Neglect


I’m trying not to fall out of the habit of blogging but life’s been a little busy. It seems to me that whenever I think I’ve got a bit of spare time, something crops up to fill it, which generally means that the thing that I’ve just put off, thinking that I’ve some extra time, has no time to do. I’m sure there’s a lesson about hay and sunshine that I should have learnt when I was younger but it seems to have passed me by.

About two weeks ago I had 3 Sunday services to prepare (2 mornings, 1 evening) and one of my lectures got cancelled. Great, I thought, there’s the extra time I need to do service prep. And so that’s what happened. (And on a side note, Lanark Greyfriars, where the first Sunday morning service was being done, now make their services available online, mine included – the 14th). So, back to ‘normal’ time available and guess what! One of my pc’s threw a wobbly – Corrupted its main drive and wouldn’t boot, corrupted its partition table (that’s serious) and couldn’t be accessed from the secondary drive (which could boot). Ended up spending all my ‘slack time’ playing with data recovery tools, getting what could be salvaged. In actual fact, it wasn’t too drastic because I also run a small, separate server, so all the main documents and files live on that. The only thing at risk was my wife’s most recent email. Now this was ‘critical’ – she had two emails from Amazon which were gift vouchers for our younger daughter who was 13 at the beginning of the week. But, the data recovery software worked its techno-magic and the emails were duly recovered.

So far, so frantic(ish). More deadlines looming though and things were looking ropey. One 10 minute presentation (with handouts), one 3000 word essay and one 1000 word tutorial submission were all to be due on Monday. The cancelled lecture meant that my presentation slips back a week and I was able to opt for a different tutorial assignment, also slipping that back a week. So (can you see where this is going yet), I thought, that eases the pressure a bit this week and I can concentrate on the essay. Nooooo! That would be much too simple! Several phone calls on Monday evening ensured that one evening got written off chasing Presbytery stuff and a chunk of my morning today got taken care of (I don’t begrudge this one as it was a favour for a friend). And to cap it all, my parents announced they’d ‘just pop in on Friday on their way to St. Andrews’ (family wedding).

Ach well! I always say I work better under a bit of pressure. I need a (looming) deadline to focus my mind.

As for blogging, I have a wee list building up, so I might as well note them here to keep them in my mind:

  • A ‘word’ from God, through a new friend.
  • Virtual church – the numbers game.
  • Pastoral Care course placement – hospice or hospital?
  • More theology

And, no doubt, plenty more when I can remember them.

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