Mike's musings

Suzy continues to do well, and is eating well: the only concern we really had yesterday evening, when she didn't want to eat. She's even had a half-hearted cat chase, and followed me into the kitchen at the end of supper in the hopes of getting something which might miss the bin, so she's obviously doing OK. She has some incontinence problems - not major, but noticeable - and though she doesn't seem concerned by it (which is good, and the main thing), we need to ask the vets if it's cause for concern. My guess is that it's just the diuretics doing their thing: her abdomen is still quite large and she's drinking a lot, so we'll need to keep an eye on that. Other than that, she's doing very well.

Spent most of the afternoon at work trying to fix my machine with Oli, our sysadmin. We put a new 80GB drive in my laptop a week or so again, and in doing so seem to have shagged the Windows install. I use it so rarely (I dual-boot the machine, and almost always use Linux) that it took me a while to notice, and in the end, we had to reinstall Windows over the current partition. Hopefully I'll not have lost the Windows set-up, but more importantly, I hope that the Linux install should be find once I've rebuilt the MBR (reboot with a rescue disk, chroot to the relevant partition, run lilo and we should be fine).

So far, most of this blog has been more of a diary than anything else, but I started it partly because I'm starting my training for ordination, and I want to use it as a sounding-board for some of my thoughts during the process. One that's close to the top of my mind at the moment is - what's the right balance (for me) with regards to quiet persuasion and full-blooded rhetoric? I tend towards persuasion, but I have enough practice in presenting in my work life to know that I can, if needs be, use rhetoric and force of argument to get a point across. I've always found the pentecostal/evangelical declamatory (without meaning to stereotype - I know this is a simplification, and not generalisable) style of preaching both rather comical and rather frightening. But it puts points across. It tells people important things. And these are things that I believe: or, at least, if I were to use this style, I would try to use it to put across what I believe to be true, and important. The danger here might be the phrase lurking just behind the sentences above "I would use this force for good". It's rather arrogant, true, but it's also dangerous. And the liberal theological background that I tend to espouse doesn't sit well with a loud, forceful style: it is, but its very nature, intellectual. But should it be, always? That's what I need to start to explore. One of the many things. We have a section of time set aside next week, at the training weekend in Ditchingham, to look at homilectics, the art /practice of preaching: maybe this will be something that I might be able to discuss with some of the others there.

Music today - not much, as we had connectivity problems at work, and then I was fixing my machine

• Pärt: ... which was the son of ... - Baltic Voices (thanks to Radio 3)
• Aspice, Domine quia facta est a6 - The Cardinall's Musick (The Byrd Edition 4: Cantiones Sacrae 1575)
• Attolite portas a6 - The Cardinall's Musick (The Byrd Edition 4: Cantiones Sacrae 1575)
• Da mihi auxilium a6 - The Cardinall's Musick (The Byrd Edition 4: Cantiones Sacrae 1575)
• Dilige dominum a8 - The Cardinall's Musick (The Byrd Edition 4: Cantiones Sacrae 1575)

Oh, and Steve Kemp, who's project gnump3d is, has shown an interest in my ideas for a "what I listened to today" package to go in the stats section of the official distribution. Just need to write it, now!

I love Byrd...