because of those *evil* telemarketing phone calls that recently have begun ringing as early as 9am. I didn’t think of it before because this morning has been unusually, eerily, blessedly call-free.
groggy
Yowza… was up again last night very late, getting to bed around 6:30 am. Got up a little past noon. My schedule this past week largely has settled into a pattern of staying up until between 4 and 6, and sleeping until noonish. That’s happened over and over again since I stopped working; I’ve always thought of myself as more of a night person than a day person, and often reverted to that pattern on weekends even when I was having to sleep and get up at more typical hours during the work week. This must be my body’s preferred schedule, or maybe just the result of the interesting paradox of loving sleep but hating to go to sleep; I get so caught up in the things I’m reading/writing/viewing/doing that I lose track of the time, and hate to stop. I even get so engrossed in what I’m doing that I occasionally forget to eat until many hours past the normal meal times, which many of my friends and family say they have the hardest time imagining.
The only thing that makes this schedule a little difficult at times is that my white vertical blinds don’t do a terrific job of blocking the light, especially where it leaks around the ends; fortunately, my mostly southern exposure means I’m not getting the very earliest rays. Also, on Friday mornings the trash trucks come, and the emptying of the condo building dumpsters often wakes me. That happened this morning, and with the windows open the pollens of spring kept my sleep a little less easy, so I’m just a little bit groggy right now.
Tonight’s the reading of “Under Milkwood” at our VARUUM/Chalice Theatre co-sponsored coffeehouse, and I’ve agreed to be there to staff an information table and to help play waiter. Supposed to get there around 6:30 this afternoon. Before that, I need to go pick up some hardware items to complete the work I’ve been doing in the second bath.
the virtual church
After I lost my previous attempt at this entry, I got frustrated and went off and did something else for a while. By the time I got back to it, I realized that most of what I’d written before wasn’t important (even in the world of blogs where the most trivial narcissistic thoughts can have some import). So I’ll leave out all the stuff about the bulk of the meeting, which was the last in a series of four orientation sessions for new and prospective members. I was there not as a new or prospective member, but to speak about VARUUM, our GLBT social/social action/education group, and about the Welcoming Congregation Program by which UU congregations become more intentionally inclusive.
Anyway, I’ve also been spending a lot of time lately thinking about technology vis a vis my church as it could apply to many of our issues, concerns, activities and practices. As in most large organizations (at 1000+ members, we’re not large as, say, Baptist churches go, but we’re one of the two or three largest UU churches in the denomination), some parts of the church are way ahead of others. The Young Adult group, as one might expect, has fully embraced email and the web, and uses these technologies almost exclusively for planning and advertising their events. The GLBT group, as well, has had a listserv for several years, and now a Yahoo Group.
But most of the church is woefully far behind. The email system for the ministers and church staff is unreliable; several times this past year it stopped functioning, but messages wouldn’t get bounced back for several weeks, so you assumed that your emails had gotten through when they were actually in limbo (where the unbaptized Catholic babies apparently were reading them).
little life lessons
Not an auspicious start to the evening’s work… I’d just written an extended entry at least 6 or 7 paragraphs long about my experiences and thoughts from tonight’s church meeting, when I accidentally closed the browser window into which I was writing, before I’d saved the article. Bummer.
Even as comfortable as I am with technology, and as much as I love it and have been using it for years, I can still get zapped by the simplest human error. I think I’ve learned the humility lesson enough already, ok?
iso kidney for good home
I just got off the phone with a staff person at the transplant center that’s handling my dad’s potential kidney transplantation. This is a situation that has largely galvanized my family and their close friends, but that is also frought with difficult emotional and personal issues. My dad suffered kidney failure about six years ago, and has been on dialysis since. Initially and again most recently after surgery and a hospital stay, he has been on hemodialysis, but most of this time he has used peritoneal dialysis, which has allowed him to dialyze from home or even on vacation, giving him a little more freedom and also seeming to be easier physically.
Since the onset of his kidney disease, I along with several members of the family have offered to be tested as potential organ donors for him. Until now, Dad has always flatly refused to even consider it. He held out hope that he would get a kidney transplant through the normal channels. The “system,” though, has just offered snafu after snafu, culminating in a discovery during his recent hospital stay that his records didn’t indicate his full eligibility, noting that he’d only been eligible for less than a year rather than for the six years they should have recorded.
This most recent peritoneal infection and hospitalization were extremely difficult and painful. Dad says he’s never experienced pain that severe. Additionally, the infection eventually required the removal of his peritoneal catheter, which means that for several months, at least, he’s back on the more unpleasant, restrictive, and physically demanding and exhausting hemodialysis. These facts, combined with the discovery above about the mixup with his records, have left him finally ready, indeed eager, to allow a volunteer donor transplant. The family, including relations only by marriage, and even unrelated friends and church members, has responded very positively, and the blood testing has begun.
gimme that new-time religion
Not working, and not having been able to find a job (that’ll be a blog entry of its own, I’m sure), is frustrating and depressing in its own right, but I certainly haven’t run out of things to occupy my mind and my time.
Elsewhere on my site, I talk about my experiences with organized religion and alternative spirituality, from growing up in a conservative southern Methodist Church; to my flirtation with Episcopaliansim in college, nearly leading to my enrolling in seminary; through my continuing exploration of nature-centered spirituality largely as an agnostic pagan; to my current three-year involvement with the Unitarian Universalist Church, which seems to be leading — or pushing — me to the seminary yet again.
(If you haven’t already, check out the Belief-o-matic on Belief.net; answer 20 multiple-choice questions about your personal beliefs, and it will give you a percentage match to the world’s religions, denominations, and spiritual belief systems.)
joining the [blog] revolution
Well, here it is… my very first entry in my very first blog/journal. It will be interesting to see if I can create and sustain a habit of regular updates, or if I’ll revert to my more customary manner of bursts of activity interspersed with long periods of hibernation. This latter behavior is how I’ve tended to manage my personal web site over the years, and my email relationships with friends and family, as well as how I approach many hobbies and games. It may even characterize many of my offline relationships and romances.
I think I’m in one of those creative spurts now, though I don’t know how long it will last. In the past couple of weeks I’d just done a complete redesign of my web site, painted the two bathrooms in my condo and tackled some other home-improvement and repair projects, and installed this great software in order to begin blogging. In fact, I’m so enamored with MovableType already, that I think I may do the entire web site over again as a blog (it’s already chunked pretty much as individual entries anyway, so it seems like it might work nicely as an MT blog).