AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Another very good run this morning! I don’t know what on earth has happened — Cool weather for the last two days, warm and humid this morning, and all three went by with no sluggish portions, no wobbly joints, no dead-weight limbs. Coffee, toast (we’re out of my breakfast fruit), shower, Morning Prayer, home, communion visit, and home to write.

Further, the site is back up and doesn’t seem to be infected any longer. And Margaret’s conference is over, so she’ll be around Abingdon today. What more can a simple man ask?

The good support team at Exact have helped me weed some toxic invaders to my site, and we may be able to disinfect it altogether soon. Here’s hoping…

Meanwhile, yesterday’s run was good, and this morning’s run was very good indeed. Although I haven’t been getting around much (staying at home with the dogs), between my running qnd my walks to the churches, I’ve gotten back to my pre-retreat, pre-holiday weight. I’ll try to take off a bit of a buffer-zone, but this is all very satisfactory. Much of the way through one more preaching commentary, one further to go, and one article on (what else) hermeneutics. Then my presentation for the British New Testament Society conference in September…

Good run this morning — still a mystery to me why some mornings are better than others. Coffee, fruit, shower, coffee, toast, and Margaret and I went to St Michael’s this morning — this morning in the congregation, rather than at the altar or pulpit.

In case you hadn’t heard already, our new Team Rector will be the Revd Dr Jen Brown.

Next week, Margaret will spend much of the week at the Pusey House conference, ‘Restoring the Image’, where she (and at some point, I) will meet my former PTS student the Revd Dr Rosanna Anderson and her husband Dr Clifford Anderson, director of one of my almæ matres libraries — so I’ll be keeping pretty snazzy company, when I’m not trying to squeeze preaching helps out of my brain.

I have neglected the blog for a couple of days — well, not the blog itself, but this public face of it. The outage of June/July arose because Exact Hosting had responded to a vast upwelling of traffic on my site. The traffic is coming predominantly from Vietnam and Canada, and seems to involve ghost pages or summat. Trying to figure it out and to remove the old pages that are causing trouble is taking a painful amount of time.

The temperature dropped precipitously overnight; after a good run in the stifling heat yesterday morning, I couldn’t get loose in this morning’s chill (down from 17° yesterday to 9° this morning) and in the end, mixed walking and running. Coffee and fruit, shower and dress, and spend most of the day here with the dogs while Margaret attends the Blackfriars conference on natural law. I’ll head in myself later in the day to connect with Jonathan Birch, and will probably go tomorrow as well to buy a round for Simon Dürr. Apart from all that, it’s write write write as I’m overdue for a couple of Sunday preaching commentaries. Conveniently, I’m not preaching at all this week.

It was too hot yesterday — I made a care home visit at which I soaked through all my clothes and became distinctly aromatic, in an unpleasant, embarrassing way — so I gave myself a day to take my miles at a walking pace. Coffee and fruit, I’ll shower and dress, head to Morning Prayer, and I hope that I’ll be able to get some writing done. We will see.

Morning run (despite the heat), coffee and fruit, showered and dressed, Morning Prayer, coffee and toast, 10:30 online meeting, 15:00 service at the Old Station House, 19:00 PCC meeting, and then bed.

Minke has taken to sitting in the tiny space between me and the side of the chair, resting her chin on my lap desk…

In the interstices, I’ll try to give brief notes of where I was when, and what I was doing, during the outage…

The short version: After my last entry, I left for a visit with my children and grandchildren, during which time something lurking in the bowels of the site generated excessive bandwidth, such that Exact temporarily closed my site. I might have gotten it open again, but being on the road I didn’t have time for a support call and indefinite amounts of helpful suggestions, so I just left the status quo status quo-ing. I’ve been furiously busy since we returned, so that I only just arranged that the blog be activated again. The next step will involve upgrading PHP and WordPress, the decrepitude of both having quite possibly left a niche where a hostile digital entity could run up my hits. One doubts, after all, that I suddenly became wildly popular without my knowing it.

I didn’t run while I was away, but I have run (or walked) every day since. The results have been more of the usual: stiffness, slow times, and dubiousness about the worth of the practice. Writing a lot (mostly just sermons at the moment, but hoping the habit continues).

Preached at St Michael and All Angels, an adaptation of a sermon I’d given earlier. Caught up on rest.
Continue reading “21 June”

Went in to Oxford to have the phone repaired, and was told that they couldn’t accept it for repair unless I had an appointment (even though there was nothing else going on at the store). Hung out with my former student Ryan Whitley for a while, showed him around Oriel, and rolled back to Abingdon while Margaret was doing her all-day drop off/retrieve routine for the dogs.

We woke up early this morning to get to Kansas City in time for the first of our three flights homeward. Ours left a little late, so that we were cutting it close for our flight to Boston. Oua ground holdr flight out of Baltimore was slightly delayed, though, so we got there in good time — except that as soon as the plane rolled away from the terminal, we encountered a ground hold due to wind and lightning. Sure enough, we experienced both on-the-ground wind shaking the craft, and flashes of lightning.
After more than three hours on the ground, we were finally cleared for departure to Boston, with fading hopes of making our departure for Heathrow. Once again luckily, it turns out that bad weather in Baltimore was correlated to bad weather approaching Boston, so the plane had been delayed out of Logan. (Unluckily for us, while we were navigating over Rhode Island, I think, we hit a band of seriously choppy turbulence. Eeuuurgh…. But luckily for us, the plane held firm despite being tossed two or three feet up and down, so cheers to the Boeing engineers.) We grabbed a cursory dinner in the BA Lounge, and hurried to our gate to board for the overnight, arriving in Heathrow in the morning and staggering to the Airline bus to Oxford in good time. We were home again. Zzzzzzz….

(Inflight film viewing: to the US, A Complete Unknown, Captain America: Brave New World, and on the way back A Working Man and The Room Next Door. I’m pretty sure I watched at least one more, but without a list of options I can’t recall which. Ed Norton stole Complete Unknown from Chalamet, liked it a fair amount; The Room Next Door was deliberative, and Tilda Swinton was Tilda Swinton, and it was not as deep as it aspired to be, but it was more patient and less arm-twisty than many other versions might have been.)