Now THAT'S Desperate.

I got an email from a certain college professor this morning, who said:

Are we actually going to hear/read something about the weekend? Is that snippet all there is? [...]

I begged off, noting that the weekend past was a swirling maelstrom of swirly maelstromity, and it didn't get any better in the expanded version. Aside from the haircut.

However, some people are rather persistent--

I need something--I have to preach at tonight's service. We make a big deal of holy week so that by the main service on Easter Day we are so tired I don't care. Thus anything to help me procrastinate would be pleasing.

I feel so, so...whatever the combination of "sacrilegious, yet usefully time-wasting" would be.

I tried to deflect the attention of my correspondent to another post, but he would have none of it, so I finally asked what request I could fulfill that would satisfy his need to not do anything--

I don't know, how about 3 paragraphs.

On the other hand how about reporting on dull church meetings and how the planning for the new addition is going--some actual serious stuff--failing in that, how about a trip to the store.

Well, this might be pretty easy if I do single-sentence paragraphs like all the newspapers do now.

Like this.

And now, I'm done.

Nah. I suppose I owe it to my regular readership to accomodate special requests as best as I can.

Dull church meetings? Not at all--tiring, yes. But never a dull moment. I think I have finally gotten everyone to concentrate on priorities--space to eat and fix food, one; more space for classrooms, two; everything else, three. It's very hard, because I have been trying to get our committee, with input from everyone else, to do as much of the preliminary programming work as they can so they can understand WHY they want what they want, and WHY certain decisions have to be made at certain times, and why some things are mutually exclusive (we had several people say we had too many handicapped parking spaces, and some say not enough--obviously, someone's gonna get peeved at the end result), and why we don't need to be trying to figure out where doors are going to go or the color of the carpet before we've decided a few things about how many people we're going to try to cram in the place.

The frustration from their point of view is that they want to see pictures now, and right now is not the time to draw pictures. And they keep asking me, "don't we need to get an architect to help us figure out what we want?"

::blink::blink::

THAT'S WHAT I AM, AND THAT'S WHAT I'M DOING!

Except, I'm not charging you to sit here and discuss the same things that you'd have to discuss anyway with whoever we finally decide to hire!

People are funny--the idea that if your not paying for something, it must therefore have no value is hard for some to overcome. But, thankfully, I get to facilitate things, and we'll eventually get to the understanding that there is a whole series of steps and decisions to be made in proper planning that just can't be skipped.

Next is to get with the surveyor and find out why they're taking so long, and to get one of the guys on the committee to get the set of building plans digitized so we can have something to work from. Another thing no one seems to understand is that it's awfully hard to hold your brother's feet to the fire to get something done on deadline. Sometimes it's better to be able to have a business relationship with whoever's doing something for you so you can be mean and cranky and actually require performance.

AS FOR THE TRIP TO THE STORE--Sunday night after church, we went to Wal-Mart and bought Catherine a new Bible because her old one is falling apart.

SO, there you go, Doc!
posted by Terry at 2:29:00 PM