(You can tell how appealing sorting and clearing isn't by my practical outworking of 'sporadic!')

Anyway, HT Polly, this is fun and clever, and this is good too.  Plenty more onYou Tube!  Enjoy.

If you haven't yet discovered The Beaker Folk of Husbourne Crawley (HT Andy Jones who introduced me to them some time ago; see link, left) or of you need some relief from hymnological absurdity, check this out, it's fun.

Tonight the D+2 Girls' Brigade met for the first and last time this academic year - a party to celebrate 46 years of witness and service which ended today. Around fifty folk, including the founding officers, were present for an evening of food, chat and, for the girls, games.  At the end of the evening we gave each girl an age-appropriate Bible story book; many of them asked us to sign them as a keepsake, which I found rather touching.  I returned home with arms-ful of flowers and no more vases in which to put them. Alas neither 28 years a GB leader nor Baptist ministerial training/experience have equippped me to conjure up vases ex nihilo, shocking I know, but there you have it.  Various containers have been press-ganged into service to hold the blooms overnight until I can sort out something better.

As someone for whom GB was very formative in her faith-story, I am sad that D+2 comapny has closed, though I do appreciate and understand the reasons.  I am glad that we have been able to show these girls something of God's love, which never fails, and pray that one day the seeds sown will burst forth into glorious bloom.  In the meantime, I am looking forward to getting to know Girls' Brigade Scotland, Greater Glasgow Division.

Phew!

On Thursday night this computer died - or so it seemed - all the tricks I knew for managing to get it work failed and I was left wondering how I could recover all my essential files, contacts and the like when my tame computer experts were all away for the weekend.  In one last attempt I managed to boot it into set-up mode (it had been 'hanging' at the end of the boot checks just before the 'clunk' that tells you it's going into windows (if this sounds ancient technology, it is, but at least it's user fixable!)) tabbed round the options changed nothing whatsoever, then it slowly but surely opened up windows and so far so good... not that I'll be shutting it down in a hurry!

The hope was that it would see me through my move north and give my time to decide what new hardware will best serve my needs - what can connect to my equally old but reliable and really cheap to run HP laserjet 5 A3 printer, what has enough USB ports for the umpteen things I conect (I currently have a powered 7-way USB hub!) and so on.

Anyway I now have, so far as I know, the world's only Lazarus computer, busily printing off essential documents and waiting for me to back-up (again) and copy/print absolutely everything I might possibly want, just in case...

Yesterday one of my tasks was to work on the liturgy for my final Dibley service - during which we will declare our belief that our time together is complete and release each other from the covenant we made nearly six years ago.  It took a while to find the right word to describe what it is we are declaring, but in the end 'complete' seemed the best, and today as I was mulling it over the Greek 'tetalestai' floated into my conscious.  Fulfilled, completed, accomplished, done, finished...

In my experience we aren't so good at endings, at least liturgically: we make a right song and dance over inductions (which is good, I like it and am looking forward eagerly to my next one!) but leaving tends to avoid any acknowledgement of the commitments that are now being un-done.  Once it happens, I will post my words and you can see what you think.  Thanks to Jim's comment on my previous post, I think I now have the last line sorted.