Around the time of year of my annual review

I don’t think this will be long. The week has been pretty mundane with slightly more excitement over the weekend. Church meeting went without a hitch, but the comment of the life review people that they felt they had to reassess their opinions every time after coming to St Andrew’s threw Ian slightly. St Andrew’s is St Andrew’s and on Sundays, particular Theo’s baptism they are putting on a performance. They can do, in some-ways it is their default setting but the idea that you are gaining insight into how the church is by attending that Sunday is daft, unless you already know them. The impression is of a highly functional church which is largely content with where it is, maybe too many grey haired members but otherwise not doing too badly. Its true up to a point. They would have gone onto Annual Church meeting and St Andrew’s still functions on “how quick can we get to lunch” mode at such events. Then elders where I suspect they saw some real discussion and finally a church meeting where what must have appeared out of the blue the congregation were reorganising the whole committee structure. Of course it was not out of the blue, it had been around committees and actually there had been a working party busy with it while they were around, but because it was behind the scenes work, nobody was talking about it. They technically do not need to attend more but have indicated at least one Sunday of normal worship (they have not done a communion yet) and we did suggest that they came to the Breakfast which will make them reconsider again. Oh well we are now officially moving from a many committee structure to Elders and Management both reporting to church meeting with a sort of exec to coordinate what comes to Church Meeting. Also some scope on management to co-opt people who are not members of the church for a year. We will see what will happen.

Work has been busy but I was able to work around the mild migraine that came on Tuesday afternoon (helped by the fact I was officially working at home because I had something I rather do at home which had to be done for work). Well lets be honest it was my annual review preparation or SRDS. Its a fairly tedious task where I have to work through the year and decide what I want to achieve next year. Actually the second part is still to do but I will try to make some notes before I see Cliff to look at the sound system tomorrow. Otherwise it has been work as usual.

Friday I went to the Dickson’s for evening meal. We had a pleasant evening an article had been going between me and James and he was being a good editor only he put back things I had removed as corrections before.  Anyway I think I am beginning to get the stage where it is ready to go out, and I have started drafting the next one, we shall see. The next thing to consider is where to go after that. Choice between the Bible and the nature of God, don’t worry I am only trying to get across the uncomfortable otherness of God, not actually try and say “God is like” because “God is like...” always seems to end up in absurdities.

Yesterday went for a meal with Margo, she had a french exchange pupil staying with her and it was the case that my rudimentary French and sometimes she wanted really complex sentences translating like  how do you say “I was telling the dog that as she (dog) already had you stroking her she did not need anyone else to stroke her as well.” Its not the vocabulary particularly I was struggling with but stroke/pet/fondle were not in my vocabulary but the complexity of the sentence structure.  It however is an enjoyable evening. Today has been keeping quiet and catching up with my thesis.

Life around packing up offices

Monday was the date of my annual review for work. I was not expecting major plaudits but there was an acknowledgement that I was doing fine at present. Actually my major grump that I can start saying things must be done weeks in advance and NO ONE listens until its too late and we annoy people by changing things when they are expecting continuity went home. The fact is when we update software we need to do it earlier than when we first install software (or rather we need to do it in a test environment earlier) so that we can tell staff what version will be running the next year before they go on holiday.  So next year I have to work at getting people to do things. Something I am oddly reluctant to do at work, when it comes to PhD I am ready and willing. So I am going to have to look at courses on that sort of theme. I suppose I better hope for a breakthrough like last years when I realised why I was doing something, what was reasonable to suspect me to do and so concentrated on getting myself focused on a restricted number of tasks each day rather than trying to tackle everything. Actually having short lists is great because they give you time to play but you keep on top of things and I can manage a day at a time. In the evening I went to writers group. It was good to be back, although it turns out that Jan, one of the group has what sounds like quite a serious form of cancer.

Tuesday was a busy day with me doing an analysis for Jessops hospital and then talking through it, also I got the new slow cooker I had ordered. I finally decided over the weekend that the present one was:

1. broken- the setting button had come off and no longer allowed me to change the settings
2. I needed a bigger one, when I started I thought I would cook perhaps double meals for myself and put one in the fridge. In actual fact I cook about four meals and put three in the freezer. The old one was not quite big enough for meals for four
3. Had a long difficult clean after over filling it the last time due to number 2

so I ordered a new one. Still to use it but it is about double the size and I am planning to stick with cooking four meals, two reasons: firstly that is what the recipes normally work with, secondly my freezer isn't big enough to take any more. Oh I also arranged to seem my supervisor next Monday on the grounds that although I was moving next week it was unlikely to be Monday.

Wednesday I found out that I was moving on Monday. I have actually twice moved offices when I was away. What I do is pack everything up, label it all, then porters move it across and I unpack afterwards. It means I do not waste a day, nor do I get in the porters/van boys way. So I spent Thursday and Friday packing when in work.  I have labelled everything, I think in the end they will decide I have been neurotic about it, but I wanted to make things as simple as I could. Every last thing has been packed. i can lift every single box although a lot I would not want to walk far with them. Books went into smaller boxes although ring files went into crates. I am going to have to weed out the defunct files once I am in the new office as there are quite a few where I have been waiting for over five years for someone to come back with a PhD questionnaire that they carried out. They are not going to now. The new office is a single office again, but this is short term as the department is  moving big scale oin 6 to 18 months, to the Brunswick Street building (former nurses home). This will mean the pulling out of a lot of staff from a lot of dispersed places.

Friday Evening I went to the Dicksons for supper. It was good to spend time with them again. Amongst topics James brought up was that he had a scan of a photograph of Lorna Trevorrow, but the original photo graph was damaged, could I do anything about it. I was dubious, I can do repairs of some things but I was scared that there might be a complex background or a lot of colour detail, bot of which makes it very hard indeed to manually do repairs. Photoshop CS5 I believe does them automatically but that is way beyond my budget and so I was using GIMP, which means that I have to have to do a lot more of the work myself. However the picture turned out to be a studio portrait of about fifty years ago in black and white. This meant none of my worries were founded. So I said that James could send them to me and I would have a go.

Saturday was an easy day, I really had very little planned for it. I needed to shop in town but wrote a list and largely stuck to it, although I still haven't got the hook. I also went to bed on the afternoon and then wrote up two diary entries for my PhD. Stuart came around to return my church keys. WE spent a time chatting together before he went off to watch the world cup match so that he was up to speed the next day at work.

Today I went to Herringthorpe and spent some time talking to the daughter of one of the regulars. Her mother rebinds the hymn books and such. Actually the rebinding is getting a bit much for her and were I joining the church I would be volunteering to help. Music is a hot topic at Herringthorpe. I saw a music rehearsal for next Sunday's parade service going on at the same time as people were complaining about the use of the electronic keyboard. There is some thinking to be done over this tension as this has a far wider range of hymns than any other congregation I have known. I am guessing that the music is actually a substitute item for the real issue but what is the real issue?