Let there be light! …or, see you in church :-)

On March 1st, I spent some time reviewing the two weeks since Boskone, trying to figure out what the f*ck I’d been doing. It seemed like all that time had gone by without my getting diddly-squat accomplished. After I started adding up all the extras, it made more sense: two online meetings, a week with that head cold dragging me down, four extra loads of laundry (I have no dryer, so everything has to be individually shaken out and hung up to line-dry), breaking down the old bed, taking a door off its hinges and replacing it after the new bed was moved in, shoveling out after two big snow storms and one small one, doing a Full Moon/eclipse ritual, catching up with a lot of website e-mail, and doing a lot of work on the IPNE website…among other things.

Since March 1st, I’ve been planning a church service for today, which dominated my week. I also spent an afternoon on calls back and forth about my homeowner’s insurance (not telephone tag, actual calls) which saves me about $100 on the premium and also adds By Light Unseen Media to the policy. Business items aren’t covered by your homeowner’s policy unless you arrange for that–for BLUM, it’s mostly the computers and whatever small amount of “inventory” I happen to have, but I’d still like it covered. I researched lodging out in the Northampton area for ConBust and made the room reservation for me and a friend I’m sharing a room with. I came up with the title for The Longer the Fall, Book 2 of The Vampires of New England Series, which is no small deal. I participated in an IPNE conference call. I got the tripod I bought set up and experimented with lighting and angles and positioning and made some trial videos of myself, which was very interesting. I got an unauthorized copy of my FireHeart article taken down from a blog by filing a formal complaint, including an “electronic signature,” to the ISP (I tried contacting the blogger first and s/he ignored me, so…). I did a New Moon ritual (darn moon phases, they just keep coming!).

But mostly, it’s been church service. The current minister asked me a while back if I might be able to fill in if she needed coverage, and she’d asked me to do March 9th a couple of weeks ago. This is a Unitarian-Universalist church, and the services have a number of components. I need to decide on a theme, and find relevant quotations for the Order of Service, opening words, closing words, and usually a chalice lighting. The church has a selection of chalice lighting speeches but I’ve gotten into the habit of finding one that fits the theme of the service. I need to select three hymns and send them to the musician so he has time to practice them. I need to put together the Order of Service and get it to the person who designs and prints that. I need to find an appropriate children’s story to read. I need to find a short “reading” or a responsive reading, and if I do the latter, I need to format it and print it out as an insert for the Order of Service. And finally, I need to write the sermon–I say, “finally,” because that’s the part I am sometimes finishing just before bedtime on Saturday night. *wry smile*

I came up with a theme last weekend, and I started running searches for quotations. I now have a number of sources for these, but usually two of them–Bartleby’s Online and The Garden Way: Quotations for Gardeners–provide me with a wealth of material. Running keyword searches and going through them takes a while, though. I now streamline the children’s story search by doing keyword searches in the online library network catalog, making a list of likely titles that are on the shelves, and going to the library to look at them. I used to just drop into the library and go through all the storybooks, but that tended to be rather frustrating. After a few sessions in which I wound up doing keyword searches on the library’s computers, I thought, “why don’t I just do this at home, before I come over here?” Doh. I found a story for today’s service on Tuesday.

Writing sermons, for me, is like writing everything else: I spend about nine times as long beating my Muse’s head against the walls, pacing the floors, reading related quotes and essays for inspiration, re-reading my own writing to prime the pump (something that works well for me), doing research and having mental arguments with myself about what I’m reading, as I spend actually writing. Hence, I finally got started writing the sermon on Friday, after collecting and reading quite a lot of essays, articles, and reference material related to my theme. I was a little later getting the Order of Service e-mailed off than usual, and I still hadn’t quite pinned down the reading.

Another Friday night and Saturday, another big storm! This makes three weekends in a row now! We had pouring rain on Friday, a bit of a break, then more pouring rain on Saturday. Saturday night, the “cold front” went through, with high winds forecast. They said we might get thunder, but I never heard any. At least it wasn’t snow! However…it was the change-over to Daylight Savings. At 12:35am (EST), I was doing a final read-through of the sermon, in preparation for printing it out. (Along with assembling and writing all the material for the service, I also “rehearse” it all several times.) I also needed to print out the rest of the material, like the opening and closing words. Outside, the sky had completely cleared. It was very dark with lots of stars because it was just one day after the New Moon. There was a roaring wind.

Poof–the power went out.

I lit a couple of candles and put a call into National Grid, which didn’t seem to have any calls from Pepperell yet. This wasn’t a widespread outage. I could see lights on at my neighbors’ houses and the streetlight out front was shining. I walked out with the big flashlight, and the line to my house was okay. I could only guess that a branch had come down on a line just up the street. Trouble is…small local outages often take longer to get fixed than big ones.

But I was really in a bind! I have to get up an hour and half early for church services, anyway, and with Daylight Savings, it was two and half hours early. I’d been planning to print out the sermon, set the clocks ahead and go to bed. Now I couldn’t set the clocks at all–including my alarm clock! How was I going to be sure I didn’t oversleep?

I sat and had a nice self-indulgent sulk until my three problem-solving brain cells kicked in and I remembered that my cell phone has an alarm clock function (that’s what they call it, “Alarm Clock.”). I got the cell phone out and tested that and it worked. (The watch has an alarm but it won’t wake me up.) The computer is a laptop so it was running on battery. I had no idea how long the power would be out, though, and I could only hope it was fixed by the next morning, or I’d have to take the laptop to church and do my service off the screen! (I’m told there is a precedent for that. *wry smile*) So I went to bed with the flashlight and cell phone (not my usual bedtime accessories).

The power came back on around 4:00 a.m., which I know because I didn’t sleep very well. *sigh* But I printed everything out when I got up, arrived at the church on time and the service went fine. Between the time change and the power outage, when I got home I had to reset the VCR, the older computer, the stove clock, two light timers, the fax machine, the cordless phone, the alarm system panel, my watch and my alarm clock. I also had to “register” the two cordless phone handsets. Sheesh. I know I’m supposed to check the smoke alarm battery, too! But right now I’m cold, sleep-deprived, and not feeling too motivated.

Two rather cool things this week: first, I discovered that I’ve sold three Kindle editions of Mortal Touch! I hadn’t checked in a while, and this is a new development. Second, I got my very first piece of fan mail! I’ve gotten feedback from people I know personally, but this was a complete stranger, from the U.K., writing to me to tell me how much she loved the book, and asking if there will be a sequel. Golly. That feels nice! Doesn’t quite make up for the fact that the Amazon sales rank for MT’s print edition is tanking–but that’s what the video stuff I’m working on is to boost, partly.

Here endeth the latest update! Is it just me, or is the whole ‘Net really dead? I’m not even getting as much spam as I used to.