Unusually busy

More bright cold sunny weather today. At last some free time to spend on preparing for the rest of the week's services on WhatsApp, and making contact with chief mourners arranging funerals at which I'll be officiating this week and next. I uploaded this morning's as soon as I woke up, and got tomorrow's ready during the day.

For this week's assignment, Clare recorded all six resurrection Gospel readings. I think it's good to have the change of voices. Doing this for a continuous live recording is too complex and stressful given the resources available, and the recording time it requires. Inserting an audio file against a photo into the video stream was easy to do. I recorded Morning Prayer, and my reflection of the Gospel of the day separately, and this allowed me to edit them together using Windows Movie Maker. The program is perhaps long in the tooth, but I've used it enough times now not to find it hard to recall how to, and that's what counts, when you're under time constraints, and want to do this as well as possible.

I took a break for a walk in the afternoon, and worked again in the evening. One thing I had forgotten but which was nagging me in the back of my mind was the preparation for the on-line Safeguarding training I have committed to do in order to renew my Diocese in Europe PTO. Maybe I'll never get another locum duty assignment abroad, but I'd prefer to be ready if asked and am free to travel safely etc.. What matters is keeping up to date on an important dimension of pastoral care and awareness applicable to any parish or chaplaincy. The ways in which people can abuse and harm each other seems to keep growing. We have to 'expect the unexpected', as Ashley would say.

The on-line training seminar is a week today, and before that I have to answer, and submit to the training team a series of questions in a digital work book about the nature of safeguarding and the church. There is a deadline for this on Wednesday this week, so that nagging feeling was that I'd better got on and do it pronto. I sat up when I'd finished my other tasks for the day and looked at the questionnaire, thinking I'd do it in the morning, but thoughts occurred to me rapidly, so I wrote to completion, emailed it and went to bed later than I should have done. This training promises to be very interesting, despite being on-line and not in the flesh.

My, that was a busy day!