The Blog With No Name

The choir has begun taking communion in the choir loft, to save a particular member the trial of going up and down the steps unnecessarily. Today, the assistants finished with the choir and went over to the organ to wait for Pam to have a break. HA! Breaks? Breaks are for weaklings! She didn’t miss a beat, not with her hands or her feet. Pam rocks; if I have failed to mention that in the past, please know it now.

For some reason, I am on the Endowment Board for the Jenny Lind Chapel. I think there is a legal requirement that at any given time at least one person with my last name has some involvement. So anyway, like all old buildings it’s basically falling apart. It needs MONEY. It needs a huge boost to its Endowment Fund, so we don’t have to go to the bishop, hat in hand, every year to make up the shortfall in operating expenses. So we have this meeting. Never have I been to a meeting where so much time was spent discovering that so little was known. It turns out that no one knows 1. who owns the actual property (grounds and building) 2. who is in charge of the endowment fund (synod? endowment board?) 3. who can pay the bills 4. who can actually elect officers to the endowment board et cetera et cetera. All of these things are supposed to be determined by a synod council subcommittee that actually ceased to exist in the 70s, or maybe the 90s, or might still exist, it just depends on which copy of the trust document or bylaws you are looking at. The Bishop’s Assistant, the guy who GOES TO SYNOD COUNCIL MEETINGS, doesn’t know. I ASK YOU.  I kept thinking, “let’s CALL THE SYNOD TREASURER, or someone like that, and ASK.” But being the youngest person in the room by, um, half a generation (it occurs to me that I might be the youngest person ever elected to this board. Must ask), and being by nature a turtle in meetings, I held my peace.

It did not help that at least one person in this meeting was fluent in meeting-babble, so I had to endure references to mission statements, stakeholders, ownership, and the rest of that crap.

TWO HOURS into this mess, at 9:00 p.m., I had had enough (no, I’d had enough about 30 minutes earlier. Oh well). My poor little monkey boy had had to come with me, as I could not find a babysitter (spouse was at our church council meeting, daughter at swim practice). He sat quietly upstairs during all this, but I needed to get him home to put him in bed. They kept talking! I fled to the strains of “feasibility study…..”

That is the glory of being a lowly admin assistant, down there at the bottom of the totem pole. Rarely do I have to endure such nightmares. I can’t imagine a job or activity that would require them on a regular basis.

I played in a trivia game the other night hosted by, for lack of a better term, the local “gay” church. It was organized by a friend of my cousin Jill; Jill and I, and my brother and his friend Sarah played as a team (we did not win). My brother is seven years younger than I am. There, context over.

One of the categories was “National Coming Out Month,” and the questions all had to do with various entertainers, authors, etc who are gay. Well, most of the questions did…One of them had to do with Anita Bryant. After the answer was read, my brother and his girlfriend looked across the table at Jill and me and said in unison, “Who is Anita Bryant?” I don’t think they were joking. Of course, Phil may have been 4 or 5 when she was most in the news, and Sarah might not have been born. Sigh.

My aunt gave me her old computer (next – my mom’s!) and I have installed Linux on it (Slackware 12, to be precise)!! It’s in the basement, so I won’t go near it unless I’m doing laundry, or I won’t get any laundry done unless I’m playing with mySQL, take your pick. In any case, I think it’s time for the daughter to start doing her own laundry.

Unlike the last time I tried this, I have a decent computer to work with, and the installation went very well (except for forgetting to install Lilo the first time around, so no boot – oops). And it’s not networked at all, but at least there are USB ports on it, so I can use a flash drive if I do need to put anything else on it.

Woot! I’m ROOT, baby!

bread1

Originally uploaded by hoyameb.

I just pulled these out of the oven – they are my mom’s 70th-birthday gift (among other things). I was extremely careful about loaf formation, something I generally don’t pay too much attention to. Did it pay off – I think these are some of the finest-looking loaves I’ve ever produced. Woot!

I have a seventeen-year-old coat that someone is willing to pay $165 for. Can you believe it? Madness. I look upon it as Subway money – buying the daughter dinner at 8:00 p.m. after swim practice, when I don’t want to cook and she doesn’t want to eat whatever the rest of us had.