Casa Chiri Young Professionals: Latin Wine & Food Pairing Experience

Let’s celebrate wine and food from Latin countries while we learn about a local charity, Casa Chirilagua! Casa Chirilagua helps build community in a Latino immigrant neighborhood in Arlandria known as Chirilagua.

When: Friday, June 17, 7 p.m.
Where: Beth’s Apartment near Duke & N. Jordan, (I’ll email you the address the day before)
What: Bring a bottle of wine from South America and a food item, perhaps Latin-inspired(!), to pair. As we open and taste each wine and food pairing, each person will tell us why he/she picked this particular wine and food item. We will get to know each other better and talk with others involved with the Casa Chirilagua community.

RSVP to me directly or at MeetUp at http://meetu.ps/1gPR7

P.S.  If you’d like help picking a wine or a wine/food pairing, I am happy to help!

Arlington Theology Pub

NO Sunday Service Tonight!

Hi Friends!

 

Jen reminded me last night that we never got the word out about the plans for Memorial Day weekend. As I recall, we decided to cancel the Sunday evening service because we were unsure as to who would be there and didn’t have anyone to lead.

SO… enjoy a Sunday evening off, come hang out at Half-Priced Burgers tomorrow, and we’ll catch you later

 

(If there’s a big enough group who wants to/is able to be there tonight as well as somebody who watns to lead, I’m going to trust you to handle that amongst yourselves )

 

1/2 Price Burger Time

WOW!  Can you believe it, it’s Memorial weekend……. That makes Monday a holiday and 1/2 price burgers at noon.  So if your in town make plans to stop by Crystal City Sports Pub for a great meal in the company of your friends.   And the first round of Ice Water is on my tab!

Movie Time!

 

 

Alright Friends… To kick off the next few weeks of super fun moving parties, I propose an entertaining venture. THIS FRIDAY (May 13), let’s go see THOR. I don’t know an exact time yet (Fandango hasn’t released them yet), but I’ll probably be looking at and 8:00 showing in 2D at Hoffman AMC (right off 495 in Alexandria) or Regal Potomac Yard (on Rt 1 by Hops). Let me know if you’re interested in going (lrn.wllms[at]gmail[dot]com), and I’ll make sure to keep you in the loop once I get more details

Farewell Party for Josh (& Lauren – kind of :))

Hey all -

So our dear friend Josh is back from training, but sadly only for a couple of weeks before heading to Germany for good.  We decided to send both he and Lauren off in style (even though Lauren is staying for a bit) with the first barbeque of the summer.  The festivities will take place on Friday, May 20 at the Dale’s house.  We’ll fire up the grill sometime around 6 pm (“we” may or may not actually be the Dale’s who might still be at work) and we’ll plan to eat between 6:30 and 7 pm but you can come whenever you get off work.  I’ll try to help coordinate food, so let me know if you’re willing to bring something and what that something might be   Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Steph

 

HG – Plan for May

Hello all -

For those of you that missed the planning meeting last week, we thought we should fill you in on a couple of things.  The plan for the foreseeable future is to go back to a 6:00 pm start time with different members of our community leading discussions each evening.  We are also going to do a focus on Fear for the next several weeks.  We have leaders scheduled for the next several weeks and will be adding to the schedule as we go.  Finally, we decided to make a donation to Carpenter’s Shelter on behalf of Holy Grounds.

That’s the quick summary – I’ll be posting separately about a couple special events and a volunteer need we have.  Hope to see you all next week!

Steph

HG Planning Meeting this week

Hi all -

We’ve now reached the end of Lent and therefore our trial period of meeting with the Methodists over lunch.  This week, we’re returning to the 6:30 pm time slot and will meet to talk about what we want to do for our worship service moving forward.  I hope to see you all there!

Steph

Game night tomorrow at Steph’s!

Hi friends – So there are a few of us with a hankering for Monopoly so we’re playing at my place tomorrow night (Friday).  Come by anytime after 6 pm and we can order food if people are hungry.  Call or text me if you need directions – 612.708.0793.  And no, you’re not required to play Monopoly, you can just come by and hang out if you want.

Easter Sunrise Service

Hi all – Thought it was time to share the official plan for Easter.  We are doing the traditional HG Easter Service at 6 am on Sunday (I know, I know, it’s crazy early but the sun rises at 6:25 and you can go back to bed).  The service will be held at the Joanna Geiger  Baptism Memorial Park (otherwise known as one of the little decks shooting into the water at Oronoco Bay Park in Alexandria).  Easiest access is to go to the end of Pendleton Street where it hits the water.  Jan is bringing coffee, Lauren and I are bringing food of some nature — feel free to bring something to contribute but don’t feel obligated.  See you all there!

Steph

Rebuilding Together

Ok Everyone, Dave just sent me the details for our April service project. We’ll be getting together to work with Rebuilding Together Alexandria (aka Christmas in April). They’re a really cool organization that works to rehabilitate the homes of low-income homeowners. There are projects happening year round with RTA, but they have a massive Work Day every year in April (hence “Christmas in April).

This year, the work day is Saturday, April 30.

Dave thinks it will be easiest for volunteers to contact RTA directly and let them know that they’re signing up to work the the Holy Grounds/TNT team.

RTA’s POC is Mike Moss (703-93-0164, 571-277-0739 (cell), or cmoss [at] ida [dot] org.

Also, if you know of any Alexandria families that could be served through RTA’s program, please call 703-836-1021.

 

Hope to see you all out there!!!

Adding Security to Your Posts

I’ve heard it a few times from a few different people… There’s a desire for the ability to make posts inaccessible to crawlers like Google and Yahoo. This is specifically desired for posts that include personal information (such as prayer requests).

After a little bit of playing, I think I’ve come up (hopefully) with a suitable solution (at least for now until we can find something a little more reliable).

SO, if you have a post that you don’t want showing up on search engines (but still accessible to any visitors to the site and it will appear in RSS feeds)…

Step One: Write your post like normal

Step Two: Before you hit “Publish,” scroll down on the page (or look to the right sidebar, depending on how you’ve set your page layout) until you find the little box that says “Meta Robots” it should look like this…

Step Three: Find and select the “noindex, nofollow” option on the Meta Robots drop down menu.

Step Four: Publish your post as usual.

 

This plugin should stop crawlers from coming through your post. It will still be tweeted, emailed, and it will still appear on RSS feeds.

Additionally, if you want added protection for your post, you can change the visibility of the post to only include registered users of this site. To do so, edit the “Visibility” options in the “Publish” box. Setting it to “Private” will lock it down for anybody who is not registered on our site.

If you have any questions about this, or if you would like additional tutorials on posting options, let me know!!!

 

Potluck Next Sunday

Pull out your Pyrex and find your recipe for Tuna Noodle Casserole, we’re having a potluck!

Next Sunday is our LAST lunch meeting/study with the Methodists, and we thought it would be appropriate to do something fun.

SO, next Sunday (April 17), we’ll be meeting at 12:15 in the basement of FPC. Bring an empty stomach and a dish to share. The plates/cups/napkins and drinks will all be taken care of

As always, PLEASE feel free to come even if you forget/don’t have time/whatever to bring something. There is always more than enough food when we get together!

Site Maintenance Update

Alright Kids… I *think* I’ve gotten everything sorted out enough that you should be able to fully use the site without any major issues.

If you’re curious about what I did, I’m about to tell you. If you don’t care, stop reading now ;)

In a nutshell, I got rid of some of the extra plugins that we weren’t utilizing, installed a new Facebook login plugin that will hopefully be less glitchy, added a “login through wordpress” option to the sidebar for those who prefer to use their wordpress login, installed a new calendar plugin (and updated it!), added a “Coming up” events list to the sidebar, and tried to clean up a little on the backend of things.

If you have any questions about any of this, please feel free to ask me! The only other (somewhat) major update that I’m working on is ensuring that our twitter account is still linked to the blog (it hasn’t been updating properly), but I’m still waiting on some info before I can check into that. I also plan on looking into connecting to the HG facebook album to add some fun pictures to the sidebar (not sure yet if I’m going to get that to work).

I think that’s it! Please play around, click all the links, and let me know if you run into any issues. I’ll be monitoring the site activity fairly closely for the next few days to make sure I don’t see anything wonky come across

Test Post

This is a test post… feel free to ignore it

 

Site Maintenance

Hi All! In an attempt to get rid of some of the kinks in the HG site as well as get it in a usable state once again, I’m working on a fairly major overhaul of the plugins and widgets (you probably won’t notice a major difference in the face of the page, but you’ll hopefully notice a few upgrades in functionality). What that means is… for a little while (hopefully not too long, but I need some big pieces to come together), the “Login through Facebook” option will not be available.

What that means is, if you need to post something, you will either need to 1) email the full post to me and I can post it for you or 2) let me know if you want me to create a site-specific login for you.

Sorry for the inconvenience! I’ll let you know when everything is up and running again

Hanging out Saturday Night

Hello friends -

So Whitney had the great idea that it’s time for a Guapo’s night.  Therefore, we’re going to meet up at Guapo’s at 5:30 pm on Saturday for dinner and sangaritas (or your drink of choice) and then head back to my place to hang out and play games, watch whatever sporting event in on TV, etc.  Shoot me an email or text (612.708.0793) if you want to join us so I know how many to get a table for!  Thanks friends!

Steph

RANGO

Hey All – I’m thinking about going to see the movie Rango tonight at Potomac Yard. If you want to see it in Digital the show starts at 6:30 or in a normal view at 7:00.  Send me a text, drop me an email or give me a call if you’d like to meet up.  Jon

Lent study with the Methodists starting March 13

Hello everyone -

As many of you have seen in the emails from Jen and previous posts, we are exploring some possible collaboration with a group from the Methodist church next door.  As part of that experiment, we are going to do a season of joint Bible study during the Lenten season leading up to Easter.  Starting March 13 and running until Easter, there will not be regular Holy Grounds in the evening.  Instead we will meet in the Fairlington Pres basement at 12:30 pm to do a joint Bible study focused on the parables of Jesus.  Ricardo from Fairlington UMC will be leading.  Once we get through this season, we will re-evaluate and decide if we want to continue or go back to our normal schedule.  Thanks all – let me know if you have any questions!

Steph

Game Night This Friday

Hi all – Just a reminder that we’re doing a game night at church on Friday night starting at 7 pm.  Bring a snack and games to share and feel free to bring friends!  See you all then!

Steph

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