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I did read a good bit and write a few words for my next essay, spent some time thinking about my upcoming paper at BNTS, and wrote some of the sermon for Wednesday, on top of taking the Communion service for Bridge House — so yesterday I had a full dance card.

This morning’s run was practically spot-on my five day rolling average. I caught myself at least once, thinking ‘I should pick up my pace!’, but self-awareness protected me from getting drawn into self-competition. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, then presumably home to work on academic and homiletical pursuits. I’ll also take a minute or two to work on the nib of a pen that’s been running dry.

Yesterday morning’s sermon went all right, and Margaret and I enjoyed a plesant cup of coffee (tea) in the square after church. I did get a tiny bit of work done on my current essay debt in the afternoon, but step by step is how it will get done. The rest was rest and reading and writing a sermon for Wednesday.

This morning’s run came in at a pretty average time. I’m sipping coffee and nibbling grapes, will shortly shower and dress before Morning Prayer, then back to R&R in the square. I’ll stop in at a care home midafternoon….

I haven’t been able to post sermons for most of July, so weeks of preaching are clogging up the pipes. I’ll post several below the fold, as it were (‘“As it was” — we know this to be true from our Prayerbooks’, as my father used to say).
Continue reading “Sermon Backlog”

When I stopped timing my runs in March, I had hammered my times down to about 17:30 or so for the two miles. But I was no longer feeling neutral about exercising in the morning — I started to feel more intense annoyance and resentment about my morning runs, and I decided that any extra fitness I attained wasn’t worth the spiritual cost of beginning the day with vexation.I stopped timing runs, settled back down to my unambitious pace, and resumed my milder dislike of running. It was good. The unpleasantness of running was balanced by the evident health benefits. I am sure that I’m fitter, sturdier, and my weight has very gradually diminished since I started skipping rope in the mornings about six years ago.

As I said earlier, I begsn timing myself again this week, not with a view to improving my time so much as to observe my run, just as I didn’t set out to lose weight as a goal, but I have observed it as a side effect of the more important activity. So now, I’m running a more comfortable 20:15 or so. I still don’t like it, but it’s good, and the malignant competitive drive hasn’t kicked in.

And although we haven’t conquered the infection; we’ve nipped various vectors, but it seems as though someone is just directing a lot of hits at various addresses, most of which are no longer even there. Way too much traffic for three days, but my hosts are trying to figure it out — and if I go silent again, you’ll know that we haven’t been able to solve it. Yet.

So, haven’t burned through my bandwidth yet.

Ran and walked my two miles this morning. I’ve been running every day (barring rain) for a while, but my legs just didn’t feel like putting in the effort this morning, so I gave them a break.

Yesterday I had a parish visit and a meeting with a wedding couple (‘wedding couple’ = couple who will be getting married in the parish). Lovely times but quite full-on in terms of extraversion, so I came home and focused on Sunday’s sermon for a while. Today, if I finish the sermon promptly (d.v.), I will tackle my short introduction to Anglican biblical interpretation, and maybe Margaret and I will stroll out to a local pub.

This post may be visible only for a short while, as my hosting company and I haven’t been able to figure out just who has been hammering the site nor how we might stop them, and my monthly bandwidth allowance may burn up in a matter of minutes. Nonetheless, I’m still here to say ‘I’m trying’, and Tim (at Exact) is trying.

Someday I’ll post photos from our family holiday in June, and I might even post sermons from July, and tell some stories from both, but I’m not going to try till I’m sure the site is up and stable. I’ve kept running, and have resumed timing myself (but without letting myself get caught up in trying to improve my time).

I still love you, and I miss writing for you. Keep the faith.

After having extricated the Disseminary domain from its infestation of bots (at least, for the time being), made back-ups galore, taken a deep breath, and squeezed my eyes closed — I updated my PHP installation and then, trembling, updated WordPress.

You see the result before your wondering eyes: don’t let the glare blind you.

Now, to resolve to keep it updated rather than waiting another mphsftml years…

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.