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.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
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.
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