Monday was a relatively quiet day, writers group in the evening. It felt wrong to be coming into a quiet building because no jugglers were meeting. There were three things on the go with the group. One was the actual class, another is the preparation for the observation and the third is preparing the book for publication. I have said I will do the layout. a bit of cheating and some knowledge of Microsoft office should not make it too arduous. Margaret one of the group is just finishing a novel which in my opinion is by far the best writing in the group. Her biggest challenge is to get it sent off to an agent over the summer rather than decide on yet another re-write. I am pretty sure there will be agents willing to take it. In fact I suspect all the group want to buy a copy already and will be really disappointed if it isn't published. We are discovering more and more twist and turns to the story each week and we would love to know how they all fit together.
Tuesday was an NVivo day as there was a query about why a certain files would not open in it. I eventually discovered that it was to do with memory management but my own machine is playing up. I am not quite sure what with at the moment but it managed to corrupt at least one programme while I was sorting it. That is a file went missing for some reason, I suspect the computer tried to overwrite it but did not do it properly. After work I got my haircut. My hairdresser agreed it had gone wild. Will people with curly hair who think this does not happen to people with straight hair please take note. Then on the evening I went to Herringthorp for Bible Study. Whereas St Andrews Sheffield seems to go for husbands always sitting with wives, Herringthorpe goes for men on one table and women at another. I also am realising my understanding of prophecy is significantly different to what some people at the church would hold. I am not sure that you tell true prophets by the fact their prophecy comes true, or that a person who is a prophet only is so occasionally. It seems to me that while coming true is a criteria it is only useful for short term prophecies, secondly that if I wanted to fool someone creating a short term prophecy that came true is fairly easy. The question that is more important is does this fit with God as we understand God to be. Hmm something to think about there.
Wednesday was a relatively quiet day. At work I went and sat down with the reviews of a papers that had been rejected and tried to work out why. The first thing that was clear was that we were not sending it to the wrong journal. Rather it seems that the problem was that because we were sending it to a journal that is outside the normal range where this research group sends papers, we had not made enough adjustment to house style. Specifically we had not actually read around the literature enough and we had also not been clear enough in our explanation of what was being done. It was very clear that the reviewers were making mistakes due to not understanding what was happening. In the evening I did a Waitrose shop. As a treat I bought a packet of Gingerbons which are delicious ginger flavoured gums. The company obviously knows how tempting they are because they are individually wrapped in wrappers that take some opening. I gave up trying to open them with my bare hands and used scissors instead.
Thursday morning was relatively quiet as far as I can recall, I wrote my findings on the paper to the main author. Then it was off to TFR at Church House in Rotherham. TFR is an organisation funded by the Anglican and Methodist Churches to enable involvement by the Faith sector in regeneration. Herringthorpe found them and managed to persuade them to provide an advisor while it goest through the process of analysing needs in the local community. This started out under the Buildings Group when they were thinking of going for public funding. I suspect that the advisor thought he was dealing with people who were doing this sort of thing for the first time. In actual fact he was dealing with me and Sue Ball who was a health visitor, did her masters at some stage and is now part of the management at the local health authority. So neither of us were exactly beginners. It showed, we came with a research proposal and were able to answer the questions he threw at us. The effect of asking directly about funding for the second part of the project was for Mark to have fourteen possible sources for such funding according to what we decide is necessary. Now we need to take the proposal back to the NAG meeting next Wednesday.
Friday I had a late start, the effect of the previous afternoon was that I was fairly tired and certainly was more than ready to go back to bed after going to the Broomhall Breakfast. I also needed to start putting together the slide show for the NAG meeting and I needed to write up last Sundays worship as I had not found time earlier in the week. Oh and I did type faces for the writers group publication. I have I think put out a mix, Two serif, two san serif and one modern. For those who think modern is going to be something like comic sans, forget it, its a halfway house between serif and san serif. Oh and none of these were fancy fonts.
Saturday I went shopping in the morning, I was up pretty promptly and in Jones Shoe shop before 10:30 a.m. The result of which is that I got a pair of semi smart sandals with low heals. There is very little with low heels this season and I was wondering whether I would have to buy a summer shoe instead. However I found a pair which have the straps interweaving a bit like celtic knotwork designs. They are pretty comfortable and look summery. I also shopped for the stuff for the brainsorming session I am hoping to run for the youth group on Thursday. I am hoping there are not more than ten of them at the group or I am going to have problems with the equipment. Came home and finished off the Presentation for the NAG meeting on Wednesday. One of the issues we have to get the rest of the group to understand is that there is no way Sue and I can do the first part of the research on our own. I am thinking that as it is a group of about 8 people and we want to do about twelve interviews, doing one or two each would be fair. We are giving people three open ended questions to ask. Actually there are two reasons for this which have nothing to do with Sue's or my time: firstly I want people to get a feel for what other people are saying and talking to them is the best way to do that; secondly I want people to build relationships with people outside the church who are involved in working with the community. However I also want them to see what is reasonable and what isn't.
Today I did not go to church. With three evenings at Herringthorpe this week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday plus how tired I was last night and I still needed to write up Tuesday's Bible study. It just felt as if I would be better in this morning. I just felt off colour, nothing that a couple of extra hours in bed did not put right. So I got up wrote up Tuesday's bible study and then went and had a shower. It is really good to have a shower in the middle of the day with the warm temperatures that are around. I have since had lunch, created a front cover for the writers group book and written this.
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