’t really committed to.  Remember The Milk is not strictly a GTD tool, it is a list management tool.  But with just a little work it works just fine.  More importantly it syncs with my Blackberry Curve.  Since I installed the 4.5 OS update on my Blackberry it has been much more user friendly, and the task management interface on it is simple but gets the job done.  So now I can enter tasks right away, without losing them.  Then I go back and can manage them from RTM’s web interface, and they are automatically synced back to my Blackberry.

Now the real fun begins.  Getting my task list life organized again….

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I am always looking for a better personal productivity methodology.  From Day-Timers to The 7 habits of Highly Effective People to todo lists and PDA’s (still have my Apple Newton!), so it is no surprise that I am constantly on the lookout for new techniques.

Right now, I am looking at Getting Things Done by David Allen.  It is an interesting system, in that he really doesn’t give you a system as much as a methodology.  He expects you to develop a record-keeping system that works for you.  I’m using an online planner system to do this called “Remember the Milk.”  I’m very impressed with it so far.  RTM is extremely flexible – almost too flexible.  I’ve reconfigured it about 4 times to get it to work how I want it to work.

What I like most is the combination of tags and smart lists.  Smart lists are basically stored searches,  but the UI treats them just as if they were lists.  So effectively, I can mix and match tags to create a very flexible system for organizing my work.  I haven’t decided if it is too flexible, but I have already organized and diced my work into about 30 different piles.  More on that when I get some time with it to see how it works.

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