Another Sunday, another fun weekend ending. I got lot of rest and relaxation in, but no where near caught up with everything that I need to do.
Friday night Bethany and I had a pretty quiet evening, relaxing at my place. I’m sad to admit that I have a new TV/DVD addiction: 24. My friend Matt has been raving about it for the last few weeks, and Bethany has been a huge fan, so due to the peer pressure I managed to get a DVD from Season one into my Blockbuster queue. It came in Thursday and Bethany and I decided to watch it Friday. Now I’m hooked, we killed all four episodes on the disc in one night… And I’m also pissed. The show always ends on these huge cliff-hangers, and now I’ll have to wait at least until mid-week until LackLuster video sends me Disc 2 – that is if they don’t’ screw it up and send it out of sequence. We’ll see how things go.
Bethany and I also had fun with some of the recurring themes & events in the show, by playing a drinking game where we would each take a shot for each time someone shot another person on the show. Luckily we were just drinking Tequila Rose or else we really could have gotten messed up. A warning to those who want to also make the show most interesting: don’t do "1 shot for each time the phone rings". You’ll be trashed in one episode.
Saturday was a really good day except for the fact that I got no cleaning done around my apartment. I set out this weekend to really clean up my apartment. I have my NCSC Regional Team coming next weekend and with all of the guys staying with me, it’s imperative that I clean up my pig-sty. None of that happened Saturday I did go play at Mass though, and it was a really nice liturgy, especially compared to last week’s Mass. I had a nice night afterwards as well. My friend Shannon turned the big 2-1 on Friday so we went and celebrated at everyone’s favorite watering hole – Old C’s. It was a really fun night. However, my "I’ll have a quick dinner and get back to cleaning" turned into me not coming home until 2am…
Sunday wasn’t much better. My sister was in town from Boulder, so our family had brunch, then I had to go back over to church for a meeting*. The freakin’ meeting lasted more than 2 hours, so when I got back home I was only able to clean the downstairs area this afternoon. I have yet to tackle the disaster that is my room. It’s going to be a long week.
A few random thoughts…
*Meetings – This is not going to be a fun week for meetings. As of right now, I am scheduled to be at church for 6 straight days, each time pretty significant (at least 2 hours). Normally this wouldn’t be bad, except for the fact that most of those days at church are going to be spend doing things I’d rather not be doing. Today, day #2 began a series of crappy meetings – this one is over all of the choir confusion going on with our Music Director leaving. Since my last posting a slew of emails have gone out – 36 – since our music minister announced her registration. Most of them with people opining on how things should move forward, and some of them offering their own selfish and disrespectful ideas. One of the most popular ideas kicked around has been to forgo hiring a music minister for three months and defer their salary to purchase new music. While I don’t think the idea itself is a bad one (although I do adamantly disagree with it), I think the timing couldn’t be worse. The music minister isn’t leaving until early January, and right now it just feels like a family discussing how they’re going to spend a relative’s inheritance when the relative is still alive. To me, nothing could be more professionally disrespectful than telling a departing member that their position really wasn’t needed, and for someone to suggest drastic changes at this point in time is disrespectful to say the least.
This is only the tip of the ice burg with the music ministry troubles… So today they had a meeting with representatives from a few choirs. While people felt that there was progress made, I wish that more would have been resolved. I’m disappointed that we did not leave the meeting with intentions well-defined, preventing someone from pursuing their own agenda. I’m also disappointed because the Pastor did not seemed pretty resolved to deferring the hiring of a music minister, and was not interested to expedite the search process. I understand that a search for a part-time candidate in the middle of the school year will only get you so far, and if you do want to make a quality hire you’ll wait for a sufficient candidate pool – but if you’ve already resolved yourself to delay you’re going to subconsciously work towards a delay. I’m troubled because there are too many similarities in this situation when compared to our failed Director of Campus Ministry hire. My prediction that of not hiring a music minister still stands.
Monday night I have a Pastoral Council meeting, which could either be very interesting or really boring depending on where discussion takes us. Right now Music Ministry isn’t the only parish group bursting at the seams. I fear that our community is headed for a crisis, but I’m not sure if the key leadership recognizes or realizes they should address the issue. I’ve planned tomorrow night’s agenda to create a forum for such discussion, but we’ll see if other members of Pastoral Council & parish staff are willing to engage in a discussion.
Tuesday I was planning on going to TNT, but at this point Tuesday is looking like the only possible evening that I have to clean my apartment, along with transport beds from my parent’s home over to my place… I think I’m going to take the night off from church, so instead of 6 consecutive nights, I’ll be at church 7 out of 8 days.
Wednesday I got roped into volunteering to catalog our music for choir. I’m basically eating my own words here, or putting my money where my mouth is. In the email discussions the one email I wrote (and yes, I only wrote 1 out of the 36), I attempted to validate the original music suggestion by declaring the idea as worthwhile and volunteering my time to help catalog. Well I was taken up on my offer, so 7-10pm I’ll get to sort music – how exciting…
Thursday night is UMAC, and after last month’s meeting it will be interesting to see what the future of UMAC will be.
Friday I’ll be welcoming members from the Western Region team. I’m really excited about this coming up, but am nervous when I realize just how much work I have ahead of me this week to sufficiently prepare for this event. I’ll be glad when it gets here.
Well that’s it for now… More thoughts to come!