This last week included the carol service. The wreath was a big task again. Next year I am going to have to do things differently. Lynn and Sandra(twins) who pick about 50% of the greenery are away visiting Lynn’s daughter in Australia from November to January or February and then the greenery that is sprayed needs spraying in advance or spraying not using the aerosol paints we use at present due to the solvent. I suspect that what will be needed is a preparation day when others help collect and prepare the greenery, there might be other activities as well. The pictures come out far more blue than I recall the actual wreath being. It looked positively pink at the Carol service.
Having done this on the Tuesday on the Wednesday I threw a migraine. Al right I know largely why, not taking extra medication on Tuesday morning to prevent migraine and then not drinking enough water during the day.
With that over with I started to think earnestly about Christmas. Friday and Saturday I spent a lot of the time doing Christmas things like shopping. I had planned just to shop on Friday, but I realised part way through the day that I was not really up to finishing the shopping that I planned so decided to do the food shop at Waitrose the next day. I did however manage to make rum truffles by following a recipe and managed to up load all my essays to date for my PhD. That allows me to move them from my main computer to this one which I will take with me on holiday and also to print them out at work so I can read through analyse them and come back with some idea of what my PhD is actually about. I also managed to write a round robin (if you want to read it, it is the next post down, but there is nothing there that is not elsewhere and in more detail. I bought a pack of Christmas cards and will send these with the letter to a few people who I keep contact with at Christmas time.
Today I went to both the morning service and to the carol service. The carol service was better attended this year with about seventy people there. This still was not the packed church that they have at St Andrews Chesterfield and it was a far more traditional in its readings. Pauline decided to read a piece of poetry, it was a fun piece, but I am not sure it worked being read aloud. Maybe my writers group are getting to me, they always read poetry several times before commenting, or maybe it just needed a performance rather than a reading. The rhythm and the rhyme tended to drown the meaning for me. There was however a good group chatting around and having mince pies afterwards.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Christmas Round Robin 2010
December 2010
This is just a quick note to stick in with the Christmas cards to let people know how life is going. The year has been busy, I have to keep reminding myself that I am trying to do 80% of a full time job and 50% of a full time degree and somehow those have to fit together. I basically get around to planning the University’s Advent Wreath after my December Supervision and Christmas happens after the carol service.Health wise I am actually lots better this year. In January I had a resurgence of migraines so sat down and asked what I had changed. In the end all I could think of is that I might have with changing supplements slightly dropped my magnesium intake, so I went out and got some and the change started almost immediately. Since then other little things seem to have helped, changing to a quieter office (I had the choice of a noisier one or a quieter one and I had realised that if things got noisier I was in trouble), stopped eating prawns and some minor messing with other supplements. The net result is not only fewer migraines but I have substantially reduced the medication for depression.
Holidays are often taken up with doing PhD work but I spent almost a fortnight with my God-family in the Rhins of Galloway. As I go up there regularly and what we do is between family excursions is go for walks and explore religious sites often at the same time but interspersed with drinking lots of coffee and ginger-beer while eating chocolate. There is a lot of Christian sites covering the whole of Scottish Church history, from Pre-Celtic to the Covenanters. However although the big ones such as Whithorn are known many of the smaller sites are largely unknown. We decided to create a website that gives people information on both the sites and on the walks in the surrounding area.
I also attended a conference of the Society for Liturgical Studies. One of the problems with my PhD is there isn’t a developed academic community to talk to, so I end going to conferences that overlap with my discipline. A surprising amount of identity work is done around worship and sacraments in both my congregations. So I find myself regularly writing about liturgical events or discussing liturgical controversies. The Society was interesting to say the least, an organisation who expressed the desire for more Free Church liturgists to join, who defined liturgy in such a way that most Free Church liturgist would not be interested. They also kept referring to people from the Reformed tradition.
Otherwise I am as busy as usual, if anything work at the University is busier than it has been for a while. I am not sure if this is part of the University refocusing on research due to the economic climate or me being in better health so more pro-active.
Hope that you have a good festive season and that during next year the blessings outweigh the sorrows. With Love and best wishes, God Bless Jean
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
From a supervision to an Advent Wreath
Lets see how things have been. I cannot remember back to the start of last week although I know the snow was still making travel difficult, indeed if you know where to look around here in Sheffield (i.e. below the normal snow line) you can still see traces of snow, not much, and the rain today has done something to get rid of the dregs but still there. Oh I got snow boots on the Monday which made walking a lot easier. Snow boots are fairly similar to walking boots but stiffer, lighter, warmer and with a better tread so less likely to slip. However at work someone recommended Yaktrax which you put on over shoes and have coils for gripping the snow
Wednesday I was down to see my supervisor. He had emailed me on Monday to say don’t come if travel is dicey. I was watching the weather but by Wednesday it had definitely started to pick up. I was also watching the trains through the website the Narional Rail Enquiries disruption page and spotted that alternate trains seemed to be having difficulty. As one of the delayed trains was the one I was planning to get, I was able to set out and get the train half an hour early which was only five minutes late leaving Sheffield but then behind a stopper to Chesterfield. This meant it was delayed by about half an hour, so I got in the time I would have otherwise. On the journey Derbyshire was thick with snow,with the ground all white up to Derby but after that you started to see tall grasses coming through the snow and such, by the time I got to Birmingham everything was outlined in white by frost not snow. It turned out that my supervisor was going on information from his sister. She lives east of Sheffield and the snow has been worse out that way. There is noticeably more snow remaining in Rotherham than in Sheffield at present. The supervision went well and though the journey back was delayed it was otherwise smooth, until I got to Sheffield when there was a huge queue for taxis so I decided to go for the tram. This meant a wait for the tram and cramped travel but I suspect the wait was shorter than it would have been for a taxi. Apparently a shooting star went over while I was waiting, unfortunately I was looking the wrong way.
Friday started with a departmental meeting. This meant I missed Broomhall Breakfast and had to do a quick-turn around at work to get there. The meeting was poorly attended I assume in part due to the snow. I started picking the greenery for the Advent wreath for the chaplaincy. On the evening I went up to James and Jean for a meal. It was a lesson in how badly Sheffield public transport was effected by the weather. I got to the bus stop shortly after 6pm and by 6:30 pm no 40 bus had been by. A full 120 had gone by and the 52 seemed to have sorted itself out but no 40. At which point I and a French Lecture caught a taxi that dropped him at Slayleigh Lane and then took me onto James and Jean. After that the meal was uneventful but a thaw had set in that day and I was slightly concerned that if the temperature dropped below zero, that the Close which my flat is on, would be inaccessible by car, as there were puddles lying in the snow on the road leading to it.
Saturday was busy. I needed to shop for bits for the advent wreath and other practical shopping. Then on the evening went to Herringthorpes Women’s Christmas Dinner. This year only a dozen attended compared with between twenty and thirty last year. Pauline dropped out at the last minute due to Alex being ill but one of the other ladies took her place. The chatter was general this year, about family and what was going on in each others lives. I got to here about NHS winter weather planning in quite a lot of detail due to sitting near two nurse-managers.
Sunday I made a strategic decision to stay at home on the morning as with all the time spent out over the weekend I needed some time in. I also had more greenery to get for the Advent wreath for chaplaincy. On the afternoon I went to Herringthorpe for their Cristingle service. The car park still had quite a bit of ice/snow on it as indeed had the pub the previous evening. About a dozen kids came to the service. A former scout master from the church brought his grandchildren so it was not just a selection of the usual suspects. At Herringthorpe they make up the oranges during the service including making the cuts for the candle in the top. A good atmosphere to it.
Yesterday was a fairly normal day in work except I went to cut more greenery for the Advent Wreath. This year on both Friday and Monday I have taken time out of work to cut the greenery, it means that I was not going out after dark to cut the greenery which I have done previous years. In the evening I went with my writers group to the Frog and Parrot, fortunately for us there was no DJ or live band that evening, just fairly loud background music. The pub was fairly busy when we arrived but quietened down as the evening went on and we continued to natter.
Today was the carol service at the University. I was again in charge of making the Advent Wreath. There had been communication problems in advance. I said Advent Wreath and I think they started looking for something about a foot in diameter with eighteen inch candles. What I was talking about was something six foot wide (the base is a metre wide) and has candles between 2 ft and 4 ft. It was not helped that they lost the candles and did not think to ask the office manager who knew exactly where they were. Anyway it all worked on the day as you can see from the photos. Next year I will have to plan the work flow differently as we can’t spray the greenery in the Octagon which means it will have to be sprayed, probably at St Andrews (hopefully outside in the garden at the back) on the Sunday. Lynn and Sandra who are half the team will also be in Australia so I need to do some thinking. However the comments were good, and there was an acknowledgement that something like that had to happen to create an atmosphere in that room. It was interesting that the party afterwards was quieter. I think quite likely as Will the former chaplain had felt the need for a Christmas party and I don’t think the present one does.
Wednesday I was down to see my supervisor. He had emailed me on Monday to say don’t come if travel is dicey. I was watching the weather but by Wednesday it had definitely started to pick up. I was also watching the trains through the website the Narional Rail Enquiries disruption page and spotted that alternate trains seemed to be having difficulty. As one of the delayed trains was the one I was planning to get, I was able to set out and get the train half an hour early which was only five minutes late leaving Sheffield but then behind a stopper to Chesterfield. This meant it was delayed by about half an hour, so I got in the time I would have otherwise. On the journey Derbyshire was thick with snow,with the ground all white up to Derby but after that you started to see tall grasses coming through the snow and such, by the time I got to Birmingham everything was outlined in white by frost not snow. It turned out that my supervisor was going on information from his sister. She lives east of Sheffield and the snow has been worse out that way. There is noticeably more snow remaining in Rotherham than in Sheffield at present. The supervision went well and though the journey back was delayed it was otherwise smooth, until I got to Sheffield when there was a huge queue for taxis so I decided to go for the tram. This meant a wait for the tram and cramped travel but I suspect the wait was shorter than it would have been for a taxi. Apparently a shooting star went over while I was waiting, unfortunately I was looking the wrong way.
Friday started with a departmental meeting. This meant I missed Broomhall Breakfast and had to do a quick-turn around at work to get there. The meeting was poorly attended I assume in part due to the snow. I started picking the greenery for the Advent wreath for the chaplaincy. On the evening I went up to James and Jean for a meal. It was a lesson in how badly Sheffield public transport was effected by the weather. I got to the bus stop shortly after 6pm and by 6:30 pm no 40 bus had been by. A full 120 had gone by and the 52 seemed to have sorted itself out but no 40. At which point I and a French Lecture caught a taxi that dropped him at Slayleigh Lane and then took me onto James and Jean. After that the meal was uneventful but a thaw had set in that day and I was slightly concerned that if the temperature dropped below zero, that the Close which my flat is on, would be inaccessible by car, as there were puddles lying in the snow on the road leading to it.
Saturday was busy. I needed to shop for bits for the advent wreath and other practical shopping. Then on the evening went to Herringthorpes Women’s Christmas Dinner. This year only a dozen attended compared with between twenty and thirty last year. Pauline dropped out at the last minute due to Alex being ill but one of the other ladies took her place. The chatter was general this year, about family and what was going on in each others lives. I got to here about NHS winter weather planning in quite a lot of detail due to sitting near two nurse-managers.
Sunday I made a strategic decision to stay at home on the morning as with all the time spent out over the weekend I needed some time in. I also had more greenery to get for the Advent wreath for chaplaincy. On the afternoon I went to Herringthorpe for their Cristingle service. The car park still had quite a bit of ice/snow on it as indeed had the pub the previous evening. About a dozen kids came to the service. A former scout master from the church brought his grandchildren so it was not just a selection of the usual suspects. At Herringthorpe they make up the oranges during the service including making the cuts for the candle in the top. A good atmosphere to it.
Yesterday was a fairly normal day in work except I went to cut more greenery for the Advent Wreath. This year on both Friday and Monday I have taken time out of work to cut the greenery, it means that I was not going out after dark to cut the greenery which I have done previous years. In the evening I went with my writers group to the Frog and Parrot, fortunately for us there was no DJ or live band that evening, just fairly loud background music. The pub was fairly busy when we arrived but quietened down as the evening went on and we continued to natter.
Today was the carol service at the University. I was again in charge of making the Advent Wreath. There had been communication problems in advance. I said Advent Wreath and I think they started looking for something about a foot in diameter with eighteen inch candles. What I was talking about was something six foot wide (the base is a metre wide) and has candles between 2 ft and 4 ft. It was not helped that they lost the candles and did not think to ask the office manager who knew exactly where they were. Anyway it all worked on the day as you can see from the photos. Next year I will have to plan the work flow differently as we can’t spray the greenery in the Octagon which means it will have to be sprayed, probably at St Andrews (hopefully outside in the garden at the back) on the Sunday. Lynn and Sandra who are half the team will also be in Australia so I need to do some thinking. However the comments were good, and there was an acknowledgement that something like that had to happen to create an atmosphere in that room. It was interesting that the party afterwards was quieter. I think quite likely as Will the former chaplain had felt the need for a Christmas party and I don’t think the present one does.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Coping with snow in Sheffield
I think this will be highlights as I can’t remember over the fortnight to give details.
By the time I got back from Writers Group on Monday 22nd, I had a burning sensation at the back of my throat, which normally heralds a cold; so I looked in my work diary and as the next day was free in work, I took it off and bombed the cold, the result of which is that it did not develop.
The next day I had some premonition of the coming weather as I ordered snow boots and a down gilet and snow boots unfortunately they have not arrived yet. I also was helping out with the Arts and Humanities PG Open Day. They call it an open day but it lasts about four hours in the afternoon and it is mainly Sheffield Undergraduates who come.
The weekend was writing weekend. It was also church fair at Herringthorpe on the Saturday but the snow arrived overnight and as I had no duties, plenty of writing, I cancelled. I did get to church on Sunday although the congregation was reduced as more snow had fallen over night but then there was a Baptism which increased the numbers. So the church was still fairly full. The writing was progressing well although I am struggling to find methods of talking about the ways the congregation uses space as part of creating an identity. Part of it is that I am realising that I have to cope with a different understanding to space to that that is assumed with other theorists of religious space. The nearest I can get is sacred space in the Reformed tradition is four dimensional with the time boundaries being as important as those in the other three dimensions. This is not the essay I intended to write, there is something about introversion and extroversion that needs writing but I am cautious over how to deal with this. I was ahead of myself so went to writers group on the evening.
Tuesday I think proved my dedication to teaching. The gig I did had only come through the previous Thursday when finally the Social Science RTP decided to contact CICS and see if we had anyone who teaches NVivo. If they had actually gone back through their records they would have seen my name for having done this in the past but doing something sensible like that isn’t what they are about. So I got on Thursday an urgent email. There was no way I could write anything special especially as it was a writing weekend, but I do have a 2 hour course I give to introduce academics to NVivo but even to do that straight requires some preparation as I work off my memory. The other snag was that it had to be given twice on the afternoon to two different groups. So that already was a tall order, when you add that it was the day the snow settled in, and although about 12:30 pm the roads were clearing by 13:30 it was coming down harder than ever. Then the students were protesting over cuts to Higher Education and staging a sit in. I’d never been to the room which was in the bowels of Bartolome House. It seemed to go okay. There were only eight I think to the first time but upwards of twenty to the second and therefore I finished after 18:00 p.m.. Unfortunately despite my best efforts to gather all my cold weather gear stuff when I left, a glove remainded in the room and when I noticed I did not have the energy to go back and look. In the midst of me doing this my university email account was switched to Gmail.
It was still snowing on Wednesday. I went in late due to the previous days length and the place was like a ghost town. What is more remarkable is for the first time I was sent home by University due to poor weather. That is not to say it was the first time I have gone home early due to poor weather but that has normally been my decision, this time the senior management in the University told everyone to leave before dark, so when the flood lighting started coming on in the building opposite I thought it was time to leave. I walked down to Waitrose and promptly saw another member of staff had also used the early leave to go shopping. Also met up with a former colleague who was doing a quick shop. Also bought myself a pair of gloves but these were women, and with my long fingers even large women’s are really too small, I can wear them for a while but the fingers always end about half way down the bottom segement of my fingers.
Friday I made it too the breakfast albeit late. On the way back I came across a mum, who I presume is the wife of one of the overseas students, pushing her daughter in a pushchair to playgroup. Daughter was squalling, Mum believed it was due to not wanting to go to playgroup but I suspect by that time it may have had more to do with absence of hat, mittens and blanket. I am not quite sure what to do, the quicker that child got to playgroup the better.
Yesterday I mainly did two things, I cooked a big pot of sweet potato, carrot, ginger and chilli soup. It was going to have coconut in it but I could not lay hands on the coconut milk I thought I had so it had to make do with Soya Dream instead. I think if I was making it for anyone else but myself I would cut back on the amount of Chilli I put in. I also went shopping. I went into Blacks as well as buying yet another thermal base layer (can one have too many) bought another pair of gloves. So will have a spare pair while up in Scotland however I suspect there will be no shortage of takers for them.
This week I have a trip to Birmingham planned provide the weather is such that the trains are running. If the current forecast is right, this should be the case. After that I can start Advent properly and just to make sure I am due to go out three times over the weekend socialising. I also will be collecting greenery for the Advent Wreath at the chaplaincy, the carol service being the following Tuesday. I will cut back on greenery and paint (only four cans this year I think not six)
By the time I got back from Writers Group on Monday 22nd, I had a burning sensation at the back of my throat, which normally heralds a cold; so I looked in my work diary and as the next day was free in work, I took it off and bombed the cold, the result of which is that it did not develop.
The next day I had some premonition of the coming weather as I ordered snow boots and a down gilet and snow boots unfortunately they have not arrived yet. I also was helping out with the Arts and Humanities PG Open Day. They call it an open day but it lasts about four hours in the afternoon and it is mainly Sheffield Undergraduates who come.
The weekend was writing weekend. It was also church fair at Herringthorpe on the Saturday but the snow arrived overnight and as I had no duties, plenty of writing, I cancelled. I did get to church on Sunday although the congregation was reduced as more snow had fallen over night but then there was a Baptism which increased the numbers. So the church was still fairly full. The writing was progressing well although I am struggling to find methods of talking about the ways the congregation uses space as part of creating an identity. Part of it is that I am realising that I have to cope with a different understanding to space to that that is assumed with other theorists of religious space. The nearest I can get is sacred space in the Reformed tradition is four dimensional with the time boundaries being as important as those in the other three dimensions. This is not the essay I intended to write, there is something about introversion and extroversion that needs writing but I am cautious over how to deal with this. I was ahead of myself so went to writers group on the evening.
Tuesday I think proved my dedication to teaching. The gig I did had only come through the previous Thursday when finally the Social Science RTP decided to contact CICS and see if we had anyone who teaches NVivo. If they had actually gone back through their records they would have seen my name for having done this in the past but doing something sensible like that isn’t what they are about. So I got on Thursday an urgent email. There was no way I could write anything special especially as it was a writing weekend, but I do have a 2 hour course I give to introduce academics to NVivo but even to do that straight requires some preparation as I work off my memory. The other snag was that it had to be given twice on the afternoon to two different groups. So that already was a tall order, when you add that it was the day the snow settled in, and although about 12:30 pm the roads were clearing by 13:30 it was coming down harder than ever. Then the students were protesting over cuts to Higher Education and staging a sit in. I’d never been to the room which was in the bowels of Bartolome House. It seemed to go okay. There were only eight I think to the first time but upwards of twenty to the second and therefore I finished after 18:00 p.m.. Unfortunately despite my best efforts to gather all my cold weather gear stuff when I left, a glove remainded in the room and when I noticed I did not have the energy to go back and look. In the midst of me doing this my university email account was switched to Gmail.
It was still snowing on Wednesday. I went in late due to the previous days length and the place was like a ghost town. What is more remarkable is for the first time I was sent home by University due to poor weather. That is not to say it was the first time I have gone home early due to poor weather but that has normally been my decision, this time the senior management in the University told everyone to leave before dark, so when the flood lighting started coming on in the building opposite I thought it was time to leave. I walked down to Waitrose and promptly saw another member of staff had also used the early leave to go shopping. Also met up with a former colleague who was doing a quick shop. Also bought myself a pair of gloves but these were women, and with my long fingers even large women’s are really too small, I can wear them for a while but the fingers always end about half way down the bottom segement of my fingers.
Friday I made it too the breakfast albeit late. On the way back I came across a mum, who I presume is the wife of one of the overseas students, pushing her daughter in a pushchair to playgroup. Daughter was squalling, Mum believed it was due to not wanting to go to playgroup but I suspect by that time it may have had more to do with absence of hat, mittens and blanket. I am not quite sure what to do, the quicker that child got to playgroup the better.
Yesterday I mainly did two things, I cooked a big pot of sweet potato, carrot, ginger and chilli soup. It was going to have coconut in it but I could not lay hands on the coconut milk I thought I had so it had to make do with Soya Dream instead. I think if I was making it for anyone else but myself I would cut back on the amount of Chilli I put in. I also went shopping. I went into Blacks as well as buying yet another thermal base layer (can one have too many) bought another pair of gloves. So will have a spare pair while up in Scotland however I suspect there will be no shortage of takers for them.
This week I have a trip to Birmingham planned provide the weather is such that the trains are running. If the current forecast is right, this should be the case. After that I can start Advent properly and just to make sure I am due to go out three times over the weekend socialising. I also will be collecting greenery for the Advent Wreath at the chaplaincy, the carol service being the following Tuesday. I will cut back on greenery and paint (only four cans this year I think not six)
Sunday, November 21, 2010
A more straightforward week
This week has been quieter, although Stuart has been given compulsory leave (he’d got himself in a situation where he was not coping and needed time to rest and recuperate) so been around slightly more often than he is usually.
Monday was writers group on sequencing poems. This was interesting although I don’t think I am up to deliberately writing a sequence of poems at the moment. The other way around where I accidentally write poems that form a sequence seems far more likely. I do seem to work on themes at least unintentionally. There maybe a sequence developing from Autumn to Spring. I am also beginning to realise that I may be a halfway decent amateur poet, which is surprise, as I took to poems largely because I could not find the time for consistent concentration to write longer fiction. Interestingly another person in the group seems to be following much the same line. Before anyone asks, until I have finished my PhD I an not even considering trying to get any of them published more formally. It takes time and effort that I do not have. By the way I have a memory of Browning referencing Shelley’s Ozymandias in one of his poems but am unable to find the citing.
Tuesday I manage Bible study, which was quite quiet although people hung around afterwards which is unusual for this congregation. If this was Parrswood I would just treat it as normal but as a rule everyone is out by 9pm prompt. I think it might be due to a couple going on holiday but I am not sure.
Wednesday I managed to not notice that I was meeting my boss at 9:30 (it had changed several times and my brain still had it as 11:30 which I think was one of the earlier times. However otherwise the day went fluently. Stuart came around in the evening and I think I managed to talk him into going to Castleton on Friday so that he did something.
Thursday was my day off and I had a bitty sort of day, Cliff was coming to set the sound system us so that it could take sound from a PC. This appears not to be difficult but it was something new to me. However Cliff was ill on the day, so he postponed it from 9:30 to when he was able to come out (about 3:00 p.m.) I had said to my supervisor I would put up a discussion board for his tutorial group. I had tried the previous Friday evening but the straightforward method had not worked. So I was trying to do one in Drupal. This was more complicated but also a better solution. I also managed to finally get around to organising things so that I have a separate web address and the ability to put it up for “Wigtonshire Wandering”. I need to learn some more Drupal then I can set up the basics of the website and we can go on to develop from that.
Friday I saw my boss, she rather threw me saying she would be five minutes late as the queue was long in Coffee Revolution and would I like anything. In the end I asked for a black coffee and said that next time it is my treat. On the evening James and Jean took me out for a meal at Panahar's an Indian restaurant at the bottom of Tom Lane. It does not have an alcohol license but you can bring your own and it serves a decent range of soft drinks. The interesting thing being that I don’t think anyone in our party was drinking. James was driving and Jean and I were too tired to actually want to drink anything. The food was good but they put what I suspect are Asian or Thai chilli peppers in their vegetable dish. Unfortunately I mistook them for green beans. This was not a good idea and the main problem was that it blew my taste buds, so eating any level of spiced food afterwards was painful. Before that I had tried the food and it tasted good. I had dessert of sorbet which cooled my mouth and took away much of the stinging, although if my mouth gets slightly dry it returns.
Yesterday was bitty as well. The tiredness in part was due to a not quite migraine, so I felt fragile on Saturday morning. I then went down town, bought a number of things I needed including a folder for my poems. I realised that I was actually developing quite a collection and it needed some sort of sorting rather than all just bunged in my writing folder. What I actually also need to do is produce final pieces as most of the work is in draft state. Some only require words changing, others require quite large re-writes. I also found out that my home phone is not working. I have reported it and at present if you ring my home number you get through to my mobile. They should let me know what is going on in the next twenty four hours so they have found a fault. I was worried that Cliff had just not managed to hang up as he was the last person to call me or that the phone itself had given up. I got in and then messed around, doing so reading on Drupal, until Sarah rang to say she and James and Jean were heading down to St Andrews after the elder’s retreat, I assume at St Luke’s Lodgemoor. For those who wonder why this has moved, the Church Army College is having lots of work done at present and there is no way they could accommodate it. We were setting up the church so that today Sarah could play a video through her laptop. Stuart came around again in the evening.
Today, I was officially not going to church this morning. Just as well as my body clock had not got itself back on track after the disturbance of the almost migraine. Sarah rang me early because one sound operator was down with the flu and the other had injured his ankle. Unfortunately I can’t get my mobile phone to ring loudly enough to wake me when I am having a lie in. So I only picked up the second phone call when Ray Smith had already agreed to do the sound. However it did mean I made sure I was up and dressed by 10:30 just in case. This evening I was leading worship at Herringthorpe. Now before anyone gets any idea about what sort of thing this is, just think of leading bible study. That is the group gather over a coffee and biscuit, sing a few songs and then discuss a chapter in a book which has a bible passage attached and about an hour later we say some prayers. This is NOT PREACHING and it is no indication that I think I should be leading worship in other settings. Oh and the theme was the discipline of joy. Unfortunately that comes across as people saying “be happy” when I think the theme really was a lot better, about savouring/appreciating/enjoying things as they happen, practising gratitude and then allowing yourself to celebrate. The third thing arises naturally out of the previous two and when it doesn’t there is no reason to stick a smile on your face because Christians are joyful. As I said I can do five minutes a day of the first.
Monday was writers group on sequencing poems. This was interesting although I don’t think I am up to deliberately writing a sequence of poems at the moment. The other way around where I accidentally write poems that form a sequence seems far more likely. I do seem to work on themes at least unintentionally. There maybe a sequence developing from Autumn to Spring. I am also beginning to realise that I may be a halfway decent amateur poet, which is surprise, as I took to poems largely because I could not find the time for consistent concentration to write longer fiction. Interestingly another person in the group seems to be following much the same line. Before anyone asks, until I have finished my PhD I an not even considering trying to get any of them published more formally. It takes time and effort that I do not have. By the way I have a memory of Browning referencing Shelley’s Ozymandias in one of his poems but am unable to find the citing.
Tuesday I manage Bible study, which was quite quiet although people hung around afterwards which is unusual for this congregation. If this was Parrswood I would just treat it as normal but as a rule everyone is out by 9pm prompt. I think it might be due to a couple going on holiday but I am not sure.
Wednesday I managed to not notice that I was meeting my boss at 9:30 (it had changed several times and my brain still had it as 11:30 which I think was one of the earlier times. However otherwise the day went fluently. Stuart came around in the evening and I think I managed to talk him into going to Castleton on Friday so that he did something.
Thursday was my day off and I had a bitty sort of day, Cliff was coming to set the sound system us so that it could take sound from a PC. This appears not to be difficult but it was something new to me. However Cliff was ill on the day, so he postponed it from 9:30 to when he was able to come out (about 3:00 p.m.) I had said to my supervisor I would put up a discussion board for his tutorial group. I had tried the previous Friday evening but the straightforward method had not worked. So I was trying to do one in Drupal. This was more complicated but also a better solution. I also managed to finally get around to organising things so that I have a separate web address and the ability to put it up for “Wigtonshire Wandering”. I need to learn some more Drupal then I can set up the basics of the website and we can go on to develop from that.
Friday I saw my boss, she rather threw me saying she would be five minutes late as the queue was long in Coffee Revolution and would I like anything. In the end I asked for a black coffee and said that next time it is my treat. On the evening James and Jean took me out for a meal at Panahar's an Indian restaurant at the bottom of Tom Lane. It does not have an alcohol license but you can bring your own and it serves a decent range of soft drinks. The interesting thing being that I don’t think anyone in our party was drinking. James was driving and Jean and I were too tired to actually want to drink anything. The food was good but they put what I suspect are Asian or Thai chilli peppers in their vegetable dish. Unfortunately I mistook them for green beans. This was not a good idea and the main problem was that it blew my taste buds, so eating any level of spiced food afterwards was painful. Before that I had tried the food and it tasted good. I had dessert of sorbet which cooled my mouth and took away much of the stinging, although if my mouth gets slightly dry it returns.
Yesterday was bitty as well. The tiredness in part was due to a not quite migraine, so I felt fragile on Saturday morning. I then went down town, bought a number of things I needed including a folder for my poems. I realised that I was actually developing quite a collection and it needed some sort of sorting rather than all just bunged in my writing folder. What I actually also need to do is produce final pieces as most of the work is in draft state. Some only require words changing, others require quite large re-writes. I also found out that my home phone is not working. I have reported it and at present if you ring my home number you get through to my mobile. They should let me know what is going on in the next twenty four hours so they have found a fault. I was worried that Cliff had just not managed to hang up as he was the last person to call me or that the phone itself had given up. I got in and then messed around, doing so reading on Drupal, until Sarah rang to say she and James and Jean were heading down to St Andrews after the elder’s retreat, I assume at St Luke’s Lodgemoor. For those who wonder why this has moved, the Church Army College is having lots of work done at present and there is no way they could accommodate it. We were setting up the church so that today Sarah could play a video through her laptop. Stuart came around again in the evening.
Today, I was officially not going to church this morning. Just as well as my body clock had not got itself back on track after the disturbance of the almost migraine. Sarah rang me early because one sound operator was down with the flu and the other had injured his ankle. Unfortunately I can’t get my mobile phone to ring loudly enough to wake me when I am having a lie in. So I only picked up the second phone call when Ray Smith had already agreed to do the sound. However it did mean I made sure I was up and dressed by 10:30 just in case. This evening I was leading worship at Herringthorpe. Now before anyone gets any idea about what sort of thing this is, just think of leading bible study. That is the group gather over a coffee and biscuit, sing a few songs and then discuss a chapter in a book which has a bible passage attached and about an hour later we say some prayers. This is NOT PREACHING and it is no indication that I think I should be leading worship in other settings. Oh and the theme was the discipline of joy. Unfortunately that comes across as people saying “be happy” when I think the theme really was a lot better, about savouring/appreciating/enjoying things as they happen, practising gratitude and then allowing yourself to celebrate. The third thing arises naturally out of the previous two and when it doesn’t there is no reason to stick a smile on your face because Christians are joyful. As I said I can do five minutes a day of the first.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
A late supervision makes for a busy week
This week has been quieter, if only slightly than the last two. I wrote last on Monday so I pick up Monday evening when I went to writers group. I had not made it the previous week due to writing. I got asked a really awkward question about how long it takes me to write a poem. Sometimes I can give an idea, but last weeks was pulled together of so many small bits that really it was impossible. How does one even start the timer if one wanted to. It started with bits attracting my attention, short snap shots of scenes. Then I realised I had about half a dozen of these which weren’t going anywhere. Too little content to really be a poem. Poems don’t need to be long but they do need content. So I tried putting them together and was still at the wondering stage. Then the snapshots themselves were not neat tidy aspects, clicked on a camera and frozen. Some of them actually started out as photographs rather than poems, some happened simultaneously but are separated. It was only in the final couple of stages when I got to first writing them down on the same page and secondly organising them into a poem that any order was brought to the process.
Tuesday I really can’t remember much it was an ordinary day in all the business of the week. I spent a good time dealing with a PhD student from Landscape who was wanting to know how to sort her factor analysis out. It took quite a long time. In the end I did a exemplar analysis and on leaving she asked me where next and I said “Linear regression” but come back to me when you are ready to tackle that. I just hope she has gone away and done the practical work that I had set her earlier as that is the basis on which she needs to work to understand the higher levels.
Wednesday was a supervision in Birmingham, mostly this was routine. That is the papers I had done were fine, there was nothing huge to talk about. My supervisor was just reminding me of where we were in the process. That is I should be looking to clear my thoughts and start to actually decide what I want to write about for my thesis. I guess that most people actually do this far earlier, but I have enjoyed the random tangents of exploring the ground around here. I said I would therefore do thorough reading through of the papers I have written in the past four years over Christmas and try and prepare a diagram and brief outline of what themes and such have come up. I have however another paper to write before I do and am thinking that I might have to write about introversion and extroversion in churches. That may not be quite the right form but I suspect that there are three different aspects to it. The most basic being that certain churches will tend to attract people on certain parts of the spectrum. I am normally drawn to smaller churches because I find people easier to cope with in small numbers. So you might actually get quite a healthy small church that is growing slowly but attracting more introverted people. However this effects all sorts of organisational aspects of the church as well. The next is the churches mission-pastoral balance. A church that puts all its efforts into developing and caring for its own members is introverted, a church that spend all its efforts on connecting with those outside is extroverted. Now I hope you never get a purely introverted church in this sense as it would almost certainly be dying, equally a totally extroverted church is likely to find people have gone off elsewhere and it no longer exists. So somehow a congregation must balance the two. However I suspect there is a third one and that is one of potential direction. A congregation needs to be looking to ways of growing but growth takes time. A congregation that thinks it has arrived and wants to stay where it is, is going to shrink. For a congregation to try to maintain itself is to doom it to failure. The only answer to this is that it must try to envisage being something more than it is now. If you want to liberal terminology, how better to serve the kingdom of God than at present. It nearly always will mean looking for resources congregations don’t have, and it will be risky, although sometimes it is right to take small risks rather than big ones. If you want to learn to swim you need to get into the water, but diving in at the deep end is not always the brightest of ideas. Anyway that is me writing out ideas.
Another thing that came out is that my supervisor would like something like a discussion board for his tutorial group. I am pretty sure I can set one up on my web account but at present every time I go to it the specialist software that I thought I would use won’t install. However Drupal will so I think I will have a play with that and see if I can get a simple webforum up. It does allow me to set things so that people who aren’t logged in cannot see. However I need to talk to Zen about getting a second web address set up for WigtownWanderings.
The supervision time was 4pm so it had gone 5pm by the time I left my supervisors office, so I wandered back via Waterstones and ended up on a whim buying three notebooks. This was funny, I spotted them earlier, and kept going back to look at them. Usually I have some idea what a note book is for before I buy it but in this case no idea. The books came in packs of three which is why I bought three. The train was fairly full. With the timings I wonder if it isn’t better for me to get a meal in Birmingham and catch a later train home. The snag with that is I am even later in.
Thursday felt like a day when I achieved nothing in work. Instead I suspect that I did rather a lot of getting my head around two research projects. The thing is that they were both written out and you would think just reading them would be enough but no I have to think about what they are doing and try and sort out what I think they are doing. The language of science (whether biomedical science or chemistry) does not translate easily into statistical design. Just reading them over and over again and taking hints from here to there is quite difficult. The things that seem important to the chemist in the laboratory are not what seem important to the statistician trying to analyse the data although the two are connected.
Friday I spent most of the day sorting out the chemistry one. The initial stage was to clarify what had happened from a statistical perspective. The one thing that is still worrying me is that there were blocks of 96 cells but no where can I find in the data given me blocks of size 96. I am presuming that some cells were left empty. The best I find is 45 cells per card or there may have been 90. The examiners had asked a question, but that question was no solvable the way that they suggested. There was no simple link between control and treatment which would have allowed the student to use proportions and the data also showed no sign of requiring a log transform (yes the data was well behaved, if only all data was). Indeed on inspection it turned out that the problem was not what they thought it was. I just did a more complex form of the original analysis and sent it back to the guy.
Saturday my parents came over. As usual they had shopping they wanted doing. This time it was to get de-caf coffee beans from Waitrose. So we went and did that. They also got a plain christmas cake, the smallest there was in Waitrose and some other coffee beans. We bought a Seriously Lemony Tarte Au Citron for lunch as the weather was cold and I fancied a warm dessert. It was like a rich lemon meringue pie without the meringue. At one time while we were chatting my property management company decided to ring me. My next door neighbour is wanting them to put in plastic glazing rather than the current wood. The wood has done eighteen years, with not the best paint jobs in the world and it is beginning to look as if the wood frames will start to give out. The thing is that the building will have to have scaffolding to do the top floor and it therefore would make sense to do my flat’s windows as the same time. I need to know how much this will cost but I can think of several advantages not least getting the window by my computer to shut properly. However it is also important that the installed system is at least as good as the present one and that means sound proof glass for the living room and kitchen windows. On the afternoon we went out to Ecclesal Woods. They are in the process of creating a Forrest Discovery Centre there where the saw mill was. It looks interesting and we will probably go back some other time as it is relatively nearby.
Today I went to Herringthorpe. It was a Remembrance Day service. This is certainly not my favourite service in the year although I must admit it is easier at Herringthorpe than at St Andrews as there is less pomp to the ceremony. Partly surprised that the all-age worship is next week as I am used to Guides and such wanting to parade on Remembrance Sunday. I think the congregation was lower than usual which is what I remember from last year as well. It may be that some were attending the main Rotherham activities, but I suspect there are others who find it a very ambiguous day as well. I then did an interview with one of the members during coffee.
Tuesday I really can’t remember much it was an ordinary day in all the business of the week. I spent a good time dealing with a PhD student from Landscape who was wanting to know how to sort her factor analysis out. It took quite a long time. In the end I did a exemplar analysis and on leaving she asked me where next and I said “Linear regression” but come back to me when you are ready to tackle that. I just hope she has gone away and done the practical work that I had set her earlier as that is the basis on which she needs to work to understand the higher levels.
Wednesday was a supervision in Birmingham, mostly this was routine. That is the papers I had done were fine, there was nothing huge to talk about. My supervisor was just reminding me of where we were in the process. That is I should be looking to clear my thoughts and start to actually decide what I want to write about for my thesis. I guess that most people actually do this far earlier, but I have enjoyed the random tangents of exploring the ground around here. I said I would therefore do thorough reading through of the papers I have written in the past four years over Christmas and try and prepare a diagram and brief outline of what themes and such have come up. I have however another paper to write before I do and am thinking that I might have to write about introversion and extroversion in churches. That may not be quite the right form but I suspect that there are three different aspects to it. The most basic being that certain churches will tend to attract people on certain parts of the spectrum. I am normally drawn to smaller churches because I find people easier to cope with in small numbers. So you might actually get quite a healthy small church that is growing slowly but attracting more introverted people. However this effects all sorts of organisational aspects of the church as well. The next is the churches mission-pastoral balance. A church that puts all its efforts into developing and caring for its own members is introverted, a church that spend all its efforts on connecting with those outside is extroverted. Now I hope you never get a purely introverted church in this sense as it would almost certainly be dying, equally a totally extroverted church is likely to find people have gone off elsewhere and it no longer exists. So somehow a congregation must balance the two. However I suspect there is a third one and that is one of potential direction. A congregation needs to be looking to ways of growing but growth takes time. A congregation that thinks it has arrived and wants to stay where it is, is going to shrink. For a congregation to try to maintain itself is to doom it to failure. The only answer to this is that it must try to envisage being something more than it is now. If you want to liberal terminology, how better to serve the kingdom of God than at present. It nearly always will mean looking for resources congregations don’t have, and it will be risky, although sometimes it is right to take small risks rather than big ones. If you want to learn to swim you need to get into the water, but diving in at the deep end is not always the brightest of ideas. Anyway that is me writing out ideas.
Another thing that came out is that my supervisor would like something like a discussion board for his tutorial group. I am pretty sure I can set one up on my web account but at present every time I go to it the specialist software that I thought I would use won’t install. However Drupal will so I think I will have a play with that and see if I can get a simple webforum up. It does allow me to set things so that people who aren’t logged in cannot see. However I need to talk to Zen about getting a second web address set up for WigtownWanderings.
The supervision time was 4pm so it had gone 5pm by the time I left my supervisors office, so I wandered back via Waterstones and ended up on a whim buying three notebooks. This was funny, I spotted them earlier, and kept going back to look at them. Usually I have some idea what a note book is for before I buy it but in this case no idea. The books came in packs of three which is why I bought three. The train was fairly full. With the timings I wonder if it isn’t better for me to get a meal in Birmingham and catch a later train home. The snag with that is I am even later in.
Thursday felt like a day when I achieved nothing in work. Instead I suspect that I did rather a lot of getting my head around two research projects. The thing is that they were both written out and you would think just reading them would be enough but no I have to think about what they are doing and try and sort out what I think they are doing. The language of science (whether biomedical science or chemistry) does not translate easily into statistical design. Just reading them over and over again and taking hints from here to there is quite difficult. The things that seem important to the chemist in the laboratory are not what seem important to the statistician trying to analyse the data although the two are connected.
Friday I spent most of the day sorting out the chemistry one. The initial stage was to clarify what had happened from a statistical perspective. The one thing that is still worrying me is that there were blocks of 96 cells but no where can I find in the data given me blocks of size 96. I am presuming that some cells were left empty. The best I find is 45 cells per card or there may have been 90. The examiners had asked a question, but that question was no solvable the way that they suggested. There was no simple link between control and treatment which would have allowed the student to use proportions and the data also showed no sign of requiring a log transform (yes the data was well behaved, if only all data was). Indeed on inspection it turned out that the problem was not what they thought it was. I just did a more complex form of the original analysis and sent it back to the guy.
Saturday my parents came over. As usual they had shopping they wanted doing. This time it was to get de-caf coffee beans from Waitrose. So we went and did that. They also got a plain christmas cake, the smallest there was in Waitrose and some other coffee beans. We bought a Seriously Lemony Tarte Au Citron for lunch as the weather was cold and I fancied a warm dessert. It was like a rich lemon meringue pie without the meringue. At one time while we were chatting my property management company decided to ring me. My next door neighbour is wanting them to put in plastic glazing rather than the current wood. The wood has done eighteen years, with not the best paint jobs in the world and it is beginning to look as if the wood frames will start to give out. The thing is that the building will have to have scaffolding to do the top floor and it therefore would make sense to do my flat’s windows as the same time. I need to know how much this will cost but I can think of several advantages not least getting the window by my computer to shut properly. However it is also important that the installed system is at least as good as the present one and that means sound proof glass for the living room and kitchen windows. On the afternoon we went out to Ecclesal Woods. They are in the process of creating a Forrest Discovery Centre there where the saw mill was. It looks interesting and we will probably go back some other time as it is relatively nearby.
Today I went to Herringthorpe. It was a Remembrance Day service. This is certainly not my favourite service in the year although I must admit it is easier at Herringthorpe than at St Andrews as there is less pomp to the ceremony. Partly surprised that the all-age worship is next week as I am used to Guides and such wanting to parade on Remembrance Sunday. I think the congregation was lower than usual which is what I remember from last year as well. It may be that some were attending the main Rotherham activities, but I suspect there are others who find it a very ambiguous day as well. I then did an interview with one of the members during coffee.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Two hectic weeks
On Tuesday the week before last I got to do another interview. At it for the first time I heard a rumour of both arguments and people leaving the church. This has been confirmed about four or five times since but that was the first hint and I do not know why. It is always in the second year that you get such hints, I am not sure whether people deliberately keep you in the dark or whether it is more that you don’t pick up the clues. What I am noting is that when a fall out happens there nearly always is a financial crisis afterwards. I am not sure this is deliberate but I suspect it may be. I would be more happy to have a direct and non emotive relationship if I had not been through stuff previously.
On the Wednesday I finally made it to the chaplaincy communion. Will Lamb has moved onto being Vice Principle of Westcott house and the new chaplain Anglican chaplain is Jeremy Clines. He is one of those people whose path occasionally crossed mine, I suspect the first time, at a coffee room late one night at High Leigh during a Chaplain’s conference I was attending in an attempt to try and work out what role I was trying to perform as Chaplaincy contact after taking it on after Fleur’s departure, and then both the Anglican and Methodist Chaplain’s changing over the summer as well. It was an interesting situation. Then he managed to email some time later. This puzzled me, as the email wasn’t spam but about a tour he was organising to Jerusalem. Although I recognised the name, I wondered where he had got my email address from as I had definitely not given it. So I did some hunting and realised he was on supervisor’s, supervisees list. For those putting 2+2 together I am pretty sure you are right in making 4.
Thursday that week saw Cathy and her kids coming over. We did not go swimming, firstly Sam had been swimming that morning already (he trains with the county squad) secondly the cold had been nasty and upto the day it was definitely unwise for me to swim. I had found an Indian Day at the local library and as it seemed to be one of a set of days running over half term. We stopped off at the Millenium galleries on our way up for a coffee. Sam had a fantastic hot chocolate with hot melted chocolate, cream, tiny marshmallows and a chocolate stick. Hannah had a Coke (Dad was not around so rules were being relaxed, as Coke makes Sam hyper). Then up to the Winter Gardens. They were recruiting for a craft tour for children Sam’s age and older although parent and siblings could come along. Sam decided not to so we went to see what the Indian day at the library was like. I had spotted that the library had a series of days on all week on a drop in basis. As it was half term I suspected that they were aimed at Primary school children, so maybe a bit young for Sam but not drastically. What I saw and what Cathy confirmed the age group aimed at were pre-school. Admittedly we turned up and the next thing I knew Hannah was colouring in, but there was obviously nothing for Sam. He solved the issue by getting the book he had to review for homework out and so I got out my reading book and we went and sat in the teen part of the library in comfy chairs and read. I think it helped Sam that I was reading as well. Then we went on and got pizza from Antibos. Neither of the kids finished theirs, although Sam ate over half. This is surprising given the amount of exercise Sam gets.
Over the weekend I was writing. The big task was to take the article I am writing for Anaphora and try and get it flowing again. To do this I took the article section by section and wrote it out by hand, then typed it into the computer again. I just hope that it worked. The idea being that if I am writing by hand I am unlikely to be editing it. I suspect it now really needs a good edit, too much waffle but that is as far as I can go.
I was hoping before the weekend that I would be able to cope without taking Friday as a work at home day, however by the end of worship on the Sunday I knew that there was not only Yorkshire Synod on the Saturday at Herringthorpe (I had offered to help with the sound) but that there was a church meeting on the Sunday at which I would be reporting the outcome of the interviews. So no chance of just doing evening service on the Sunday as I had planned. So it was obvious that I would have to have Friday working at home to get ready for Sunday and that I also would need time to rest afterwards so needed to take today off. I was inducted into the sound system that Sunday. It is no more complex than St Andrews except they record to tape. They want to move to mp3. What is different is beside it they have someone doing the audio visual. This basically consists of a PC with Zionworxs on it and a couple of projectors. It is fairly easy to use. If you want to have power point you just open the powerpoint and if Zionworxs is open it can be seen in the control panel. The one at the front is pretty powerful but the one at the back is just a normal projector. If they are using sound they feed it through the sound desk.
Tuesday I tried to get to Bible Study, it was a wet night with the sort of South Yorkshire wet, where the roads are running with water. I got to the car, and I knew the windscreen wiper was faulty but as it was usable I had not reported it. Well that night it broke before I even started driving and after ten to fifteen minutes of trying I was not managing to fix it. So I was now late and wet. I rang to cancel, they offered me another car but being both late and wet that was not on so I came back for an early night.
Friday I got my supervision papers ready and the presentation. He has not written back to me cancelling so I presume it is on. I have done the Training Needs Analysis done as well as quite a bit of other stuff. It gets more and more ridiculous every year. Part of the problem is that I actually have a half way decent research record due to my job and I certainly can trace and find papers and such very quickly. Also picked up the hire car. Again I got an upgrade, this time to a Ford Zetec. The only problem is that I am deliberately choosing a Corsa as it is a far nicer car to drive than the Zetec as you have far better visibility.
Saturday was synod. Actually it was fun as I was one of four people on the audio-visual desk. I was the second sound person. That meant I was there but beneath most people’s radar, the only two who spotted me were Sarah and James, even though I read at the final service. Most people were not expecting me to appear in that contexts so did not fathom who I was. It was interesting the blind spot it created. The two exceptions were Malcolm Hanson and maybe Kevin Watson who asked my opinion and I think got rather more than he expected. I suspect Kevin is trying to work out who I am and I am at present not helping. He has enough info if he wants to find out to do so. It was a lot of voting and little discussion. Most votes were unanimous (I think there was only one that wasn’t) and yes Yorkshire Synod has straight votes still. I think the more consultative approach would have added significantly time-wise to an otherwise already full agenda. I am far more in favour of it in situations where there is real debate to be had. The big decisions were largely uncontroversial because fairly thorough soundings had been done in advance. Two of them were reporting the conclusions after fairly thorough investigations and another was just realising that they weren’t really capable of doing what they were set up to do, so returned a neutral report. Oh can somebody please send Nick Maskell on a presentation course. When he is good he is very, very good but when he is bad he is horrid. A sure sign of someone who has ability but needs training. Training does not produce brilliant presentations, it stops people producing bad ones. Three presentations by him: one was brilliant, one perhaps middling and one was a classic how not to do a presentation.
Sunday was interesting, Three new elders appointed a new secretary and a new treasurer. The treasurer was an obviously popular choice. I suspect people had had him in mind for when the present one retired for quite a while. They also voted for their charity for this year. It was interesting, last year there were at least three candidates, this year there was one. There was also the feeling that the people who nominated the charity in previous years had not been pulling their weight (the nominators of this years charity will pull their weight without a doubt, in fact unofficially it has been a church charity for quite a while).
Today after a cold but bright weekend the heaven’s have opened and Sheffield has had water running down the roads again. Returning the car was not fun. Firstly I have to get to Hertz. On foot that is easy, but by car it is anything but, then I had to walk home. Had a brainwave however and rather than trying to find blue hard boiled sweets and making stained glass cookies I bought silver card and blue plastic and will make stain glass ornaments using that. This year there does not seem to be as much to do for the Advent wreath. This is something I have been working towards for a number of years and up to now have not achieved.
On the Wednesday I finally made it to the chaplaincy communion. Will Lamb has moved onto being Vice Principle of Westcott house and the new chaplain Anglican chaplain is Jeremy Clines. He is one of those people whose path occasionally crossed mine, I suspect the first time, at a coffee room late one night at High Leigh during a Chaplain’s conference I was attending in an attempt to try and work out what role I was trying to perform as Chaplaincy contact after taking it on after Fleur’s departure, and then both the Anglican and Methodist Chaplain’s changing over the summer as well. It was an interesting situation. Then he managed to email some time later. This puzzled me, as the email wasn’t spam but about a tour he was organising to Jerusalem. Although I recognised the name, I wondered where he had got my email address from as I had definitely not given it. So I did some hunting and realised he was on supervisor’s, supervisees list. For those putting 2+2 together I am pretty sure you are right in making 4.
Thursday that week saw Cathy and her kids coming over. We did not go swimming, firstly Sam had been swimming that morning already (he trains with the county squad) secondly the cold had been nasty and upto the day it was definitely unwise for me to swim. I had found an Indian Day at the local library and as it seemed to be one of a set of days running over half term. We stopped off at the Millenium galleries on our way up for a coffee. Sam had a fantastic hot chocolate with hot melted chocolate, cream, tiny marshmallows and a chocolate stick. Hannah had a Coke (Dad was not around so rules were being relaxed, as Coke makes Sam hyper). Then up to the Winter Gardens. They were recruiting for a craft tour for children Sam’s age and older although parent and siblings could come along. Sam decided not to so we went to see what the Indian day at the library was like. I had spotted that the library had a series of days on all week on a drop in basis. As it was half term I suspected that they were aimed at Primary school children, so maybe a bit young for Sam but not drastically. What I saw and what Cathy confirmed the age group aimed at were pre-school. Admittedly we turned up and the next thing I knew Hannah was colouring in, but there was obviously nothing for Sam. He solved the issue by getting the book he had to review for homework out and so I got out my reading book and we went and sat in the teen part of the library in comfy chairs and read. I think it helped Sam that I was reading as well. Then we went on and got pizza from Antibos. Neither of the kids finished theirs, although Sam ate over half. This is surprising given the amount of exercise Sam gets.
Over the weekend I was writing. The big task was to take the article I am writing for Anaphora and try and get it flowing again. To do this I took the article section by section and wrote it out by hand, then typed it into the computer again. I just hope that it worked. The idea being that if I am writing by hand I am unlikely to be editing it. I suspect it now really needs a good edit, too much waffle but that is as far as I can go.
I was hoping before the weekend that I would be able to cope without taking Friday as a work at home day, however by the end of worship on the Sunday I knew that there was not only Yorkshire Synod on the Saturday at Herringthorpe (I had offered to help with the sound) but that there was a church meeting on the Sunday at which I would be reporting the outcome of the interviews. So no chance of just doing evening service on the Sunday as I had planned. So it was obvious that I would have to have Friday working at home to get ready for Sunday and that I also would need time to rest afterwards so needed to take today off. I was inducted into the sound system that Sunday. It is no more complex than St Andrews except they record to tape. They want to move to mp3. What is different is beside it they have someone doing the audio visual. This basically consists of a PC with Zionworxs on it and a couple of projectors. It is fairly easy to use. If you want to have power point you just open the powerpoint and if Zionworxs is open it can be seen in the control panel. The one at the front is pretty powerful but the one at the back is just a normal projector. If they are using sound they feed it through the sound desk.
Tuesday I tried to get to Bible Study, it was a wet night with the sort of South Yorkshire wet, where the roads are running with water. I got to the car, and I knew the windscreen wiper was faulty but as it was usable I had not reported it. Well that night it broke before I even started driving and after ten to fifteen minutes of trying I was not managing to fix it. So I was now late and wet. I rang to cancel, they offered me another car but being both late and wet that was not on so I came back for an early night.
Friday I got my supervision papers ready and the presentation. He has not written back to me cancelling so I presume it is on. I have done the Training Needs Analysis done as well as quite a bit of other stuff. It gets more and more ridiculous every year. Part of the problem is that I actually have a half way decent research record due to my job and I certainly can trace and find papers and such very quickly. Also picked up the hire car. Again I got an upgrade, this time to a Ford Zetec. The only problem is that I am deliberately choosing a Corsa as it is a far nicer car to drive than the Zetec as you have far better visibility.
Saturday was synod. Actually it was fun as I was one of four people on the audio-visual desk. I was the second sound person. That meant I was there but beneath most people’s radar, the only two who spotted me were Sarah and James, even though I read at the final service. Most people were not expecting me to appear in that contexts so did not fathom who I was. It was interesting the blind spot it created. The two exceptions were Malcolm Hanson and maybe Kevin Watson who asked my opinion and I think got rather more than he expected. I suspect Kevin is trying to work out who I am and I am at present not helping. He has enough info if he wants to find out to do so. It was a lot of voting and little discussion. Most votes were unanimous (I think there was only one that wasn’t) and yes Yorkshire Synod has straight votes still. I think the more consultative approach would have added significantly time-wise to an otherwise already full agenda. I am far more in favour of it in situations where there is real debate to be had. The big decisions were largely uncontroversial because fairly thorough soundings had been done in advance. Two of them were reporting the conclusions after fairly thorough investigations and another was just realising that they weren’t really capable of doing what they were set up to do, so returned a neutral report. Oh can somebody please send Nick Maskell on a presentation course. When he is good he is very, very good but when he is bad he is horrid. A sure sign of someone who has ability but needs training. Training does not produce brilliant presentations, it stops people producing bad ones. Three presentations by him: one was brilliant, one perhaps middling and one was a classic how not to do a presentation.
Sunday was interesting, Three new elders appointed a new secretary and a new treasurer. The treasurer was an obviously popular choice. I suspect people had had him in mind for when the present one retired for quite a while. They also voted for their charity for this year. It was interesting, last year there were at least three candidates, this year there was one. There was also the feeling that the people who nominated the charity in previous years had not been pulling their weight (the nominators of this years charity will pull their weight without a doubt, in fact unofficially it has been a church charity for quite a while).
Today after a cold but bright weekend the heaven’s have opened and Sheffield has had water running down the roads again. Returning the car was not fun. Firstly I have to get to Hertz. On foot that is easy, but by car it is anything but, then I had to walk home. Had a brainwave however and rather than trying to find blue hard boiled sweets and making stained glass cookies I bought silver card and blue plastic and will make stain glass ornaments using that. This year there does not seem to be as much to do for the Advent wreath. This is something I have been working towards for a number of years and up to now have not achieved.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Writers group reading and a cold hampers play
On Monday finally finished “Why women don’t Ask”. It is worth reading, yes Fleur it does say something about the Church but I have not worked it completely out yet. One of the surprising conclusions is that if women’s approach to negotiation was the norm, then solutions would be better but only if they are strongly dominant. Against a male style negotiation someone negotiating in a woman’s style would do worse. It is not a simple book and needs some digesting. At the moment it is enough that it is making me more willing to ask for things. On the evening went to writers group, which was a rehearsal for Friday nights reading. The problem is that while the rehearsal is a good idea in principle it only really demonstrates how much work is needed before we actually get up to the level where we are able to read our pieces well. The rehearsal therefore does for timing and getting a feel for faults but nothing else. I unfortunately managed to get the keyboard for my phone swapped to Japanese. Instead of doing the sensible thing and searching the Internet for a solution instead I tried the heavy approach. It worked but it meant I had to reinstall my synchronisations software. Needless to say this took me longer than I would have liked.
Tuesday was fairly quiet. I got my hair cut and also had a meeting over introductory documents for postgraduate students. One of the problems is we draw the distinction between taught students and research students. On the evening went to Bible Study at Herringthorpe and set up with Mike to learn their sound desk by sitting with someone next Sunday and the following Tuesday for Mike to run through. So I should be up to speed by synod on the following Saturday.
Wednesday I had a fairly quiet day. Cliff came down so got to put St Andrews sound system to a more functional state. Somebody, I don’t know how, decided that the spare loose microphone was extra to requirements and went and chucked it out so when another microphone we could not simply replace one. However the church was in luck, some time before Barry had made an extension cable for one of the microphones to receivers which therefore had the part that was broken in it. So Cliff is able to substitute one for the other. I can’t do that sort of work. However a replacement microphone will cost over £40.
Thursday I thought I had a migraine as a woke feeling lousy. It wore off as the day went one but by evening I had the pain high in my nasal passages that normally signs colds. Other than that I did a mock up of the front of the book for the writers group the following day. I made a mistake in what I should have done was to print two A4 images onto A3 sheets as this would have allowed me to trim to the right size, instead I had borders.
Friday I had a heater coming for my flat. I got up early intending to go to breakfast but then checked the time on the email that Argos sent. The time said “7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.”, so although I was pretty sure it was not going to be that extreme and the cold had come out, I decided that breakfast was out. Indeed they turned up exactly when I expected them i.e at 10:00 a.m.. For those who think this is remarkable, I am fairly fortunate living in town centre, this means that I end up normally at a fairly set place in the run, either first thing or last thing. So once I have ordered once or twice from them I have a good idea of when they will turn up.
In the evening I went to writers group reading at the Bank Street Arts Centre. It also had on a jewellery exhibition. They have a bar but it is on a honesty basis so I presume they do not have a license. The room was smaller than the ones we had previously but this suited the group. As always we performed far better at the actual thing than at the reading. I find it intimidating to read something and not get anything back apart from a round of applause. Part of me is left thinking “What did they really think”. I was also fully dosed up on cold suppressants so slightly out of things which might partly have caused my inability to sense what people were thinking. Stuart came down and we got the tram up but for once in my life I did not check where the tram was going and it only went as far as the Cathedral so we had to swap over and get the next tram. Fortunately the tram does not require you to buy a new ticket.
Saturday it was over to my parents. Again I stuffed myself full with cold suppressants so although I was not sneezing all over the place I was not up to much. The only job Dad would let Ruth and Me do was choose the wine. He then dutifully did not have any himself, but his resolve finally crumbled that evening when there were two glasses left in the bottle and nobody to drive home. It is agreed that he will drink wine when others are around and may occasionally have a glass of whisky in an evening. In the evening I got Dad’s email back working or at least I think I did. This is much to my Mum’s relief. She really is not bothered about wine and such but Dad has always enjoyed a glass. It was good to see Ruth although I really was not up to much.
Sunday was much the same. I got the train back about 5 pm giving Mum and Dad plenty of time to get to church, so much so that I was back in my flat before they got there but it did stop them panicking about whether they had enough time.
Today woke with the cold flaring and decided that a day in might well be a good idea. I hope it has eased things. Unfortunately it meant missing Owen Sheers at St Andrews as I am still to full of it to be of much use.
Tuesday was fairly quiet. I got my hair cut and also had a meeting over introductory documents for postgraduate students. One of the problems is we draw the distinction between taught students and research students. On the evening went to Bible Study at Herringthorpe and set up with Mike to learn their sound desk by sitting with someone next Sunday and the following Tuesday for Mike to run through. So I should be up to speed by synod on the following Saturday.
Wednesday I had a fairly quiet day. Cliff came down so got to put St Andrews sound system to a more functional state. Somebody, I don’t know how, decided that the spare loose microphone was extra to requirements and went and chucked it out so when another microphone we could not simply replace one. However the church was in luck, some time before Barry had made an extension cable for one of the microphones to receivers which therefore had the part that was broken in it. So Cliff is able to substitute one for the other. I can’t do that sort of work. However a replacement microphone will cost over £40.
Thursday I thought I had a migraine as a woke feeling lousy. It wore off as the day went one but by evening I had the pain high in my nasal passages that normally signs colds. Other than that I did a mock up of the front of the book for the writers group the following day. I made a mistake in what I should have done was to print two A4 images onto A3 sheets as this would have allowed me to trim to the right size, instead I had borders.
Friday I had a heater coming for my flat. I got up early intending to go to breakfast but then checked the time on the email that Argos sent. The time said “7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.”, so although I was pretty sure it was not going to be that extreme and the cold had come out, I decided that breakfast was out. Indeed they turned up exactly when I expected them i.e at 10:00 a.m.. For those who think this is remarkable, I am fairly fortunate living in town centre, this means that I end up normally at a fairly set place in the run, either first thing or last thing. So once I have ordered once or twice from them I have a good idea of when they will turn up.
In the evening I went to writers group reading at the Bank Street Arts Centre. It also had on a jewellery exhibition. They have a bar but it is on a honesty basis so I presume they do not have a license. The room was smaller than the ones we had previously but this suited the group. As always we performed far better at the actual thing than at the reading. I find it intimidating to read something and not get anything back apart from a round of applause. Part of me is left thinking “What did they really think”. I was also fully dosed up on cold suppressants so slightly out of things which might partly have caused my inability to sense what people were thinking. Stuart came down and we got the tram up but for once in my life I did not check where the tram was going and it only went as far as the Cathedral so we had to swap over and get the next tram. Fortunately the tram does not require you to buy a new ticket.
Saturday it was over to my parents. Again I stuffed myself full with cold suppressants so although I was not sneezing all over the place I was not up to much. The only job Dad would let Ruth and Me do was choose the wine. He then dutifully did not have any himself, but his resolve finally crumbled that evening when there were two glasses left in the bottle and nobody to drive home. It is agreed that he will drink wine when others are around and may occasionally have a glass of whisky in an evening. In the evening I got Dad’s email back working or at least I think I did. This is much to my Mum’s relief. She really is not bothered about wine and such but Dad has always enjoyed a glass. It was good to see Ruth although I really was not up to much.
Sunday was much the same. I got the train back about 5 pm giving Mum and Dad plenty of time to get to church, so much so that I was back in my flat before they got there but it did stop them panicking about whether they had enough time.
Today woke with the cold flaring and decided that a day in might well be a good idea. I hope it has eased things. Unfortunately it meant missing Owen Sheers at St Andrews as I am still to full of it to be of much use.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
ASSESS conference in the midst of a busy week
Monday was fairly quiet, went to writers group and we were mainly just pacing ourselves. I have the feeling I probably need to buy more but we shall see as by the time I had already orders for four although one was technically direct and not through me. However don’t let that stop you asking for a copy. If however you want to be sure of a copy and to cut out the middle person then please just turn up at the Bank Street Art Centre (on Bank Street which is behind the Cathedral) next Friday at 7:30 p.m. where we will be reading. There was some discussion on whether we should make it available over the internet. If people abroad want it, let me know and I will email the final pdf file to you.
Tuesday was Bible study. This was quiet, many people appeared tired even of those that had made it. The course is in my opinion taking Acts far to quickly. We will get through it in about ten sessions. The thing is that last time we had Ananias and Saphira, the appointment of deacons and the stoning of Stephen in one session. Any one of those on its own could take a full session to talk over.
Wednesday was my day off. I spent the morning at Herringthorpe as they have no less than two meetings on a Wednesday morning. They have a prayer meeting and a fellowship group and although the two overlap they are not the same and led by different people. This is a Songs of Fellowship church but the Wednesday fellowship group are Mission Praise. I have seen churches where the main hymn book has been the denominational one and the youth have had a supplementary one, but I wonder why this group chose Mission Praise.
Thursday back into work but a largely quiet day and it needed to be. As on Friday it was Assess Conference. This is an annual get together in York of people who use SPSS. So I had an early start as I needed to be at the station for 8:20. That does not sound bad until you realise taxis want to pick you up an hour beforehand so I planned to leave the house at 7:30. The free gifts were good from IBM but the support wasn’t. The fact is that until last year they actually sent people to these events. This meant that it actually was time when I could talk to someone in the company about how we were doing at Sheffield and as it is major research package there, that I felt was important. Now we just have a linkup with someone in US. This should be by computer but both times we have had to use phones. If you have ever heard a mobile phone being projected through a microphone you will have some idea how poor the reception was.
Saturday I did some writing up of things in the morning. In the afternoon I went out to find where Bank Street Arts Centre was, so I could get there easily next Friday. It is in the roads I think of as back of the Cathedral. What I will do coming home at least is get the Tram from Fitzalan Square which is really very close by. It is an interesting place, I think it exists in two floors of a couple of tall former terrace houses. I would say Victorian only what little knowledge I have of Sheffield suggests they may be older. The building is therefore on several different levels, yes there is disabled access at least to the lower floor. I am not sure where we will be performing.
On the evening I went to a social event. The judgement of many people I hear is there could have been more people there but there was a good crowd and I think what they mean is that people who are normally at socials weren’t there, but then the point was to get to know new people and had there been more of them that would have been harder for those who were there. The thing that was perhaps most surprising for me was the entertainment. They have four members who as one of their hobbies do Abba Impersonators together. So they got entertainment put on by them. It was loud. Don’t get me wrong, I have no objection to Abba music, but having to listen with my fingers in my ears isn’t normally how I prefer to listen to it. They had some sing-a-long ones as well and some of the younger people were dancing but I suspect quite a few of the older people went home because of the volume and style of the music.
So today spent the day mainly inside. I think made a slight breakthrough with my research diary keeping. I just need to keep telling myself that what I need to do is to free writing and not bother too much about putting down things correctly after all the only person who is going to read the diary is me. So why do I need things in perfect style if I am typing for myself. Also that I should not bother about getting everything down. What I need to do is just get down an impression of what I experienced and that can be done in a lot looser style than I have used up to now. The skill is actually getting me to start typing and stay at it. Often I pressure myself too much over getting something right, although I don’t know what right is, so I am tying myself into knots. I stop writing because it is so difficult to sort out what is the exact thing I need to write.
This evening went to the evening service, which could well be a favourite with me. This church has lots of small meetings that are called different things but roughly do the same thing. There is Bible Study on a Tuesday, Fellowship Group on a Wednesday and Evening Service. I wonder if the Monday Group is the same, although the one account I have had of it, it isn’t. Oh a comment from tonight which was worth noting. This mornings worship was all age and the comment was that it was almost a different congregation.
Tuesday was Bible study. This was quiet, many people appeared tired even of those that had made it. The course is in my opinion taking Acts far to quickly. We will get through it in about ten sessions. The thing is that last time we had Ananias and Saphira, the appointment of deacons and the stoning of Stephen in one session. Any one of those on its own could take a full session to talk over.
Wednesday was my day off. I spent the morning at Herringthorpe as they have no less than two meetings on a Wednesday morning. They have a prayer meeting and a fellowship group and although the two overlap they are not the same and led by different people. This is a Songs of Fellowship church but the Wednesday fellowship group are Mission Praise. I have seen churches where the main hymn book has been the denominational one and the youth have had a supplementary one, but I wonder why this group chose Mission Praise.
Thursday back into work but a largely quiet day and it needed to be. As on Friday it was Assess Conference. This is an annual get together in York of people who use SPSS. So I had an early start as I needed to be at the station for 8:20. That does not sound bad until you realise taxis want to pick you up an hour beforehand so I planned to leave the house at 7:30. The free gifts were good from IBM but the support wasn’t. The fact is that until last year they actually sent people to these events. This meant that it actually was time when I could talk to someone in the company about how we were doing at Sheffield and as it is major research package there, that I felt was important. Now we just have a linkup with someone in US. This should be by computer but both times we have had to use phones. If you have ever heard a mobile phone being projected through a microphone you will have some idea how poor the reception was.
Saturday I did some writing up of things in the morning. In the afternoon I went out to find where Bank Street Arts Centre was, so I could get there easily next Friday. It is in the roads I think of as back of the Cathedral. What I will do coming home at least is get the Tram from Fitzalan Square which is really very close by. It is an interesting place, I think it exists in two floors of a couple of tall former terrace houses. I would say Victorian only what little knowledge I have of Sheffield suggests they may be older. The building is therefore on several different levels, yes there is disabled access at least to the lower floor. I am not sure where we will be performing.
On the evening I went to a social event. The judgement of many people I hear is there could have been more people there but there was a good crowd and I think what they mean is that people who are normally at socials weren’t there, but then the point was to get to know new people and had there been more of them that would have been harder for those who were there. The thing that was perhaps most surprising for me was the entertainment. They have four members who as one of their hobbies do Abba Impersonators together. So they got entertainment put on by them. It was loud. Don’t get me wrong, I have no objection to Abba music, but having to listen with my fingers in my ears isn’t normally how I prefer to listen to it. They had some sing-a-long ones as well and some of the younger people were dancing but I suspect quite a few of the older people went home because of the volume and style of the music.
So today spent the day mainly inside. I think made a slight breakthrough with my research diary keeping. I just need to keep telling myself that what I need to do is to free writing and not bother too much about putting down things correctly after all the only person who is going to read the diary is me. So why do I need things in perfect style if I am typing for myself. Also that I should not bother about getting everything down. What I need to do is just get down an impression of what I experienced and that can be done in a lot looser style than I have used up to now. The skill is actually getting me to start typing and stay at it. Often I pressure myself too much over getting something right, although I don’t know what right is, so I am tying myself into knots. I stop writing because it is so difficult to sort out what is the exact thing I need to write.
This evening went to the evening service, which could well be a favourite with me. This church has lots of small meetings that are called different things but roughly do the same thing. There is Bible Study on a Tuesday, Fellowship Group on a Wednesday and Evening Service. I wonder if the Monday Group is the same, although the one account I have had of it, it isn’t. Oh a comment from tonight which was worth noting. This mornings worship was all age and the comment was that it was almost a different congregation.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
A Cold causes limited damage
Right lets see about the last week:
Last Monday the books were finally available from my writers-group. If you want a copy please let me know, we are officially charging £4. Those who want a copy please let me know. Sarah I will put your copy in your pigeon hole and another for Derek Collins. Alright its partly me showing off as I did the layout as well as the first pieces in the book (I did not collate so had no say over that). However in my opinion the second piece is from a novel that really should be published. Because I wanted to see what the finished product looked like and so even though I new I had something virusey but was keeping going. On the night Jude read a superb piece and she is not always the sort of writer I find easy to get on with.
Tuesday I still had the virusey thing, although some of the symptoms in shared with a cold it also put me off eating, not made me nauseous but just meant I rarely felt like eating. However as I had a team meeting and a advice session with someone in Education, basically I am helping her to do her analysis in NVivo by partly being more expert than her on using NVivo, partly being a sounding board and partly by just saying “yes you are doing fine”. Fortunately I had called off house group on the evening because I felt that with supervision the next day it would over tire me. So I went down to Waitrose to shop and to buy some cold suppressants for the next day. I wanted the same ones as worked last year but when I got there they had added guaifenesin which is an expectorant but it also interacts with amiltryptyline which is one of the drugs I am on. I took some once before accidentally and it is not pleasant, even on the low dose I am on. The problem was then that I had to find an alternative. It made my shopping twice as long as I would have liked.
Wednesday I was down to Birmingham for a supervision. Things went smoothly, my supervisor suggested that I really needed to do a re-write rather than an edit of the paper as my language had got too caught up in the editing. The difference between a re-write and an edit is with a re-write I start with a fresh document, take each section and write from memory what is important in that section having read the section first. With an edit I take the actual words and try to put them into a better form. His conclusion is that I need to limit my editing. The good news is that I seem to have ended up with a weekend to do this because everything else has to be done earlier in the month.
Thursday I finally gave into my cold/virusey thing and spent most of the day in bed. I surprised myself in that I slept until after mid-day. However had I needed I suspect I could have gone into work.
Friday I was up and in work. Admittedly I came home slightly earlier than I normally do but I was working fairly well and not just sitting there doing nothing. Stuart came around in the evening to have a glass of wine (he brings the wine) and eat garlic bread. One of the ironies of life that at present we manage to meet more regularly in a purely platonic way than we ever did when we were going out.
Saturday was one of those in days where I did bits and bobs. I went down town on the afternoon, to buy soya flour (I make a form of scrambled egg for breakfast that uses it and soya dream as well as egg). Also bought some page dividers, I will shortly be on my third folder of written work for my PhD. When I have filled this one I will really be down to serious writing of my thesis. Actually I suspect before then. One thing I did not manage to sort is how to finish my work flow process for poetry. I write it in a small note book originally maybe do two or more drafts, then I produce a more polished piece for my writers- group, but after that there should be a final edit and then put somewhere to keep. The choosing what to keep them in is what is puzzling me and my current work folder is getting rather full!
Today I went to Herringthorpe, it took longer than usual due to the verge being tidied. This seems to largely consist to litter picking rather than actually gardening and certainly does not involve any work on the road. However one lane either way of the parkway is closed. I also ended up parking in the Doctors car park due to be late and there being a baptism. Today we had the blessing of a parent and the baptism of a child. There is no need to tell me that that is liturgically awkward, someone prepared to make promises on their child’s behalf that they cannot make for themselves. There is nowt as queer as folk. If anyone had said to me at the start of this thesis that I would have to spend a good portion of my thesis on the sacraments, I simply would think that they were talking through their hat but in St Andrews Chesterfield one of the major flash points was communion and at Herringthorpe it is baptism. The congregation is split between adult baptiser and fairly strict paedo-baptists. There is also the strong feeling that they see these families at Baptism then don’t see them again. The big question, what does it mean to belong?
Next week is busy, I am hoping on Wednesday to call around at the doctors surgery after a prayer meeting at the church and see if I can persuade the manager to give me an interview. What is really interesting is that in some ways the boundaries between Herringthorpe and this Doctors surgery are not clear cut and they need to get along. On Friday I am off to ASSESS at York.
Last Monday the books were finally available from my writers-group. If you want a copy please let me know, we are officially charging £4. Those who want a copy please let me know. Sarah I will put your copy in your pigeon hole and another for Derek Collins. Alright its partly me showing off as I did the layout as well as the first pieces in the book (I did not collate so had no say over that). However in my opinion the second piece is from a novel that really should be published. Because I wanted to see what the finished product looked like and so even though I new I had something virusey but was keeping going. On the night Jude read a superb piece and she is not always the sort of writer I find easy to get on with.
Tuesday I still had the virusey thing, although some of the symptoms in shared with a cold it also put me off eating, not made me nauseous but just meant I rarely felt like eating. However as I had a team meeting and a advice session with someone in Education, basically I am helping her to do her analysis in NVivo by partly being more expert than her on using NVivo, partly being a sounding board and partly by just saying “yes you are doing fine”. Fortunately I had called off house group on the evening because I felt that with supervision the next day it would over tire me. So I went down to Waitrose to shop and to buy some cold suppressants for the next day. I wanted the same ones as worked last year but when I got there they had added guaifenesin which is an expectorant but it also interacts with amiltryptyline which is one of the drugs I am on. I took some once before accidentally and it is not pleasant, even on the low dose I am on. The problem was then that I had to find an alternative. It made my shopping twice as long as I would have liked.
Wednesday I was down to Birmingham for a supervision. Things went smoothly, my supervisor suggested that I really needed to do a re-write rather than an edit of the paper as my language had got too caught up in the editing. The difference between a re-write and an edit is with a re-write I start with a fresh document, take each section and write from memory what is important in that section having read the section first. With an edit I take the actual words and try to put them into a better form. His conclusion is that I need to limit my editing. The good news is that I seem to have ended up with a weekend to do this because everything else has to be done earlier in the month.
Thursday I finally gave into my cold/virusey thing and spent most of the day in bed. I surprised myself in that I slept until after mid-day. However had I needed I suspect I could have gone into work.
Friday I was up and in work. Admittedly I came home slightly earlier than I normally do but I was working fairly well and not just sitting there doing nothing. Stuart came around in the evening to have a glass of wine (he brings the wine) and eat garlic bread. One of the ironies of life that at present we manage to meet more regularly in a purely platonic way than we ever did when we were going out.
Saturday was one of those in days where I did bits and bobs. I went down town on the afternoon, to buy soya flour (I make a form of scrambled egg for breakfast that uses it and soya dream as well as egg). Also bought some page dividers, I will shortly be on my third folder of written work for my PhD. When I have filled this one I will really be down to serious writing of my thesis. Actually I suspect before then. One thing I did not manage to sort is how to finish my work flow process for poetry. I write it in a small note book originally maybe do two or more drafts, then I produce a more polished piece for my writers- group, but after that there should be a final edit and then put somewhere to keep. The choosing what to keep them in is what is puzzling me and my current work folder is getting rather full!
Today I went to Herringthorpe, it took longer than usual due to the verge being tidied. This seems to largely consist to litter picking rather than actually gardening and certainly does not involve any work on the road. However one lane either way of the parkway is closed. I also ended up parking in the Doctors car park due to be late and there being a baptism. Today we had the blessing of a parent and the baptism of a child. There is no need to tell me that that is liturgically awkward, someone prepared to make promises on their child’s behalf that they cannot make for themselves. There is nowt as queer as folk. If anyone had said to me at the start of this thesis that I would have to spend a good portion of my thesis on the sacraments, I simply would think that they were talking through their hat but in St Andrews Chesterfield one of the major flash points was communion and at Herringthorpe it is baptism. The congregation is split between adult baptiser and fairly strict paedo-baptists. There is also the strong feeling that they see these families at Baptism then don’t see them again. The big question, what does it mean to belong?
Next week is busy, I am hoping on Wednesday to call around at the doctors surgery after a prayer meeting at the church and see if I can persuade the manager to give me an interview. What is really interesting is that in some ways the boundaries between Herringthorpe and this Doctors surgery are not clear cut and they need to get along. On Friday I am off to ASSESS at York.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The start of terms and system upgrades
Well the students are back at Sheffield and the rain has arrived. Students return effects my work in strange ways. Instead of working flat out on interesting research projects which have taken most of the summer (maybe the oviduct study will turn up again). Anyway there is a bounced paper, don’t know why yet and another one being written which I may well need to review. I am also getting better at instructing people on how to keep tabs of their analysis. Meanwhile trying to keep tabs of the advice I give. There is one person who I am taking slowly through defining the question. I am not sure yet what we will get out of it, so I am not sure whether my advice last time was good or not. Well it is good in that it is a next step, but it might not be the right one and what will be needed is a refinement of the question and a different analysis. Meanwhile in the time spare I have I am reading “Why Women Don’t Ask”.
It really is quite a thorough exploration of sociological issues around how women interact within situations. It deals with not only the fact that women tend not to engage in negotiation and when they do to under estimate what they can get, but also the ways that women might be “punished” if they are too aggressive a negotiator. Its not a simple case that women just need to learn to negotiate but that they need to learn how to negotiate in ways that are available for a women and that some aspects of society also need to change.
On the home front I have been upgrading technology wise. I got a new desktop computer largely for writing up my PhD and am starting to feel I have got it set up how I want it although it is periodically not running one piece of software I need to use. I am not overly concerned about this as that piece of software should upgrade in the next three months and I am pretty sure my computer will handle the new version better. I also realised I was being bothered by the fact that I did not have easy access to my diary. I could take my small laptop with me but that takes so long to start up that for setting dates when at church or such I just don’t use it. So I decided to investigate. Work tends to favour people using an Iphone, but I am not the safest of Apple users and anyway I quite like to be odd ball. Instead I went for an Android phone. I only did this when I discovered that SyncML is available for Android. I actually got away with a lower priced phone than I thought I would and it is now working. It took some time to setup but in the end I got it working. I do not recommend upgrading this early in a contract, but I was beginning to realise that it was partly about keeping myself relatively sane and this would niggle me.
Thesis wise things are progressing fairly smoothly. The week after next is a challenge as I need to go to prayer meeting then onto the local medical centre to try and set up a meeting with someone there to discuss neighbourhood needs. I have written a letter, I think phoned twice and decided that in order to get an interview I would need to actually go and visit them.
Equally unsuccessful has my attempts to talk to Zen about setting up a website. They rand me twice, but both times I was either rushing out for a meeting or in one. I think I will need to set up a new query. If only they would let me send something longer than they do I could give them contact times.
My Writers Group is Reading and launching their third collection of work. For those who are interested there is more information about the reading at the venue and or from the Off the Shelf site. Please let me know if you are interested in a copy of the collection (price wil be somewhere around £5, although I may well pay it) and Morag if you could let me know how many you intend to loose this time!
Otherwise this week I am off to Birmingham on Wednesday. The department told me that everyone had moved to new offices. I was sceptical about this, as my supervisors office is not in the main lot of departmental offices and although the new offices are on the Edgebaston campus they are still a way away from the main facilities and I did not think central admin would want that for my supervisor. Now to do some reading for tonight worship.
It really is quite a thorough exploration of sociological issues around how women interact within situations. It deals with not only the fact that women tend not to engage in negotiation and when they do to under estimate what they can get, but also the ways that women might be “punished” if they are too aggressive a negotiator. Its not a simple case that women just need to learn to negotiate but that they need to learn how to negotiate in ways that are available for a women and that some aspects of society also need to change.
On the home front I have been upgrading technology wise. I got a new desktop computer largely for writing up my PhD and am starting to feel I have got it set up how I want it although it is periodically not running one piece of software I need to use. I am not overly concerned about this as that piece of software should upgrade in the next three months and I am pretty sure my computer will handle the new version better. I also realised I was being bothered by the fact that I did not have easy access to my diary. I could take my small laptop with me but that takes so long to start up that for setting dates when at church or such I just don’t use it. So I decided to investigate. Work tends to favour people using an Iphone, but I am not the safest of Apple users and anyway I quite like to be odd ball. Instead I went for an Android phone. I only did this when I discovered that SyncML is available for Android. I actually got away with a lower priced phone than I thought I would and it is now working. It took some time to setup but in the end I got it working. I do not recommend upgrading this early in a contract, but I was beginning to realise that it was partly about keeping myself relatively sane and this would niggle me.
Thesis wise things are progressing fairly smoothly. The week after next is a challenge as I need to go to prayer meeting then onto the local medical centre to try and set up a meeting with someone there to discuss neighbourhood needs. I have written a letter, I think phoned twice and decided that in order to get an interview I would need to actually go and visit them.
Equally unsuccessful has my attempts to talk to Zen about setting up a website. They rand me twice, but both times I was either rushing out for a meeting or in one. I think I will need to set up a new query. If only they would let me send something longer than they do I could give them contact times.
My Writers Group is Reading and launching their third collection of work. For those who are interested there is more information about the reading at the venue and or from the Off the Shelf site. Please let me know if you are interested in a copy of the collection (price wil be somewhere around £5, although I may well pay it) and Morag if you could let me know how many you intend to loose this time!
Otherwise this week I am off to Birmingham on Wednesday. The department told me that everyone had moved to new offices. I was sceptical about this, as my supervisors office is not in the main lot of departmental offices and although the new offices are on the Edgebaston campus they are still a way away from the main facilities and I did not think central admin would want that for my supervisor. Now to do some reading for tonight worship.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Balancing essay writing, placement activity and birthday
This time the reporting will be thematic rather than weekly.
I have over the last fortnight been preparing for my supervision. This involved me deciding whether to re-write the article from the talk I gave at SLS or whether to write something fresh on the discourses around older age. The thing is that I am finding the literature rather poor and though I can find endless stuff on older age, it all reflects broad discourses from society in general rather than what I am seeing in the churches which are largely discourses crafted by older people themselves. It seems odd that somebody who is official studying older people in the church, has not spent time actually talking with them. He might analyse the NT, OT and early church well, he might even deal with the pressures in society well, but how do older people in the church construct themselves and how do others in the church construct them is a very lightly touched upon and seems to me to be the elephant in the room. Anyway I felt that unprepared to tackle that and I know that I really need to have my new computer here to handle the recordings that I decided that the revision was in order. Actually part of this was that I came across an article on small groups which had the actual article interspersed with scenes. As different parts of narrative I was using stood quite well on their own and the narrative did not have narrative tension as a whole I felt that reshaping things like this my be advantageous. I also needed to put in some very basic ethnographic stuff and also Reformed Liturgy stuff. Anyway I was at the stage when it was sent out to my proof readers, thanks Ruth and James, and then Martin, my supervisor found that he was fully booked on the date. So I am now in the process of rearranging the date of our meeting and sending him the essay to comment. I may well try and get something written on discourses around old age next weekend or at least some reading done.
Placement wise things are going well. I remember being amazed with St Andrews Chesterfield about how the access changed when I had been there over a year. This time I got a list of dates, times and meetings, plus I have spotted that evening services actually are a bit of an odd animal. It is low key but it is also one of the place where the informal discourse that runs the church goes on. The previous Sunday evening service they ended up deciding what they would do for the next while. It was suggested that they might follow a book. The initial suggestion was The Purpose Driven Life but when Mike Thomas checked that he found that it was not how he remembered it. So much to my relief they moved onto The Me I want to Be by John Ortberg. One day I was down town doing something that needed to do, and passed by our local CLC bookshop (yes I know, but it is the sole remaining Christian Bookshop in Sheffield). I went in to see if they had it, which they did, so I bought it and photocopied a portion of it so people had chance to prepare for this evening. Hopefully Mike will have ordered the copies by next time. Also I wrote an article for their quarterly magazine this time and mentioned their notice board was in need of a revamp, hoping very much that by the time it was out, nobody would have done it as it was several months ago that I actually checked it. It had not been. So when the fabric group got to view the board they agreed with me. The problem is that people who come to the church don’t see it regularly. They largely come by car, park in the car park and go straight into the church. However the noticeboard is the main physical presence for most people as the church is set back from the road. I also got another interview in on Friday, well I say an interview the lady just talked at me the whole time having read my questions in advance. She certainly had lots to say and I think having someone to listen was important.
Also since the bank holiday I have been doing the layout of a booklet published by the writers group I belong to. I enjoy doing layout. It is something that comes naturally. That can not be said of my copy-editing skill and therefore the most annoying things have been when I have had to do copy editing and not layout. About 50% of the changes requested once I had done the final layout were copy-editing. The worst one was the last where I was asked to put in a setting for an extract from a novel. Only the setting desperately needed copy-editing before in could be included. I particularly hated doing it as the writer is Russian and her normal prose has a Russian feel to it, that I think really enhances it. However this was long convoluted sentences that were written in different past tenses and was really quite difficult English to read. Now I could turn them into clearer English but that would be English-English and I might loose the Russian sound to the piece. It was a very difficult piece piece to copy edit and I am not really happy doing that. The changes that the printer wanted were just technical bits that I enjoyed the puzzle of sorting. Oh I also got to design the cover, and used a fractal from Apophysis Software. The printer asked what it means, the answer is that it does not mean anything except what the viewer sees. Fractals can be spectacularly beautiful or just chaotic.
Birthday was quiet on the whole. I failed this year to get the day off work, accidentally letting someone believe I was free on that date and thereby allowing them to create a meeting on that date. I did however have Friday off, although I was interviewing for my PhD on that date. On Friday I went to Breakfast (having done a Tescos shop on my computer first) then went onto Traidcraft to buy chocolates for the person I was interviewing. However they weren’t open so I went up to Blackwells, not intending to buy, but then they had a book on Theological Anthropology and as that might be one description of my PhD I thought I better get it. Not that I had come across the term before but I am doing a PhD in theology that is decidedly anthropological in nature. Unfortunately I suspect the theological issues I will end up talking about will be significantly different to what the writer thinks they should be. For those who are interested while St Andrews Chesterfield was very concerned over communion, with Herringthorpe it is Baptism. If anyone had at the start of the PhD said I would have to have a chapter on the sacraments, I would have thought them crazy but it is increasingly looking as if I will. Anyway lunch time I went out to Roche Abbey taking a sandwich and a bottle of gingerbeer with me. I also took my camera with me and got some photos of the abbey and surroundings. Unfortunately I am still feeling my way with this camera (it was Olympus Mju not the Nikon DSLR) and I have not quite managed to get to doing everything right at the same time. So some are over exposed where I got it right on others and I managed to get my thumb slightly in on the one that I think has the best composition. If you are interested you can see the pictures on Flickr. In the evening I went out with the Dicksons to the Hui Wei> which is an interesting Chinese restaurant. They had a party with children in it and were slightly distracted with them, but the food was still good and slightly different from your normal English Chinese restaurant.
However the net result of that busy day was that I was whacked yesterday and as a result did not get things I was planning to do, done, so stayed at home this morning to finish off the essay.
This coming week is when everything starts up again so I have my writers group on Monday and Bible study on Tuesday at Herringthorpe. I will be interested to see if there is any change with who turns up as there no longer is a proper meal before hand. I actually suspect on the whole not. They are looking at Acts this time so we shall see how it goes. They seem to change the style of study pretty regularly. I have been to set book bible studies, I have been to talks by Nicky Gumble on video and I have been to themed bible studies and that in less than a year. Hopefully the rest of the week will be fairly quite. As there are more students around staff are getting back into teaching mode.
I have over the last fortnight been preparing for my supervision. This involved me deciding whether to re-write the article from the talk I gave at SLS or whether to write something fresh on the discourses around older age. The thing is that I am finding the literature rather poor and though I can find endless stuff on older age, it all reflects broad discourses from society in general rather than what I am seeing in the churches which are largely discourses crafted by older people themselves. It seems odd that somebody who is official studying older people in the church, has not spent time actually talking with them. He might analyse the NT, OT and early church well, he might even deal with the pressures in society well, but how do older people in the church construct themselves and how do others in the church construct them is a very lightly touched upon and seems to me to be the elephant in the room. Anyway I felt that unprepared to tackle that and I know that I really need to have my new computer here to handle the recordings that I decided that the revision was in order. Actually part of this was that I came across an article on small groups which had the actual article interspersed with scenes. As different parts of narrative I was using stood quite well on their own and the narrative did not have narrative tension as a whole I felt that reshaping things like this my be advantageous. I also needed to put in some very basic ethnographic stuff and also Reformed Liturgy stuff. Anyway I was at the stage when it was sent out to my proof readers, thanks Ruth and James, and then Martin, my supervisor found that he was fully booked on the date. So I am now in the process of rearranging the date of our meeting and sending him the essay to comment. I may well try and get something written on discourses around old age next weekend or at least some reading done.
Placement wise things are going well. I remember being amazed with St Andrews Chesterfield about how the access changed when I had been there over a year. This time I got a list of dates, times and meetings, plus I have spotted that evening services actually are a bit of an odd animal. It is low key but it is also one of the place where the informal discourse that runs the church goes on. The previous Sunday evening service they ended up deciding what they would do for the next while. It was suggested that they might follow a book. The initial suggestion was The Purpose Driven Life but when Mike Thomas checked that he found that it was not how he remembered it. So much to my relief they moved onto The Me I want to Be by John Ortberg. One day I was down town doing something that needed to do, and passed by our local CLC bookshop (yes I know, but it is the sole remaining Christian Bookshop in Sheffield). I went in to see if they had it, which they did, so I bought it and photocopied a portion of it so people had chance to prepare for this evening. Hopefully Mike will have ordered the copies by next time. Also I wrote an article for their quarterly magazine this time and mentioned their notice board was in need of a revamp, hoping very much that by the time it was out, nobody would have done it as it was several months ago that I actually checked it. It had not been. So when the fabric group got to view the board they agreed with me. The problem is that people who come to the church don’t see it regularly. They largely come by car, park in the car park and go straight into the church. However the noticeboard is the main physical presence for most people as the church is set back from the road. I also got another interview in on Friday, well I say an interview the lady just talked at me the whole time having read my questions in advance. She certainly had lots to say and I think having someone to listen was important.
Also since the bank holiday I have been doing the layout of a booklet published by the writers group I belong to. I enjoy doing layout. It is something that comes naturally. That can not be said of my copy-editing skill and therefore the most annoying things have been when I have had to do copy editing and not layout. About 50% of the changes requested once I had done the final layout were copy-editing. The worst one was the last where I was asked to put in a setting for an extract from a novel. Only the setting desperately needed copy-editing before in could be included. I particularly hated doing it as the writer is Russian and her normal prose has a Russian feel to it, that I think really enhances it. However this was long convoluted sentences that were written in different past tenses and was really quite difficult English to read. Now I could turn them into clearer English but that would be English-English and I might loose the Russian sound to the piece. It was a very difficult piece piece to copy edit and I am not really happy doing that. The changes that the printer wanted were just technical bits that I enjoyed the puzzle of sorting. Oh I also got to design the cover, and used a fractal from Apophysis Software. The printer asked what it means, the answer is that it does not mean anything except what the viewer sees. Fractals can be spectacularly beautiful or just chaotic.
Birthday was quiet on the whole. I failed this year to get the day off work, accidentally letting someone believe I was free on that date and thereby allowing them to create a meeting on that date. I did however have Friday off, although I was interviewing for my PhD on that date. On Friday I went to Breakfast (having done a Tescos shop on my computer first) then went onto Traidcraft to buy chocolates for the person I was interviewing. However they weren’t open so I went up to Blackwells, not intending to buy, but then they had a book on Theological Anthropology and as that might be one description of my PhD I thought I better get it. Not that I had come across the term before but I am doing a PhD in theology that is decidedly anthropological in nature. Unfortunately I suspect the theological issues I will end up talking about will be significantly different to what the writer thinks they should be. For those who are interested while St Andrews Chesterfield was very concerned over communion, with Herringthorpe it is Baptism. If anyone had at the start of the PhD said I would have to have a chapter on the sacraments, I would have thought them crazy but it is increasingly looking as if I will. Anyway lunch time I went out to Roche Abbey taking a sandwich and a bottle of gingerbeer with me. I also took my camera with me and got some photos of the abbey and surroundings. Unfortunately I am still feeling my way with this camera (it was Olympus Mju not the Nikon DSLR) and I have not quite managed to get to doing everything right at the same time. So some are over exposed where I got it right on others and I managed to get my thumb slightly in on the one that I think has the best composition. If you are interested you can see the pictures on Flickr. In the evening I went out with the Dicksons to the Hui Wei> which is an interesting Chinese restaurant. They had a party with children in it and were slightly distracted with them, but the food was still good and slightly different from your normal English Chinese restaurant.
However the net result of that busy day was that I was whacked yesterday and as a result did not get things I was planning to do, done, so stayed at home this morning to finish off the essay.
This coming week is when everything starts up again so I have my writers group on Monday and Bible study on Tuesday at Herringthorpe. I will be interested to see if there is any change with who turns up as there no longer is a proper meal before hand. I actually suspect on the whole not. They are looking at Acts this time so we shall see how it goes. They seem to change the style of study pretty regularly. I have been to set book bible studies, I have been to talks by Nicky Gumble on video and I have been to themed bible studies and that in less than a year. Hopefully the rest of the week will be fairly quite. As there are more students around staff are getting back into teaching mode.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
A quiet week after the bank holiday
Neil the tutor at my writers group had spoken of it taking a long time to do the layout of the booklet for my writers group. I presume this was because the way most people work it would indeed take a long time and drive me almost frantic. That is they decide how each bit of text should look individually and then alter it accordingly. I work with styles. I decide that there are a limited number of styles needed for a document and then I assign each piece of text to an appropriate style. If I therefore want to alter a style then I just edit the style. I do not have to search for every individual piece of text that I want like that and reformat it. I think I worked with Title, headings 1 to 3, two styles for Tables of contents, a context style, a poetry style and a prose style. The only extra formatting was putting odd words into italic because they were either slang or foreign. It works, it is easy to deal with. Over fifty percent of the corrections have been editorial rather than layout. Technically not my brief, but I don’t really have the ability to go back to the copy-editor and say “is this change ok” and in the end the author actually does have the final say with this booklet. Admittedly the one piece that missed the copy-editor completely was by the copy editor.
Anyway by Monday I was just handling the occasional request for changes and so found that I had unexpectedly free time. So I finally got around to digging out the Drupal book and reading a couple of chapters. I am now at the stage of installation. Well before I go that far I need to order my new PhD computer and let it arrive so my old laptop can be turned into a linux laptop and used for running drupal on. I also need to change my old machine in work into a Linux one but that is not for web development but so I have a back up machine.
Tuesday I was into work. Actually having had a break I was trying to pick up where I had left things. This was not helped by the fact works email was down and I had looked at it on Friday to see what needed tackling and had a note that there was at least one appointment that needed making. In the end it was not up until Thursday and as Friday was my day off, the appointment could not be made until next week. However a book had come with the formula for the variance. It was therefore a very quiet day. However I spent the afternoon struggling with a piece of software so that it would draw the graphs I thought it should. It did in the end, but I have also discovered that I seem to have misplaced a piece of software I support. This would normally not be a problem but with my machine being reformatted I should re install it. Mind you I have the manuals and I have not had a query about it since I said I would support it.
Wednesday and Margo was in and we reviewed the sports paper with Richard and saw how he was handling it, also we looked at the Butyrate. I had just solved out how to get the graphs I wanted from the original package. I think I am going to do a graph per sheet although really they should be three graphs per page, or better still all six on a single page. I then went to get my hair cut during lunch. My hairdresser offers a tea coffee or water while we have our hair cut. I asked for black coffee. Unfortunately it tasted nothing like coffee normally does but like a weird mix of chemicals. That taste transition is for me the main precursor of a migraine, so I went to Boots and got some Migraleve, back into work, sorted thing out so I could go home and sleep it off. The result of the advance warning and therefore being able to take diversionary action was that it was lighter than most. I think technically I still was recovering on Thursday but I was certainly able to get up and cope with life.
Thursday I got the graphs drawn, spent some time sorting out the SAS licenses and generally had a fairly productive but normal day. Still got to contact a colleague about getting more memory in my old machine so I can change it to a linux machine. It really is too low spec to run modern Windows operating system effectively at work but as I don’t trust my present machine I do need a back up.
Friday was interesting in that I was in one of my very rare homemaker moods. So amongst things I made a ginger, carrot and sweet potato soup and also put on some whisky and ginger schnapps. For those of you with Scottish sensibilities the whiskey was firstly a blend and secondly Irish which just happened to be the cheapest blend in Waitrose at the time. I think I am rather pleased with this as it will mean that the schnapps will probably be smoother than it would have been otherwise. I also rang the doctors surgery opposite Herringthorpe URC to make an appointment with the manager as part of Herringthorpe URC needs assessment. Unfortunately having psyched myself up I rang just as he was leaving and did not get through but when I rang fifteen minutes later he had left. So I will have to ring on Monday.
Yesterday my parents came over. We ate the some of the soup with coconut cream in it. I sent them home with two boxes with the base in it as there was not space in my freezer. Dad brought over their new router from Zen. He wanted to know how to set it up. I hope it is largely setup and they can just set up things from the box and it will work. Slightly concerned that the routers wireless name begins with Thompson, I hope they have sent them the right one and there isn’t a Thompson household with a router that starts with Russell. On the other hand Mum spotted I was reading Pioneering the Third Age by Rob Merchant which I am not finding very satisfactory. She wanted to borrow it, however I managed to persuade her to take Valuing Age: Pastoral Ministry with Older People by James Woodward and Wesley Carr which I suspect and I think she does will be more in line with her interests. As I said to her it was not important that she remembers what is in there as she is not anymore active in the pastoral care of her congregation but if she wants to think through this as an older person it is one place to start. What I am trying to do is find ways of characterising the discourses around older people within congregations. This is somewhat harder than for children as often the older people are creating the discourses themselves.
As per usual we went shopping in town. Mum wanted a ball of wool as she thought she would run out with the jersey she is knitting herself, while their coffee grinder had stopped working. So we went to John Lewis’ that sell both of these items. Dad uses the coffee grinder most days, so it was well worth replacing. Dad in the end bought a burr coffee grinder, partly because the blade one was only a pound cheaper and a Bodum one. It was expensive as it had a chrome body, but what put me right off it, was its grind button was exactly the same design as the one on my grinder and my experience is that I have to be very careful I clean that properly or the grinder stops working. It is a fiddly bit of plastic and awkward to clean. I think the one he got will be stronger and therefore likely to last longer.
Anyway by Monday I was just handling the occasional request for changes and so found that I had unexpectedly free time. So I finally got around to digging out the Drupal book and reading a couple of chapters. I am now at the stage of installation. Well before I go that far I need to order my new PhD computer and let it arrive so my old laptop can be turned into a linux laptop and used for running drupal on. I also need to change my old machine in work into a Linux one but that is not for web development but so I have a back up machine.
Tuesday I was into work. Actually having had a break I was trying to pick up where I had left things. This was not helped by the fact works email was down and I had looked at it on Friday to see what needed tackling and had a note that there was at least one appointment that needed making. In the end it was not up until Thursday and as Friday was my day off, the appointment could not be made until next week. However a book had come with the formula for the variance. It was therefore a very quiet day. However I spent the afternoon struggling with a piece of software so that it would draw the graphs I thought it should. It did in the end, but I have also discovered that I seem to have misplaced a piece of software I support. This would normally not be a problem but with my machine being reformatted I should re install it. Mind you I have the manuals and I have not had a query about it since I said I would support it.
Wednesday and Margo was in and we reviewed the sports paper with Richard and saw how he was handling it, also we looked at the Butyrate. I had just solved out how to get the graphs I wanted from the original package. I think I am going to do a graph per sheet although really they should be three graphs per page, or better still all six on a single page. I then went to get my hair cut during lunch. My hairdresser offers a tea coffee or water while we have our hair cut. I asked for black coffee. Unfortunately it tasted nothing like coffee normally does but like a weird mix of chemicals. That taste transition is for me the main precursor of a migraine, so I went to Boots and got some Migraleve, back into work, sorted thing out so I could go home and sleep it off. The result of the advance warning and therefore being able to take diversionary action was that it was lighter than most. I think technically I still was recovering on Thursday but I was certainly able to get up and cope with life.
Thursday I got the graphs drawn, spent some time sorting out the SAS licenses and generally had a fairly productive but normal day. Still got to contact a colleague about getting more memory in my old machine so I can change it to a linux machine. It really is too low spec to run modern Windows operating system effectively at work but as I don’t trust my present machine I do need a back up.
Friday was interesting in that I was in one of my very rare homemaker moods. So amongst things I made a ginger, carrot and sweet potato soup and also put on some whisky and ginger schnapps. For those of you with Scottish sensibilities the whiskey was firstly a blend and secondly Irish which just happened to be the cheapest blend in Waitrose at the time. I think I am rather pleased with this as it will mean that the schnapps will probably be smoother than it would have been otherwise. I also rang the doctors surgery opposite Herringthorpe URC to make an appointment with the manager as part of Herringthorpe URC needs assessment. Unfortunately having psyched myself up I rang just as he was leaving and did not get through but when I rang fifteen minutes later he had left. So I will have to ring on Monday.
Yesterday my parents came over. We ate the some of the soup with coconut cream in it. I sent them home with two boxes with the base in it as there was not space in my freezer. Dad brought over their new router from Zen. He wanted to know how to set it up. I hope it is largely setup and they can just set up things from the box and it will work. Slightly concerned that the routers wireless name begins with Thompson, I hope they have sent them the right one and there isn’t a Thompson household with a router that starts with Russell. On the other hand Mum spotted I was reading Pioneering the Third Age by Rob Merchant which I am not finding very satisfactory. She wanted to borrow it, however I managed to persuade her to take Valuing Age: Pastoral Ministry with Older People by James Woodward and Wesley Carr which I suspect and I think she does will be more in line with her interests. As I said to her it was not important that she remembers what is in there as she is not anymore active in the pastoral care of her congregation but if she wants to think through this as an older person it is one place to start. What I am trying to do is find ways of characterising the discourses around older people within congregations. This is somewhat harder than for children as often the older people are creating the discourses themselves.
As per usual we went shopping in town. Mum wanted a ball of wool as she thought she would run out with the jersey she is knitting herself, while their coffee grinder had stopped working. So we went to John Lewis’ that sell both of these items. Dad uses the coffee grinder most days, so it was well worth replacing. Dad in the end bought a burr coffee grinder, partly because the blade one was only a pound cheaper and a Bodum one. It was expensive as it had a chrome body, but what put me right off it, was its grind button was exactly the same design as the one on my grinder and my experience is that I have to be very careful I clean that properly or the grinder stops working. It is a fiddly bit of plastic and awkward to clean. I think the one he got will be stronger and therefore likely to last longer.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
including a Liturgical conference
Checking back over my twitter feed I see that the parentii were watching “Last of the Summer Wine” last week. I suspect it is on this week as well so they will not be ringing me until 8p.m. so this may well be written before they ring despite my late start.
Last Monday I heard that I did indeed get the concession, so I only have to pay half fees this year again. Yes! The day actually filled pretty quickly, partly as it was my only day in work this week and partly because my brain clicked into write mode with the Butyrate project and I wrote up most of what I needed to do. Also that evening my mind also sorted out what slides I needed to have for the conference. So a good day. I did not shop as I was away the rest of the week so the evening was free to think on the paper.
Leaving at 11:00 a.m. is civilised as it gives you plenty of time to pack. Unfortunately Kirkgate Station Wakefield is not civilised. The standard method of finding what platform your train leaves from is to ask the guard on the next train to come in. Seriously for those who have the choice of changing trains at Kirkgate or Westgate in Wakefield go to Westgate. Kirkgate was not the best of stations in 1977 and it has gone down hill from there. Fortunately the only smartly dressed people at kirkgate station were heading for Mirfield.
At the conference I was put into the retreat house. This was a good idea as the retreat house keeps silence from about 9pm to 9am as it is part of the abbey. It also meant more walking, and a continual job of educating the organisers that those in the retreat house needed extra time to get places. Turning up late was common place.
The conference itself was the sort confusing. The people were predominantly from the churches with set liturgies. This of course meant that the main interest in liturgy was critical and historical. I of course came from the sociological perspective but probably more importantly from a free liturgical tradition. That means that what I am used to is talk of what makes for good liturgy over a far wider range of topics. I think the thing that high lighted this for me, was a talk by an Anglican on the Anabaptist daily prayer book where he mentioned that they had poets, musicians and Biblical Scholars right in from the start as well as liturgists and my response was “Of course you do!” I have written two entries on my musings blog. However I have a third concern and that is the taking of Reformed thinkers out of context. A statement by a Congregationalist that for some people the main concern in worship is faithfulness to tradition and for others it is relevance, is not a statement about whether people have a written liturgy or not. You need go no further that Scotland to find excellent counter examples. The Wee Frees are totally about tradition but have no set liturgy, while Iona Community is strong on relevance and is producing liturgy all the time. Actually it gave me a weird sense that I as a lay Reformed person was about twenty years ahead of the conference. The things they were talking about were often part of the assumed structure within the URC. It was not helped by the fact that the one comment on my paper showed that I also outpaced one of the leading members in divinity, and I did not have time there to take her through all the problems I could see with her perspective. She was making logical leaps that were not possible to make from my paper. The assumption the Jesus learnt basically does not necessarily imply an adoptionist Christology. My own stance is that Jesus knew as a human according to his human nature and knew as God according to his Godly nature. (if someone recognises that quote and can tell me where from I would be grateful) Therefore as a human he learnt, because learning can not be easily separated from human development. I suspect that the God-nature was present but as an extreme form of what some introverts experience, where they seem to pick up what is going on for others around them very easily.
The net effect for me of these things was that my brain went into ethnographer mode and that takes me into a state where I overload fairly easily. By the time I came to talk to the conference I had a second paper that was a direct response to the conference germinating. I am still not sure what to do about it. However that made me highly nervous as there seemed to be so much ground that needed covering before my paper could even be read. In the end I just gave it. I tried telling the story but it did not work my brain was too full of the facts of what really happened that these undermined the telling. Anyway the paper is distributed and I will need to re-write to try and interact with the audience. This means taking things back a couple of stages and arguing that everybody does work around worship not just those who right the text. To understand a liturgy therefore you need not only look at what is written but what happens and what people understand to have happened.
Friday I was exhausted, but I also know that a couple of books had come to work, and that I needed to shop. I had ordered the books to arrive before I went to Mirfield so that I could take time out from the conference theme. One was the Non-designers design Book by Robin Williams which is very readable and I think worth reading. I got it as I was doing layout of the next collection of work for my writers group. Anyway I got into work and there were not two parcels waiting for me but four. One I left in work as it is almost certainly a book I ordered for work through Abebooks and got from Bristol Oxfam! Well it was a fairly obscure Statistical Text.
The actual text for the collection arrived Friday evening. I forget how addictive layout is and it was after midnight before I got to bed. I had just sussed how to get the stuff from Word to Publisher effectively. Although I Office 2007 was a major redesign for Word and Excel, Publisher is still very definitely Office 2003 style, which made it interesting to use. Some fairly obvious shortcuts were simply not implemented and it did not handle overflow well. Neil the teacher for the group had claimed that layout would take a long time. I am pretty sure it does if you approach it the way many people do, which is to take the different texts with all the formatting and try and create a uniform version. I did the opposite. I got rid of 90% of the formatting that was already there, then put in a fresh lot. There are still some fiddles but these are minor compared with working the other way.
Today went to Herringthorpe. It was a double baptism, the last as part of the main morning service. Pauline took the baptisms and then returned to the manse as Alex, her husband, had only come out of hospital on Friday after major surgery and was still far from well. So she wanted to be there to make sure he was alright. Roy Roddison took the rest of the service, and I was doing the reading. I got a couple of compliments on how I did it, which I expected. That is not vanity, I don’t feel that I read exceptionally well, just that I know if I prepare a passage, I will read it so that it is audible and with expression. I know about sound systems, I have been reading in church since I was ten, I have had numerous trainings and I actually focus on communicating what is going on in the passage while reading it rather than “me reading”. I am not sure why this stands out but it does because I regularly get the feed back that it does.
Last Monday I heard that I did indeed get the concession, so I only have to pay half fees this year again. Yes! The day actually filled pretty quickly, partly as it was my only day in work this week and partly because my brain clicked into write mode with the Butyrate project and I wrote up most of what I needed to do. Also that evening my mind also sorted out what slides I needed to have for the conference. So a good day. I did not shop as I was away the rest of the week so the evening was free to think on the paper.
Leaving at 11:00 a.m. is civilised as it gives you plenty of time to pack. Unfortunately Kirkgate Station Wakefield is not civilised. The standard method of finding what platform your train leaves from is to ask the guard on the next train to come in. Seriously for those who have the choice of changing trains at Kirkgate or Westgate in Wakefield go to Westgate. Kirkgate was not the best of stations in 1977 and it has gone down hill from there. Fortunately the only smartly dressed people at kirkgate station were heading for Mirfield.
At the conference I was put into the retreat house. This was a good idea as the retreat house keeps silence from about 9pm to 9am as it is part of the abbey. It also meant more walking, and a continual job of educating the organisers that those in the retreat house needed extra time to get places. Turning up late was common place.
The conference itself was the sort confusing. The people were predominantly from the churches with set liturgies. This of course meant that the main interest in liturgy was critical and historical. I of course came from the sociological perspective but probably more importantly from a free liturgical tradition. That means that what I am used to is talk of what makes for good liturgy over a far wider range of topics. I think the thing that high lighted this for me, was a talk by an Anglican on the Anabaptist daily prayer book where he mentioned that they had poets, musicians and Biblical Scholars right in from the start as well as liturgists and my response was “Of course you do!” I have written two entries on my musings blog. However I have a third concern and that is the taking of Reformed thinkers out of context. A statement by a Congregationalist that for some people the main concern in worship is faithfulness to tradition and for others it is relevance, is not a statement about whether people have a written liturgy or not. You need go no further that Scotland to find excellent counter examples. The Wee Frees are totally about tradition but have no set liturgy, while Iona Community is strong on relevance and is producing liturgy all the time. Actually it gave me a weird sense that I as a lay Reformed person was about twenty years ahead of the conference. The things they were talking about were often part of the assumed structure within the URC. It was not helped by the fact that the one comment on my paper showed that I also outpaced one of the leading members in divinity, and I did not have time there to take her through all the problems I could see with her perspective. She was making logical leaps that were not possible to make from my paper. The assumption the Jesus learnt basically does not necessarily imply an adoptionist Christology. My own stance is that Jesus knew as a human according to his human nature and knew as God according to his Godly nature. (if someone recognises that quote and can tell me where from I would be grateful) Therefore as a human he learnt, because learning can not be easily separated from human development. I suspect that the God-nature was present but as an extreme form of what some introverts experience, where they seem to pick up what is going on for others around them very easily.
The net effect for me of these things was that my brain went into ethnographer mode and that takes me into a state where I overload fairly easily. By the time I came to talk to the conference I had a second paper that was a direct response to the conference germinating. I am still not sure what to do about it. However that made me highly nervous as there seemed to be so much ground that needed covering before my paper could even be read. In the end I just gave it. I tried telling the story but it did not work my brain was too full of the facts of what really happened that these undermined the telling. Anyway the paper is distributed and I will need to re-write to try and interact with the audience. This means taking things back a couple of stages and arguing that everybody does work around worship not just those who right the text. To understand a liturgy therefore you need not only look at what is written but what happens and what people understand to have happened.
Friday I was exhausted, but I also know that a couple of books had come to work, and that I needed to shop. I had ordered the books to arrive before I went to Mirfield so that I could take time out from the conference theme. One was the Non-designers design Book by Robin Williams which is very readable and I think worth reading. I got it as I was doing layout of the next collection of work for my writers group. Anyway I got into work and there were not two parcels waiting for me but four. One I left in work as it is almost certainly a book I ordered for work through Abebooks and got from Bristol Oxfam! Well it was a fairly obscure Statistical Text.
The actual text for the collection arrived Friday evening. I forget how addictive layout is and it was after midnight before I got to bed. I had just sussed how to get the stuff from Word to Publisher effectively. Although I Office 2007 was a major redesign for Word and Excel, Publisher is still very definitely Office 2003 style, which made it interesting to use. Some fairly obvious shortcuts were simply not implemented and it did not handle overflow well. Neil the teacher for the group had claimed that layout would take a long time. I am pretty sure it does if you approach it the way many people do, which is to take the different texts with all the formatting and try and create a uniform version. I did the opposite. I got rid of 90% of the formatting that was already there, then put in a fresh lot. There are still some fiddles but these are minor compared with working the other way.
Today went to Herringthorpe. It was a double baptism, the last as part of the main morning service. Pauline took the baptisms and then returned to the manse as Alex, her husband, had only come out of hospital on Friday after major surgery and was still far from well. So she wanted to be there to make sure he was alright. Roy Roddison took the rest of the service, and I was doing the reading. I got a couple of compliments on how I did it, which I expected. That is not vanity, I don’t feel that I read exceptionally well, just that I know if I prepare a passage, I will read it so that it is audible and with expression. I know about sound systems, I have been reading in church since I was ten, I have had numerous trainings and I actually focus on communicating what is going on in the passage while reading it rather than “me reading”. I am not sure why this stands out but it does because I regularly get the feed back that it does.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
An Adminny sort of week
Last Sunday while recovering from the migraine, I had a sudden yen to make bread. I think the desire was to do the kneading rather than actually for the smell. As I am aware I occasionally get this sort of yet of desire to make bread I tend to have a couple of ready mixed ingredients in. I am beginning to think that the reason my loaves never rise as much as I desire is that with hand kneading I tend to keep the dough just too dry. Anyway I enjoyed the loaf that I made and I still have a couple of packets more to use when I want to, although I must admit the fact that they are Tescos Wholemeal rather than something more interesting does mean I am less likely to get the yen. A few years back when I had either more energy or time I used to make a fresh loaf each Sunday, and then it was worth having the dry ingredients but these days I rarely have that sort of opportunity.
Monday it was into work as usual, on the morning saw Margo with the brighter of her two student who knows what he is doing. It is just so completely different dealing with a student who is basically competent to one who is struggling. I outline roughly what he needed to do, he does it and then produces a good summary for us to review. The other student despite far more intensive support and an easier project is still struggling. I am not sure this happens but I normally know whether a person is struggling or really capable by the end of a first session. Some totally capable people are full of self doubts and just need to see me so I can say “yes you are doing fine”.
Also this last week I found the formula for Fiellers method for calculating the confidence interval of a proportion when the terms are individually normally distributed and the coefficient of variance of the denominator tends to infinity (basically an infinitesimal probability that it could be X). The data is not normally distributed but most of the studies assumed it was. I also hope I have a book with the formulae for the moment expansion method. The conclusion I am coming to is that Fieller’s method is actually better.
Wednesday I took as holiday, going to see Fleur about something that was bothering me. One of the interesting things is the assumption that because I get involved I am losing my critical distance. The fact is that although I am willing to work and chat and spend time there, I do always see this as a placement church. They have no pastoral responsibility for me, I will not vote during church meeting and I will never have myself included as a member. I am not without pastoral care, I made darn sure of that, according to what the need is I will either go to my counsellor, my minister, my elder, Fleur who is a long term confidant or my support group. It is not the placement churches role to help me sort myself out. Actually one of my reasons for having a counsellor is somewhere that I can unpack what I am feeling about the church and what I think the church is feeling about me. Sometimes I have to work harder at unpacking what other people are thinking because my past experience gets projected into the present. Fleur seemed to be in good sorts and sent me back with a German magazine for my father and was getting ready to do simultaneous translation for a group talking about spirituality of refugees and immigration in Europe I think.
Thursday I was in work but my concentration was shot, I eventually came home at 4:30 pm because I could not cope with pretending to stare at the computer screen for much longer and went to bed and slept for a couple of hours. During that time it tippled with rain. So often the inability to concentrate seems to happen in the build up to a rain storm!
Friday was a day I did a lot of admin for PhD including signing up for next year. It said that if I was eligible for 50% off I would get a tick box but no tick box appeared. As I have received it in previous years I decided to query this, especially as the description had not changed. I suspect that it quite possible that they had forgotten that my course is technically hefce covered. There is just almost nobody from the funding councils doing it. At least that is what I am hoping. Hopefully I will find out Monday.
Saturday I was out of sorts again, although I managed to buy some clothes for next week as I decided I wanted to be comfortable and fairly smart at the conferences and the clothes I had were either comfortable or smart. If I am happy with these for next week I will try buying a couple more silky stripped shirts and try wearing that during warmer weather into the office in an attempt to smarten up slightly. Work is always a problem as I have to be able to adapt pretty quickly to different situations. I need to satisfy both comfort and smartness, plus I carry a lot in my pockets. I am fortunately not a regular attender at meetings. Winter is mainly sorted with a turtle neck and trousers although I know I should wear something smarter than sweatshirts but they are warm and comfy (actually I have toning fleeces that I wear a lot). Summer however with wanting long sleeve tops, I find that most of the t-shirts have really deep neck lines which I am not really comfortable with in work. Hence my trying out of blouses. I just hope these don’t need ironing and tumble drying them will do.
So to today, and a normal day really. Got to Herringthorpe, congregation was missing mostly the families there being only about two there. There were two older lads but I had no idea where their parents were. The Sunday school was therefor sized at 6. Three of whom were cousins. Normally there are over twenty children that go out although even they are worrying over the Sunday School as they had not got any younger children coming through. I suspect it will need something stronger than a recruitment drive. Actually one of the interesting things about Herringthorpe is that the congregation is prepared to talk of things as a marketing campaign.
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