Monday was quiet, very quiet in many ways. I spent some time trying to see what I could do with nxview and raw photographs but in the end downloaded an add on to GIMP called UFRAW as the version of NXView that came with my camera seems to be a cut down version and much more about organising slides than converting raw files. The UFRAW seems to give everything the full NXView does and more. You can see some I did on flickr . Otherwise a quiet day.
Tuesday was a supervision day so it was off to Birmingham in the morning. The train was smooth, on the evening I caught the 5:00 p.m. train out of Birmingham New Street. I have learnt that it is a good one to catch. The office workers aren't out yet and the conference people aim for the 4:30 p.m.. There are major works in the quad a Birmingham as they are fixing a service tunnel and the weather was unpredictable, there were showers so I ended up having lunch in the common room. It is exam time and that means fewer students around but not as few as vacation time, so I managed to get a computer to check emails before seeing my supervisor. The supervision went well and I am on track. I need to get down to transcription. Now all I need is the discipline to sit down and do that little by little.
Wednesday I woke rough but not much the worse for wear so went into work slightly late. At lunch time only Cliff and I ended up at prayer meeting so ended up talking with him. I passed Janet Brown's card onto him as she was having difficulties with getting her computer online. Cliff sorted it on thursday but warned that the computer was very near the end of its life. Cliff is if anything conservative in what he condemns. Otherwise a quiet day, I shopped on the evening, partly as Tuesday I was in Birmingham but Waitrose also seem to have Tuesday like the old fashioned Monday and lots of things are out of stock by Tuesday evening. Wednesday evening I can nearly always get what I want. I also hit on the brainwave as my dishwasher was not draining properly, of putting in some drain unblock, leaving it a while then running a wash through to see if that would clear it. I don't know if it did clear it, because someway through the first wash the dishwasher blew the fuse circuit it was on. I reset the circuit and fitted a new fuse but on plugging it in the fuse blew again. I decided this probably meant that it had given up the ghost. If it was just the electrics that had gone it might have been worth getting an engineer but it wasn't draining properly and it was leaking and I had been nursing it along for a couple of years. The only place locally that stocks such dishwashers (they are the compact sort and really quite rare) that I am aware of is John Lewis. So I went onto their website and found that they only have one in. So that was the decision made for me. However it took me a hour to get the order through. The new one is 75% more expensive than the old one was, but it has major advantages too (like the inside is metal and not plastic so less likely to crack and leak). I doubt it is as simple as my old one which was very basic.
Thursday afternoon was the interview with David and Tricia the minister and wife and my placement congregation. However my brain had been working over night and I realised that un fitting the dishwasher was not something I really felt up to doing. So I emailed Ted and asked if he would do it for me. I also had to go into work to print out the paper work for the interview. There were several noticeable things about the interview with David and Tricia. That they did not mention that it was an elderly congregation, that they were worried about the level of socialising (too low, in a congregation I can barely keep up with the social events). They worried about people class difference being barriers in a congregation that values people for "being able to do X for anyone". X varies from "talk to" "do anything" "can ask anything of" but being open to all is also important. I gave probably about an hour back, about what I had found out. David was incredulous that I could find so much out in such a short time which had taken them about ten years. David wanted me to write a Grove book on how to hear a congregation. I won't do that until I have finished but I guess I might refer him to "Studying Local Churches" and suggest he dips into chapters as they take his interest. I think he was surprise that I affirmed his impression that there real was no community around the church. Yes it is in the middle of suburban housing but it is actually on the join of several housing estates and these face different directions so all of them have their back on the church.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday have been dominated by a migraine, largely my fault for not giving into it on Friday or Saturday (I got myself up for a doctors appointment on Friday plus Ted came around to unfit the dishwasher and to do a short shop on Saturday which just seemed to be more than my body was ready to take). Hopefully it will clear overnight and I will be ready for work tomorrow.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
the Lows and highs of a fairly quiet fortnight
If I recall rightly the last letter was just after Zachary's baptism. I threw a migraine on the Monday, which sounds like bad news but having done almost a fortnight without one and then only getting one for a day, I was actually pretty pleased. It is not ideal but it is lots better than one a week often lasting more than one day which is what it was at its worst. However it meant I missed writers and I had actually done the home work. In fact the previous writers had also clashed with migraine (the bank holiday meaning that there was a fortnight between). Now all I need to do is write something for this weeks homework.
I think the rest of the week was uneventful on the whole. I was doing a piece of semi-qualitative analysis at work and found it absorbing and draining with the level of concentration required. I could only do a couple of hours at a time and then I was drained. Wednesday Cliff and I spent about half an hour playing with the sound system. We managed to turn the organ on and we could recreate the feedback. Then Cliff switched the organ off and the feedback disappeared much to his surprise. The question therefore was how was the feedback being created. In the end we traced it to the fact that the organ and its speaker were both earthed which meant that an electrical loop was being created and this was then picking up the signal from the audio loop and transmitting that out of its speaker which is behind the pipes of the old organ and therefore behind the microphones. Hence we were getting feedback. Arrgh, three bits of kit working together to produce problems.
The weekend was a writing weekend but with a lot of other bits and pieces going on as well. Friday I had thought we had Greek in the morning as did Sarah. It turned out that Ted had either not registered the time or we had not picked up his apologies. However as Sarah was around, she decided to stay for coffee. I think we both felt it was time we did a catch up. In some ways it is quite different being a participant-observer in a congregation to being a member. There are boundaries which I have had to keep. I cannot expect the congregation to provide pastoral care for me, but that means I need to keep in with the system at my home church. I am fortunate in having a minister who understands what participant observation entails and elders who have gone out of their way to sustain the contact. Late afternoon I saw the cranial osteopath and then I deliberately took the evening off and baked a ginger cake.
Saturday I had a Tescos delivery and I imagine something else but I cannot quite fathom what and there is nothing in my diary but Sunday I felt I really had to get over to Chesterfield as it was a month since I had been at a service. I decided that I preferred to go to the evening service. The thing that I found remarkable is that I had both the essays written before I went to the service on Sunday. I had Monday morning booked off but I had to be in work on Monday afternoon. As there were two essays I sent one to Ruth and one to James and both were promptly returned. James doing his after being released from hospital on Tuesday morning. The thing was that writing for a change came easily and was not a struggle. This is unusual, I normally require over two clear days and I only got one and two bits of other days. Moreover I wrote quite a bit on the Friday, I just wrote it, but on my first day writing I rarely do anything good, yet this time when I had very little available time I did. I don't know what makes that the case.
Actually one of my meetings on Monday was cancelled but I still got to a meeting which was about me putting things up on the web. Then got complements on what I wrote for writing group on the evening. One person called me brave, I suppose if the people I had written about had been me then that would have been brave, but they weren't me, just imagined other me-s, if you get me. They both revealed and hid bits of me. I wasn't them but I did not state how I wasn't them.
Tuesday was just a work day, nothing particularly interesting going on and anyway I was tired so not up to creating things to happen. I did shop but really shopping on a tuesday is a bad idea, Waitrose always seem to restock on a Wednesday. However Wednesday was housegroup. I end up arguing with someone who said he had a "full" understanding of eucharist, if he had used the word "sufficient" which I think is what he meant I wouldn't have argued but a full understanding of eucharist is a lot to ask. The more time I spend listening to people talk about eucharist the more I am persuaded we are talking partial models and the big problem is when we think our models give us more than a partial understanding. Of course we would need to tease out what sufficient is, but that is not the work of a housegroup. I took Wednesday off work as I was tired.
Thursday was another quiet day although I finally got the book of photos I'd ordered from my holiday. Let me do some explaining. I spottend that Photobox, the firm I often use for prints, now will make up books from photographs. I thought rather than forget to put them into an album I would just order them straight as a book so ordered the smallest number of pages A4 book they do. It was posted the Wednesday before last and should have arrived on the Thursday. However the packaging meant it would not go through my letterbox. So the postman took it back to the depot but only put the card through on the Friday. So on the Saturday I asked them to be delivered to my work address by the internet on the following Tuesday. They did not manage to but delivered it last wednesday to the wrong address but the person receiving it recognised my name (we are actually in the same department). So left a phone message on my voice mail in work. I then rang her on Thursday and she brought it over, the address if only next door to the actual building.
Friday was also quiet though I got to have a good talk with Jean Dickson at the breakfast. She'd only got to bed at 2:00 a.m. and because she had the bananas for the Broomhall breakfast and could not bear to have to throw some away she came down for the 8:00 a.m. start. She was just going then to do a shop at Waitrose having not got one done the day before. There were plenty of staff at the breakfast. Then on the evening I had a evening off and got to bed by 8:30 p.m.. I was shattered even if Jean could manage on less than six hours sleep. Actually I hope she got a nap later on in the day.
Saturday was a shock to the system. A day with nothing planned. So I got up, shopped for a bit, came home got myself lunch, did some painting as I had an idea for a piece that I wanted to do, spent some time on the internet and then went for a walk with my camera, and end up by preparing a reading for today. A busy day but no "have to"s in it. Well if you except the reading.
Today I had my parents over as Dad was preaching at St Andrews Sheffield. Dad turned up just after 10 a.m. so as to be at church by 10:30 a.m.. So I gave him and mum a Green tea and finished my breakfast. Then we walked up to church. Dad is walking so slowly that I was not prepared to try and cross Upper Hanover Street without a pedestrian crossing even if the traffic had major redirecting as they were retarring by the tramstop. The sound system worked perfectly this week. I am not sure why as there are two options, one I deliberately put the lectern at 45 degree angle to the front of the church. This means the microphone is not pointing at the Organ speaker, or Douglas put the wires around the other side of the organ. I know that turning the lectern helps but does not cure and so it may well have been moving the wires. On the other hand as Derek pointed out it was a very simple service to mike. I also briefly demonstrated how to use the battery tester and how to use the lolly pop microphone.
James and Jean Dickson had invited my parents and I to join them for a meal at Antibos. As James was still in hospital at the time (yes he managed to be admitted twice in one week), Jean asked Derek along. Antibos is an Italian restaurant in West One and reliably does good food. The meal was pleasant and although there was background music it was not intrusive. While we were at the meal, Jean got a phone call from James saying he was now home having been discharged (Graham their son had collected him from the hospital). Dad thoroughly enjoyed going there after the service. I hope they are as good in a fortnights time when we go there to celebrate Dad's 50th anniversary of ordination. Mum and Dad stayed onto about six then drove home getting in well before dark.
I think the rest of the week was uneventful on the whole. I was doing a piece of semi-qualitative analysis at work and found it absorbing and draining with the level of concentration required. I could only do a couple of hours at a time and then I was drained. Wednesday Cliff and I spent about half an hour playing with the sound system. We managed to turn the organ on and we could recreate the feedback. Then Cliff switched the organ off and the feedback disappeared much to his surprise. The question therefore was how was the feedback being created. In the end we traced it to the fact that the organ and its speaker were both earthed which meant that an electrical loop was being created and this was then picking up the signal from the audio loop and transmitting that out of its speaker which is behind the pipes of the old organ and therefore behind the microphones. Hence we were getting feedback. Arrgh, three bits of kit working together to produce problems.
The weekend was a writing weekend but with a lot of other bits and pieces going on as well. Friday I had thought we had Greek in the morning as did Sarah. It turned out that Ted had either not registered the time or we had not picked up his apologies. However as Sarah was around, she decided to stay for coffee. I think we both felt it was time we did a catch up. In some ways it is quite different being a participant-observer in a congregation to being a member. There are boundaries which I have had to keep. I cannot expect the congregation to provide pastoral care for me, but that means I need to keep in with the system at my home church. I am fortunate in having a minister who understands what participant observation entails and elders who have gone out of their way to sustain the contact. Late afternoon I saw the cranial osteopath and then I deliberately took the evening off and baked a ginger cake.
Saturday I had a Tescos delivery and I imagine something else but I cannot quite fathom what and there is nothing in my diary but Sunday I felt I really had to get over to Chesterfield as it was a month since I had been at a service. I decided that I preferred to go to the evening service. The thing that I found remarkable is that I had both the essays written before I went to the service on Sunday. I had Monday morning booked off but I had to be in work on Monday afternoon. As there were two essays I sent one to Ruth and one to James and both were promptly returned. James doing his after being released from hospital on Tuesday morning. The thing was that writing for a change came easily and was not a struggle. This is unusual, I normally require over two clear days and I only got one and two bits of other days. Moreover I wrote quite a bit on the Friday, I just wrote it, but on my first day writing I rarely do anything good, yet this time when I had very little available time I did. I don't know what makes that the case.
Actually one of my meetings on Monday was cancelled but I still got to a meeting which was about me putting things up on the web. Then got complements on what I wrote for writing group on the evening. One person called me brave, I suppose if the people I had written about had been me then that would have been brave, but they weren't me, just imagined other me-s, if you get me. They both revealed and hid bits of me. I wasn't them but I did not state how I wasn't them.
Tuesday was just a work day, nothing particularly interesting going on and anyway I was tired so not up to creating things to happen. I did shop but really shopping on a tuesday is a bad idea, Waitrose always seem to restock on a Wednesday. However Wednesday was housegroup. I end up arguing with someone who said he had a "full" understanding of eucharist, if he had used the word "sufficient" which I think is what he meant I wouldn't have argued but a full understanding of eucharist is a lot to ask. The more time I spend listening to people talk about eucharist the more I am persuaded we are talking partial models and the big problem is when we think our models give us more than a partial understanding. Of course we would need to tease out what sufficient is, but that is not the work of a housegroup. I took Wednesday off work as I was tired.
Thursday was another quiet day although I finally got the book of photos I'd ordered from my holiday. Let me do some explaining. I spottend that Photobox, the firm I often use for prints, now will make up books from photographs. I thought rather than forget to put them into an album I would just order them straight as a book so ordered the smallest number of pages A4 book they do. It was posted the Wednesday before last and should have arrived on the Thursday. However the packaging meant it would not go through my letterbox. So the postman took it back to the depot but only put the card through on the Friday. So on the Saturday I asked them to be delivered to my work address by the internet on the following Tuesday. They did not manage to but delivered it last wednesday to the wrong address but the person receiving it recognised my name (we are actually in the same department). So left a phone message on my voice mail in work. I then rang her on Thursday and she brought it over, the address if only next door to the actual building.
Friday was also quiet though I got to have a good talk with Jean Dickson at the breakfast. She'd only got to bed at 2:00 a.m. and because she had the bananas for the Broomhall breakfast and could not bear to have to throw some away she came down for the 8:00 a.m. start. She was just going then to do a shop at Waitrose having not got one done the day before. There were plenty of staff at the breakfast. Then on the evening I had a evening off and got to bed by 8:30 p.m.. I was shattered even if Jean could manage on less than six hours sleep. Actually I hope she got a nap later on in the day.
Saturday was a shock to the system. A day with nothing planned. So I got up, shopped for a bit, came home got myself lunch, did some painting as I had an idea for a piece that I wanted to do, spent some time on the internet and then went for a walk with my camera, and end up by preparing a reading for today. A busy day but no "have to"s in it. Well if you except the reading.
Today I had my parents over as Dad was preaching at St Andrews Sheffield. Dad turned up just after 10 a.m. so as to be at church by 10:30 a.m.. So I gave him and mum a Green tea and finished my breakfast. Then we walked up to church. Dad is walking so slowly that I was not prepared to try and cross Upper Hanover Street without a pedestrian crossing even if the traffic had major redirecting as they were retarring by the tramstop. The sound system worked perfectly this week. I am not sure why as there are two options, one I deliberately put the lectern at 45 degree angle to the front of the church. This means the microphone is not pointing at the Organ speaker, or Douglas put the wires around the other side of the organ. I know that turning the lectern helps but does not cure and so it may well have been moving the wires. On the other hand as Derek pointed out it was a very simple service to mike. I also briefly demonstrated how to use the battery tester and how to use the lolly pop microphone.
James and Jean Dickson had invited my parents and I to join them for a meal at Antibos. As James was still in hospital at the time (yes he managed to be admitted twice in one week), Jean asked Derek along. Antibos is an Italian restaurant in West One and reliably does good food. The meal was pleasant and although there was background music it was not intrusive. While we were at the meal, Jean got a phone call from James saying he was now home having been discharged (Graham their son had collected him from the hospital). Dad thoroughly enjoyed going there after the service. I hope they are as good in a fortnights time when we go there to celebrate Dad's 50th anniversary of ordination. Mum and Dad stayed onto about six then drove home getting in well before dark.
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