This has been a relatively quiet week. Monday I can’t remember anything in particular happening. I know I was in work and spent quite a bit of time sorting out the room for a course I am going to teach next week, I also started the process of updating the booklet for the course, and dealt with a number of other little bits and pieces. I went shopping at Waitrose and they have back in Twinnings Jasmine Earl Grey which is delicious black. The other thing is they have Saffron Cakes in. Now Marks and Sparks definitely take the cup for best Hot Cross Buns with their Cranberry and orange ones. Alright way way back in the mists of time Safeway and then Waitrose did an apricot version that was even nicer but I have not seen that for years. However saffron cakes are delicious too and well worth buying. They are slightly cakier than Hot Cross Buns but not much and they have a yellow colour to them.
Tuesday was an interview day. I suspect people think an interview takes just two hours, well you need to add that: the preparation time (about an hour), the travelling (usually over an hour) the writing up, two to three hours and the basic management. What looks like 2 hours work is at least seven hours work. It of course would help if I could just sit down and write it up, but my brain does not work like that. Then I am leading evening worship this evening and I wanted to do some preparation for that. By the time I was finished I had got Tuesday and Wednesday pretty full with just doing one interview and other bits and pieces. I also decided I needed to get the backup sorted for my computers and therefore ordered a 1TB network drive. This stores an incremental back up of my main machine and does a regular back up of my laptop once a week. The reason for the different approaches is that my laptop travels while my main machine doesn’t.
Thursday I was back in work, you may remember that during the summer I was doing some work on fibre, well teaching has slowed the work down as well as other research projects but this week it came up again. I spent two hours with another academic trying to finalise the paper. I expect it will take at least another hour on Monday and probably more. Its there but not quite and the not quite is about getting the detail right. I also was sorting out other bits and pieces.
Friday equally was a busy day, I basically needed to get the course notes up to date and in working form. I went to collect a prescription from the chemist, only it was still muddled and they had only the stuff I had not taken two months ago. The resulted in me getting an emergency prescription and them having to sort it out next week. I did not tell them that actually I could manage, simply because I have some extra left over from when I was cutting back on the prescription. However as I sometimes up my dose (with doctors permission) I like to keep that in reserve. In other words I am slowly using that supply up. The backup drive had come and I tried to set it up but about 8:00 p.m. it decided to disappear off the network. Sort of got it up again, but wasn’t really successful.
Saturday and still no luck with the drive, or none before I needed to get out to go to a Stationers to do some photocopying for me before going to a talk as part of the poetry festival.So I left it and headed out. What should have been a simple task at the stationers took longer than expected, and I ended up running down the hill to the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, which is in the Furnival Building on Sheffield Hallam University’s central campus. There was a talk on the friendship between Robert Frost and Edward Thomas in the early months of the First World War. Robert Frost was in England trying to get his poetry published and Edward Thomas was a literary critic at the time. Thomas seemed to grasp Frost’s intention as a poet as well as anyone at the time, and this formed the basis of their friendship. The central bit is actually about Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” which seems to have been based on shared experiences in Gloucestershire and also seems to have been key to Thomas’ decision to enlist. I am used to the more ironic reading of that poem, may even have got half way there myself, but I had always thought the woods American and to find them British is a surprise. I then went with other members of my writers group who were also at the lecture to the Fusion Cafe which had a delicious Moroccan lamb pasty and salad. There was plenty of vegetarian food (maybe the majority) but it all seemed to have cheese in it. I certainly think it is worth another visit. I then went onto town to shop for food and found Practical Photography magazine in WH Smiths. I also got some nice shower gel as a treat. Then walked up home. As I got to West Street I could hear this drum beat and as I got by Zizzi’s it became louder so I stopped and a group of Morrismen came walking through.
When I got home I found the backup drive seemed to have fixed itself!!! I have never really known that happen before! Modern computers are getting simpler to use. There would have been a time when I would have had to set up the network to look for the drive and so on. This time not only did it install straight forwardly but when something appeared to have gone wrong it actually sorted it out. I suspect an update of firmware happening at an inopportune moment for me. Stuart came around in the evening to discuss the week with me and brought another bottle of Ame. He is quite surprised at how much he is saving now that he is not drinking. Then later when Stuart had gone home I heard the blast of a car horns and a car came past waving the Indian flag, slightly later there was a another drum and this time another group of Indian cricket fans came marching past.
Today I have been to Herringthorpe twice. This morning was communion but Pauline I think was making a point, we had a wide variety of new hymns from no less than four hymnbooks: Songs of Fellowship, BBC, Mission Praise and Rejoice and Sing. None of them were repetitive a complaint against the songs chosen last week. That did not mean we were familiar with all of them, well I was but not many of the others. This evening I was leading, now leading for evening worship is not the same as taking a service. What it meant I did was that I chose a song or hymn and prepared to lead the discussion and keep and eye on the time. Well I started something the last time because I brought chocolates, we now don’t meet without food. This time I was not the provider but Dorothy brought a meringue with thick creamy filling and an orange (marmalade) flavoured source. I had taken my lactase tablets and I think I got away with eating a slice. Oh choosing the hymn was interesting. The theme was basically taken from Matthew 6: 1-24, but was called secrecy so emphasising verse 4. Hymns on that theme are few and far between. I found one eventually which was to a well known tune Ashgate.
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