On Moving to Two Places-and Why

I decided to take a short break from packing stuff to move, preparing a sermon, grading papers, and writing books (not all at once-I’m not that good at multitasking!) to catch up the blog.

For those who haven’t heard: I have returned to the denominational church of my youth: The United Methodist Church. After joining Ebbert Memorial UMC in Springfield, OR and completing my dissertation, I found I had too much spare time on my hands-and a need to do something with my calling. After a chat with my DS, I was sent as a lay person assigned (even though I hold ordination credentials) to Hope UMC in Drain/Yoncalla, OR as their pastor. Long story short, this past July first I have been sent instead to Pioneer UMC in Coquille, OR. This is a 1/2 time slot; I’m hoping to remain there while I undertake the things I need to do to become a full elder. That's a three year process, so I have some time.

The good news is, there’s a parsonage to live in. This means for the first time in over eight years, most of my books are on shelves-and have been thatched and duplicates pulled and donated to the church for their rummage sale next month. I have an actual office as well, and I have a church with good people who want to see things happen. (Not that the folks at Hope didn’t-they also want to see things grow and get bigger as well. Join me in praying for them and their new pastor, Jerry Steele.) The downside is that we’re in the middle of a move that is having to happen much faster than we’d planned...they want to rent the apartment we’ve been living for five years by the first of August. Geez, I hate moving. Nerves are frayed, money’s tighter as a result for a few weeks-but God is good. (There’s also the part about commuting 2 1/2 hours one way to get there, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.) 

Add to that I’m now the interim director for the Cascade Chorus, the Barbershop chorus I have been the assistant director of the last five or six years or so. Toss in doing things like attending Annual Conference and a Pastoral Transition conference...and you find that ol’ Doc Crandall’s been a busy cuss.

Little things one takes for granted-like working internet-are coming together. I spent most of my Monday getting that back up and running; my wireless HP printer was balky and the Airport Express needed to be "persuaded" to play nicely with the new wifi router. I can find things in the kitchen now, and many of the boxes and tubs we’ve hauled down there have either been sorted and their contents found homes...or will be in short order. (Have I mentioned how much I hate moving?) And the fun part is that it’s only half the stuff. 

See, Deena-who lost her full-time job the end of June-now has a part time job doing the same stuff with a different department, and some per diem hours as well. If she makes the CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) course she’s trying to get into, she’ll be busier than I am. As a result, she has to stay in the area to work. So we’re moving half our stuff into her folks place and will pay them some rent, and I get to commute that 2.5 hours one way I mentioned earlier. 

I want to make one thing profoundly clear: this commute is not a sign of trouble in our marriage. Just the opposite: we are having to work harder on our relationship as we won’t have the time together we’re used to spending. On the other hand, because we are both so busy, the time we do have together is made more special. 

So...to my students, I ask your indulgence for about another seven to ten working days; I’m starting to have enough time to grade like I’m used to-which means back papers will get caught up fairly quickly. To my parishioners, I ask your continued grace as I get settled into being your new pastor and find a routine that works. To my chorus, I ask you hang with me a little longer-and keep working on your music at home. And to everyone else...when you think about us, keep us in prayer. Now, more than ever, we need God’s grásta agus síocháin-His grace and peace-to help us through a tough period of time. 

Moving day has come...

My blog, take two.

You’ll notice that this blog starts on October 2, 2009.

That’s not entirely true. It actually started January 11, 2008 over on (what was then) Yahoo 360.

But times change, and Yahoo 360 has morphed into some sort of social networking site. And while I like being social, what I really wanted was a place to write about what I thought. I know it’s hard to believe, but I have been accused of being slightly opinionated from time to time. (You have been duly warned.)

Plus, since it became some sort of social networking site, a number of readers have complained that they can’t read the Heaping Pile o’ Blog without first signing out of Yahoo. They also made it more labor intensive to write on the thing.

In short, it was becoming a pain in the lower half of my anatomy. (I’ll let you choose whatever part you wish.)

That’s why I moved here to Blogspot. Nice, neat, simple, and I can actually use some HTML to liven it up a bit. I know just enough HTML to be dangerous, having done a little website building in my time. I can add pictures, such as one of my Man-Cat, for example.

About the URL: Cpromptpoke is an old Applesoft command. Way back when, in those days where you actually programmed a computer, I learned a lot of programming in BASIC. (We all did, as kids.) There were programming languages called COBOL, PASCAL, and FORTRAN, but BASIC was what we learned first.

Then came the home PC revolution.

All you kids out there, who are are so used to having everything computerized, have I got a news flash for you: It wasn’t always this way! Instead of going online to play games or talk, we actually went outside to play and/or talk. Sometimes to talk, we used a little something called a telephone. It hung on a wall or sat on a table, was connected to the wall by a wire, and didn’t take pictures or have fancy ringtones. It used a bell to get our attention, and you dialed a number by using...a dial. When we did get to play a video game, it was a little something called Pong.

And once the Atari 2600 came out, we could play Missile Command and Space Invaders. Pac Man was a big deal. There was something called IntelliVision, Nintendo was a huge advance, and TRS-80’s, Commodore 64’s, (with a whole 64 KB of memory...not GB, not MB, but KB as in Kilobyte) and Apple I’s were on the landscape. We were lucky if we had a disk drive; most of us backed things up with tape. You know...a cassette tape. And in those days, you programmed a computer. Not just load a new program onto the hard drive. You wrote and debugged the program yourself.

Then came the Apple II. This was a great improvement over those Commodore 64’s and Apple I’s. (For some odd reason, I still have a soft spot for the TRS-80, tape drives and all.)

Applesoft was what I learned by taking a college course in PC on an Apple II of some extraction. It was designed to set memory location address to x. (You programming geeks might recognize the command better as C:\Poke addr,x.)

What is a blog, but one’s memories online? Hence, Cpromptpoke. A place to send my online memories.

Enough for now.

(Posted 10/3/09)