Sophie and Sasha - a delightful pair of kitties who bring a lot of smiles, laughs and joy into my life.

As you can see, Sophie is wearing the dreaded vetinary lampshade... after weeks of less drastic measures, oodles of drugs and potions, her sore side is still sore.  Despite this she remains remarkably cheerful, sunbathing when the weather allows, snoozing in chairs and now and then coming to see the hu-being for nuzzles and snuggles.

Sasha remains full of beans and loves nothing more than hurtling at full speed around the house.  At night she is known to settle down on the hu-being's hip and sleep there - thus pinning the hu-being on her side for hours on end!

Today all the house plants were moved to church in the latest attempt to remove potential allergens... thus far the cause of Sophie's sore side remains a mystery.

Like Holly before them, these girlies have quite an online fan-club, so it felt about time for another photo... even if it happens to have me in the corner!!

It's not just me/us that have been shifting around this week.  Just down the road at Western Infirmary Glasgow the last emergency ambulances have been and gone as the A&E closed at 8 a.m. this morning.

At 9 a.m. the new West Glasgow Minor Injuries Unit (MIU) opened and will operate a twelve hour 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. service for roughly sixteen weeks.

In October, the MIU and all outpatient services will decamp to what is currently the children's hospital at Yorkhill (when it will have closed and moved to the new Royal Hopsital for Sick Children).

Then at some point in 2016, the MIU and outpatient services will join with some of the surgical (and medical?) services at what is currently Gartnaval General Hospital.

That sounds like a horrendous cycle of packing, unpacking, disorientating, reorientating and so forth.

My thoughts and prayers are with all the hospital staff managing that transition.

You can read more here

It has taken five people and three part days but now it's done!

The vestry is now in what was the lounge (photo of it above)

The former vestry is now a meeting room:

Currently the landing between the rooms is hidden under foldy boxes, bags, stuff to be chucked out and stuff to be taken home, so still some work to do, but not today!

Massive thanks to J, M, N and N for all your help - I could not have done it without you.

In the days when I was in industry, office moves seemed to happen every couple of years.  Some management restructure or other would mean that it evidently made sense for us to move to another building where more or fewer desks could be grouped together in appropriate proximity to some other team (that may, or may not, make any sense!).

I'd pretty much forgotten about all of that until today, when I've been making arrangements to move the vestry/office across the landing to another room at church.  Quite a lot of logistics (such as moving the phone line, packing and unpacking) as well as the practicality of moving furniture around.

And the realisation that the view from my window will change!  Window seats were always coveted in my industry days.  It was pretty much a status symbol to have a window (along with either a wooden desk or a swivel chair!!)  After nearly six years of looking out on to the street, I will have a vista of rooftops.  Which might make for more more work getting done as it will be considerably less distracting.

In case you are wondering, we are not re-structuring at church it is just a practical solution to some ongoing factors relating to the present office space.  In a week or two it will all seem perfectly normal again I'm sure.

Sometimes I am amazed that I am still maintaining a blog so many years after it began... but if the book on introverts that I'm reading is correct, it is partly a result of my introvert nature.  It seems that introverts can be more comfortable expressing thoughts and feelings in a 'virtual' world than a 'real' one - so blogs and social media suit us well.  I think that's true in my case, and is perhaps why  sometimes people comment on the level of openness and honesty when I write about personal things.  And I suspect that's why every once in a while I post something that causes enough offence that it has to be taken down or retracted.

When I began blogging, hardly anyone read my stuff, and certainly no-one in my church.  It was a place where I could experiment with ideas fairly safely, knowing pretty much who might be reading the 'ramblings, reflections and rubbish' I posted. 

Moving north to the Gathering Place changed all that and a lot of folk in church read this stuff - probably more than I am aware of.  So things changed, it became more reporting of church life. 

After my cancer diagnosis it became a safe-enough space to share news and feelings, and it certainly attracted huge numbers of readers (those days, rightly, are pretty much past now). 

More recently it has changed again and the readership of which I am aware (mostly I haven't a clue who the 1500+ readers a month are) means that I often need to think before I write in a way that I'm not always so good at.  Sometimes frustrations (justifed or not) and grumpiness spill over into to what I express. 

So time for more changes I think.

One change is a return to journalling - something I was forced to do for a decade as part of my ministerial training and formation, and then by the university when doing my research degree.  After a decade I was sick and tired of it and needed a break.  For all that, the ability to blurt my thoughts onto paper (or a laptop) stood me in good stead for journalling my way through my cancer treatment (and indeed I still maintain that journal albeit very infrequently... treatment and side effects continue and I need a safe, private place to record and reflect upon them).

Last summer I bought a beautiful book to start a new journal - it never got going for various reasons, which I have now thought more about, and put into proper perspective.  I do need a safe space to record the aspects of ministerial life that are not helpfully shared via a blog, and the journal meets that need. 

Which leaves me with a question of "what now for my blog?"  And the answer is, I'm not sure.  Times have changed, I have changed, the readership has changed.  I don't feel I want to give it up yet, but I'm not honestly sure what the future holds for it.

Has this blog run its course?  I'm not sure.  But as I've said at various times in the last couple of years, frequency and content are likely to change.  That's not wrong.  In fact it's probably very right. 

The important thing for me is to be clear what I share where and why.

So to all my loyal readers, thank you for your ongoing support - it is you who make this blog the 'live' thing it is, and whose occasional annoyance at my cluminess, as well as kind support and encouragement are equally important as checks and balances along the way.