Bored/Irritated Thread

[GreyBeard]

I am emotionally drained.

Tonight was our community Baccalaureate service. We had arranged for the pastor of the local heavy metal church to bring his worship band to do music, but at the last ministerium meeting he announced that his band members didn't want to drive all the way to town and set up all their equipment to only do three songs. So I put my hand up and said I could bring my guitar and lead a few songs. The problem is, I'm not a song leader. I'm a performer - a performer who tends to take great liberties with timing and tune, which I can get away with when I'm performing solo, just me and my guitar. I do a monthly concert at the nursing home, singing a repertoire of Fanny Crosby hymns, Old Rugged Cross and Because He Lives. What I lack in talent I make up with enthusiasm. Those who don't know music tell me how great I am. I can tell when someone does know music. I see them grimacing a lot.

Baccalaureate is for the graduates, but over half of the audience is also parents and grandparents. So I tried to mix up the music with two hymns and two praise songs. I opened with a rousing version of To God Be The Glory. Then came Shout To The Lord by Darlene Zschech followed by Seek Ye First. The last song was Higher Ground by Oatman & Gabriel. During rehearsal yesterday I had gone through In Christ Alone by Townend and Getty and then decided not to use it. But I had the tune in my head when I started working on Higher Ground and discovered they have the same meter. It fits. It took forever for me to get the right tune to Higher Ground into my head. So, tonight, in order to make sure I started off singing Higher Ground to the right tune I put a little extra twang in the guitar opening. In doing that I also started it way too fast. Then, rather than stop and start over, once it cut loose, I rared back and let her fly. I ended up with the twangiest, liveliest rendition of Higher Ground that those folks ever heard.

Now I'm sitting up late thinking about what an idiot I made of myself. After over 900 sermons I'm used to the post-preaching blues and have learned to limit the second guessing that always assails me Sunday afternoons. But it still takes me awhile to wind down after singing to a broader audience in a larger venue.

[GreyBeard]

I'm sick of being sick. After getting three stents put in last month, which revealed the ex-stent of my cardio issues, I had a great week at Bible Camp as Dean. The last day of camp I got hit with a chest cold/upper respiratory infection. I'm now on day 15 and still doing anti-biotics, codeine cough syrup and daily nebulizer treatments. Fortunately I didn't get it as bad as my wife. I took her to the ER on Saturday and she ended up admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. She had a major migraine while there which really befuddled the doctors and nurses who thought she should be improving much faster. When they figured out it was a migraine, they gave her some meds that brought her back to the land of the living pretty quick. She came home yesterday. I've been enjoying two weeks of rest, but I can't do any of my shut-in or elderly visitation until I get over this cold, so I hope my symptoms curtail soon.

[GreyBeard]

Telemarketers.

Two calls this morning in spite of listing my number on the National Do Not Call Registry. One loophole is that charities are allowed to call. The first was from Kids Wish Network. I politely declined. Their name sounds a lot like the make a wish foundation, except when I checked them out, they get an F grade from charity watchdog organizations since 85% of their income is paid to fundraisers and a significant portion of the rest is paid in Director's salaries. Only about 10% of their receipts goes towards granting wishes to terminally ill children.

Reminds me of my childhood when MD carnivals were big. Neighborhood kids would host a backyard carnival and send the proceeds to Jerry's Kids during the annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. Except the kids in my neighborhood hosted an OB carnival instead of an MD carnival. OB stood for Our Benefit. The did all the same games, but kept the money. At least they were reasonably up front about it.

The second call was from a window replacement company. Normally commercial enterprises can't call people on the Do Not Call Registry. But they have found a way around it, or so they state. Rather than calling as a commercial window replacement company, they call as a charity that will get a donation for every in home demonstration the window company is able to schedule. Unfortunately, I failed to gather enough information to report them for violating the National Do Not Call Registry.

[thessarabian]

This is why I like having caller id

[GreyBeard]

Caller ID would be nice, but I'm too cheap to fork over the extra $5 a month.

[LutherMan]

I wish the thrift shop had caller ID. I probably wouldn't answer 90% of the calls...

[GreyBeard]

In response the the recent post that claimed that facebook killed TT, I ran across a great blog tonight, The Anti-Facebook League of Intelligentsia.

http://theantifacebookleague.com/about/

[thessarabian]

Interesting, but it represents a subjective experience more than objective reality and fails to consider other factors in our society, preferring instead to blame it all on Facebook. And I have to wonder about a person who uses such sophisticated language but apparently doesn't know how to spell "quizzes".

[GreyBeard]

Like so many other areas of life, if you have to say it, it's probably not true. By claiming to be "Intelligentsia" they are really admitting to being merely wannabes.

[LutherMan]

It got warm and humid here today just when I was finally getting ready for some chill in the air...

[LutherMan]

My neighbor let her dog dump a pile by my back door and I stepped in it in my favorite pair of shoes...

[GreyBeard]

Just when I think that two weeks of R&R after bypass surgery is a bit much, I have to cough which helps me realize that the sternum they ripped in two is still healing. owey owey owey Maybe it is a bit soon to totally quit the pain pills.

[ValS]

My dad used to get annoyed by the clicking of the staples in his sternum when he'd cough. Hang in there, Pastor Beard. You'll be almost better than new very soon.

[GreyBeard]

At the Community Thanksgiving Dinner & Service this evening, I had half a dozen different people come up to me to say that my color was much improved since my surgery. Of course the last time many of them saw me was at a community music event where I performed a few songs just two days before I went to the hospital. I had done six services in four days including two funerals, not knowing yet that my left coronary artery was 85-98% blocked. So I was a bit drained that night.

Tonight after the Community Thanksgiving service I watched some Mark Knopfler/Dire Straits videos on Utube. I had the song Brothers In Arms going through my head over and over, so thought I might as well listen to the original, along with half a dozen different concert performances chronicling Knopfler's development from a punk kid to a respected old man. Now in his sixties, he's still an amazing guitarist.

I had the cassette of that album 25 years ago when I lived in London. Listening to those songs again brings me back to those days, driving a big green Mercedes 508D van down the A1(M) at 3:30 in the morning on my way to Covent Garden Market to buy the day's supply of produce, with either Brothers in Arms or Dylan's Infidels blasting full volume. Those were the only two cassettes I owned at the time.

[LutherMan]

We were supposed to get snow but it passed us by...