Notes

Rather unsurprisingly, Gus didn’t get any better.

Here’s a few images of him and Ted together, looking rather better than he did of late.

Gus is one of our two rescue Persians. His brother Ted is fluffy, fat, and full of life. Gus is painfully thin, ragged and smelly.

Gus has always had respiratory problems. He sprays snot all over the place when he sneezes (it’s wise to cover your drink when he enters the room).

He looks such a state that our neighbours recently called the RSPCA thinking they’d found a stray cat in terrible condition (we had to buy him a collar with a “has medical condition” label).

Julia took Gus to the vet because of a swollen face. 24 hours later we were back - it had got a lot, lot worse. Indeed, he’d been visited by a few bluebottles who’d left their little ones behind. Gus was stinking, maggoty, and so swollen he could only open one eye.

The vet shaved half of Gus’s face, squeezed all the puss out, pumped stuff back in to prevent more puss forming, and sent him home.

So, meet Gus Puss:

For his 9th birthday, Dan wanted some bionic putty and an electric ukulele.

The putty’s not that exciting to be honest (unless you’re 9) but the electric ukulele is awesome.

I have ukulele envy.

For the past year I’ve been on the Northwest Partnership training course and it’s been fantastic.

I want to take further study to include systematic theology and year 2 of the course kicks off in the Autumn but doesn’t explicitly cover systematic theology; rather, it uses a crawl through Romans to bring out the topics - which is obviously pretty good!

For a more complete study I’d pretty much settled on the Distance Learning course from the London School of Theology, as it’s the only school really set up for distance learning.

End result: Year 2 of the NWP course, and then pix & mix modules from LST for the year after that.

It’s like study, except it’s brilliant!

I know I should have known better, but I made a kind of spur-of-the-moment purchase. I say “kind of” because I’d meant to buy one at some point, but hadn’t really researched.

I wanted a printer/copier/scanner since our printer was showing its age and our scanner had long since given up the ghost.

We bought an HP 7840 wireless printer/copier/scanner from Costco. The installation took ages but before it had finished, the printer locked up. The nice little display ceased to function. Even the on/off switch did nothing. I then wasted hours going through the trouble-shooting guide and web help but in the end took the whole lot back.

Sometimes equipment just fails, so I thought I’d just try a straight replacement. Installation on a different PC running a different operating system (Windows 7 instead of Vista) led to precisely the same problem! Arrgh! So much wasted time!!

Another journey to take that one back, but this time we just got our money back.

Still wanting a scanner, we ended up with an HP B109a (such quaint names!) which finally worked a treat.

Plug and play, I don’t think so.

So I’ve been back in work for 2 months. How’s it going?

It’s fascinating, actually. Some things to notice…

As someone hacked our church website recently, our host closed the site down and asked that all files be replaced. At first it seemed this was going to be a nightmare, but then I began to wonder how big a deal it really would be.

I deleted all files (never a great feeling) and reinstalled Mambo. Most of the stuff hanging around the site (and certainly everything that had been hacked) was old junk I should have deleted anyway. All I needed to do was upload a backup of the Mambo database content and FTP a few images back up.

We have some photos on there for Summer Camps, and they just needed to be Jalbum‘ed back up.

Hey presto - the Hoylake Evangelical Church website is back in business.

It’s always good to be faced with new challenges in work - it makes work so much more interesting.

Having worked with teams spread around the country I’m used to remote management of people and situations, but this next step is a new one: I’ve been given a team in the US to manage.

No doubt at some point I’ll go and visit them and I know it will be good news for them and the UK team, but I’m wondering how it can really be “the same”. I get drawn into operational situations here in the UK that I can’t help with in the US (not least because of a 5 hour time difference).

Really, really looking forward to this one.

How did I spend my last week off? Not as might have been expected.

The dominant feature was the arrival of a 15-month old girl to stay for a couple of weeks. When you’ve not changed a nappy for years, the re-introduction of nappies, changing bags, high-chairs, car-seats and all the rest is very weird indeed.

Add to that a mystery illness that floored me for all of Friday, and it’s a reminder that we never really know what’s coming!

So, here I am in Week 14 in Unemployment House just 10 days away from starting my new job.

A number of people have asked me if I’m climbing the walls with boredom or if I’ve been worried about not finding another job. I determined right at the start that I’d enjoy this time off. I’ve told people that I’ve worked hard for 20 years and expect to do so for the next 20+ so to be given a few months to take it easy has been brilliant.

I know redundancy is very, very bad news for many people, but I’m grateful for the opportunity it’s given me.