Tuesday (St Hilda of Whitby)

  • Weekly and daily task planning at home; MP in the car on the way in.
  • I was under a time bind because of a scheduled 9am training session for the new telephone sets that were being delivered and installed today. But the deliverer and installer was himself running behind, so I could have read the morning office properly rather than hurriedly. Oh, well.
  • When we finally did have our tutorial, I was encouraged that I may actually master the technique of transferring an incoming call to somebody else in the office--either to them directly or to their voicemail. That has heretofore been my principal failing as an office telephone user. The new system is simpler, it seems.
  • We have a clergy day on Thursday, so it fell to me to rearrange the table and chairs in the round room of the round building in an appropriate manner. You may wonder why I don't have my minions do such things, but the twofold truth is that 1) I'm a little short in the minion department, and 2) I wouldn't have know how to instruct minions to arrange things. It took actually moving stuff around to get a sense of how it should all go.
  • Took care of an administrative issue pertaining to domain name registration, which is something that is pretty opaque to me.
  • Took care of a Nashotah House-related administrative chore (an online vote of the trustees on an administration proposal).
  • Brief administrative attention to a coming workshop for clergy and wardens (and other lay leaders)--January 10, 2015. Stay tuned.
  • Fleshed out, refined, and printed a working script of my homily for this Sunday (Holy Trinity, Danville).
  • Just as I was trying to leave for lunch, I took a phone call from someone seeking material assistance (he thought he was calling an actual church, not a diocesan office, and asked to speak with "a pastor"). I did this sort of thing all the time while in parish work, but it's not so much part of my life now. Anyway, my antennae are finely-tuned to detect fishy stories, and this one had quite an aroma (eventually getting to seeking cab fare to Taylorville so he could ultimately get to Pana). Mysteriously, he was suddenly gone. The call was somehow dropped. We didn't hear back.
  • Lunch at home.
  • Five successive substantive email interactions: three regarding aspirancy to ordination, one the finances of a parish, and one a potpourri of pastoral and administrative issues.
  • Kept a scheduled video conversation (via Google+) with a candidate for an impending parish vacancy.
  • Responded via email to some points raised by the Bishop of Tabora in a message from yesterday.
  • Evening Prayer in the office.

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