A long weekend?

Hi Folks,

At the risk of falling behind I thought I better do a blog post. It's 6:30am and I'm up! It's either because I'm so into Personal Power right now that I've got a brilliant routine or because I went to bed at 7:30pm last night because I was really really really tired!

Last Thursday my health held our long enough to meet Paul and Dyb for lunch. Alan wasn't able to make tea oweing to some bad news he'd had which meant I could get on with a task I'd been putting off. Dyb supplied me with the required cable so I was able to get on with the tedious task of converting over 3 hours worth of audio cassette to CD which stupidly when I said to the person I'd do it I thought would take ten minutes... given it's tapes and you have to sit through the whole thing! I also had to reduce the hiss, remove clicks and pops and split it into tracks and burn onto CD so it really was a long task in the end!

About half an hour before I was going to get the bus home (I was doing all this in 'my' office at the church) I heard it raining outside. Now, for us saddos who have to get the bus places, from the church to Donald & Dorothy's is quite a long journey if you're reliant on the bus because you have to walk from the church about about two miles to the bus and then get the bus for an hour OR you can walk up the hill, along the road, cross over, wait for a bus, get that bus a mile and a half down the road then walk to the lights, cross over, walk up to the nearest stop and get the bus to their house for an hour. I decided to put off that journey as long as possible in the hopes that I wouldn't have to do it in the rain so I sent Stuart a text to tell him I was at the church if he had anything needed sorted for the Sunday service that required my tech.

He texted back to say he'd be straight over. When he came over he offered me a lift home so that we could put some files off of his external hard drive onto my laptop.

He stayed for a chat with us all for a while and the two of us also sorted out some of the service order.

On Friday we went to get some of the items of tuck shop for camp from various places and I made the eight sets of notices for the weekend, put the finishing touches to the Tape/CD's and did more work on the scripts for Sunday morning and night. In the evening I was watching an episode of The Simpsons but fell asleep so I went to my bed early but got up again after a few hours and then went to bed at my normal time.

Saturday was a long day of hard work at Scoughall.

I opted to avoid that and stayed at home instead :-) OK, I was still ill and by this time my gout was starting to kick in so I was doing my best to not let people notice that I wasn't walking quite as well as normal. The best way to do that is to not walk very much which only makes it a lot worse anyway. Oh, now I remember what else happened on Saturday! The people from the work party came back after they'd worked and quite a few of them stayed for a while and then some of us decided we'd go out to see Shrek 3 at night. Those of us who were going had a takeaway with The Webb's and Donald's parents and then Me, John, Laura, Other John, Stephen, Johnny, Alan & David went to the cinema.

I have to say I really enjoyed the trailers and I have two real reasons for saying that.

1) I really did like them, I'd love to see some of the films 'trailed'.
2) They were all I saw. About two minutes into the film I fell asleep and didn't wake up again until the closing credits.

On the plus-side I've now not ruined Shrek 1 and 2 for myself which I've never seen.

I was still missing some things I needed to know from Stuart in order to put the mornings service together and I knew he'd be stressing about it so rather than demanding them from him immediately and stressing him out more I just texted him and said not to worry and we could go over the things together and finish them off in the morning at 10 o'clock rather than going to the 1st service.

Having had a good couple of hours to sleep in the cinema I stayed up until my usual time and caught up with Dr Who... not literally, I watched a few episodes... I don't actually know the man.

On Sunday morning I met Stuart at ten and we finished the service up... or, so I thought. When I set things up at 11am there were suddenly a whole lot of changes needing done. I decided getting stressed just makes everyone more stressed and less productive so just took everything in my stride and got on with making them all whilst my pre-programmed 30-min pre-service autoplay with notices/songs/videos/welcomes etc ran up towards the 5 minute countdown. Stuart changed the batteries in the radio-mics and but mic packs on himself, Fiona and the speaker whilst I busied myself making all the changes like removing one song and replacing it with another and adding backing tracks I didn't know about from a CD I'd just been handed which I quickly needed to rip.

This was the first First Sunday that Fraser hasn't been around for and generally there are now two or three people on tech but I found myself alone doing it. Being the control freak that I am I actually loved it. Not only that but for the first time ever neither the chairman or the speaker wanted the clicker and wanted me to progress all of their stuff manually. The biggest worry is that I didn't have enough arms to do lights, video, powerpoints, recording, sound etc. It kept me busy and on my toes and it went without any major disaster although I still think I'm not as good a sound man as I am a video man. People are also spoiled by Fraser doing sound who really is very good at sound and loves sitting twiddling diles even when people like me would think the sound is fine.

We don't have a young people's lunch in July or August as people are always away so John, Laura, Other John and me went to get some food. John Gillan spotted the Quiz Machine so we had a play on that and made a staggering £7... good times! Unfortunately our meal was a lot more... bad times!

Yesterday I picked up three weeks worth of meds at the Chemist (which makes for quite a big bag) and didn't do a great deal more that was especially productive. As mentioned earlier I went to bed at 7:30. I still feel a bit horrible.

I'm also starting to worry about various things that I have going on in my head and also in the near future and need to get on with preparing the scripts for church for the two weeks I'm away and also get preparing the mountain of stuff for camp I need to do. All that and I'm also getting the keys for my new flat on Thursday... and I'm still ill! Oh, and my foot and wrist are in a pretty bad way. Arthritis has flaired up which means I can't get anything done which requires the ability to walk or lift anything.