Monday was quiet, very quiet in many ways. I spent some time trying to see what I could do with nxview and raw photographs but in the end downloaded an add on to GIMP called UFRAW as the version of NXView that came with my camera seems to be a cut down version and much more about organising slides than converting raw files. The UFRAW seems to give everything the full NXView does and more. You can see some I did on flickr . Otherwise a quiet day.
Tuesday was a supervision day so it was off to Birmingham in the morning. The train was smooth, on the evening I caught the 5:00 p.m. train out of Birmingham New Street. I have learnt that it is a good one to catch. The office workers aren't out yet and the conference people aim for the 4:30 p.m.. There are major works in the quad a Birmingham as they are fixing a service tunnel and the weather was unpredictable, there were showers so I ended up having lunch in the common room. It is exam time and that means fewer students around but not as few as vacation time, so I managed to get a computer to check emails before seeing my supervisor. The supervision went well and I am on track. I need to get down to transcription. Now all I need is the discipline to sit down and do that little by little.
Wednesday I woke rough but not much the worse for wear so went into work slightly late. At lunch time only Cliff and I ended up at prayer meeting so ended up talking with him. I passed Janet Brown's card onto him as she was having difficulties with getting her computer online. Cliff sorted it on thursday but warned that the computer was very near the end of its life. Cliff is if anything conservative in what he condemns. Otherwise a quiet day, I shopped on the evening, partly as Tuesday I was in Birmingham but Waitrose also seem to have Tuesday like the old fashioned Monday and lots of things are out of stock by Tuesday evening. Wednesday evening I can nearly always get what I want. I also hit on the brainwave as my dishwasher was not draining properly, of putting in some drain unblock, leaving it a while then running a wash through to see if that would clear it. I don't know if it did clear it, because someway through the first wash the dishwasher blew the fuse circuit it was on. I reset the circuit and fitted a new fuse but on plugging it in the fuse blew again. I decided this probably meant that it had given up the ghost. If it was just the electrics that had gone it might have been worth getting an engineer but it wasn't draining properly and it was leaking and I had been nursing it along for a couple of years. The only place locally that stocks such dishwashers (they are the compact sort and really quite rare) that I am aware of is John Lewis. So I went onto their website and found that they only have one in. So that was the decision made for me. However it took me a hour to get the order through. The new one is 75% more expensive than the old one was, but it has major advantages too (like the inside is metal and not plastic so less likely to crack and leak). I doubt it is as simple as my old one which was very basic.
Thursday afternoon was the interview with David and Tricia the minister and wife and my placement congregation. However my brain had been working over night and I realised that un fitting the dishwasher was not something I really felt up to doing. So I emailed Ted and asked if he would do it for me. I also had to go into work to print out the paper work for the interview. There were several noticeable things about the interview with David and Tricia. That they did not mention that it was an elderly congregation, that they were worried about the level of socialising (too low, in a congregation I can barely keep up with the social events). They worried about people class difference being barriers in a congregation that values people for "being able to do X for anyone". X varies from "talk to" "do anything" "can ask anything of" but being open to all is also important. I gave probably about an hour back, about what I had found out. David was incredulous that I could find so much out in such a short time which had taken them about ten years. David wanted me to write a Grove book on how to hear a congregation. I won't do that until I have finished but I guess I might refer him to "Studying Local Churches" and suggest he dips into chapters as they take his interest. I think he was surprise that I affirmed his impression that there real was no community around the church. Yes it is in the middle of suburban housing but it is actually on the join of several housing estates and these face different directions so all of them have their back on the church.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday have been dominated by a migraine, largely my fault for not giving into it on Friday or Saturday (I got myself up for a doctors appointment on Friday plus Ted came around to unfit the dishwasher and to do a short shop on Saturday which just seemed to be more than my body was ready to take). Hopefully it will clear overnight and I will be ready for work tomorrow.
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