7 days

I know I live in Canada.

But 7 days of snow in spring is a bit much, even for Calgary. Where's the sunshine and flowers???

Squeezing into a shoe that isn't supposed to fit

This poster has been a real challenge to complete. Not that there's anything particularly insightful on it, but just trying to arrange the kind of argument that I would spend 20 pages of text writing into a more visual format.

And you can tell that I'm not used to making graphs or even charts, because it took me the better part of yesterday just to produce those two little graphics you see on the poster!

English literature definitely is a qualitative kind of discipline, where our arguments are built on comparisons of what is contained within the texts we use as our sources, not how many of them there are. Quantitative analysis really doesn't show up in English (except for a few structuralists and come cultural critics), so trying to come up with a graphic representation of my argument was difficult indeed.

But it is finished. Now I just need to get it to a printer that can produce it poster-sized, finish off the actual paper that will go with it (if anyone is interested in the rest of the argument), print off information cards and write up my 5 minute blurb for the judges who will be coming around to all the posters to analyze them. So there's lots yet to do! But it's been interesting so far.

[Clicking on the poster should give you a bigger version of it]

My new boyfriend

At least that's what he tells me every night.

"I'm George Stroumboulopoulos. And I'm your boyfriend"

I am enchanted. I will admit that.

Imagine my surprise at leaving the country for four years only to return and find a CBC program I like! George has some of the most interesting guests on the show, and although his attempts at comedy sometimes fall flat (no flatter than Letterman or Leno though), there's competition with The Daily Show in my house for the late night slot.

Chuck Norris?

So apparently, Chuck Norris jokes are all the thing now. Why? I don't know.

My students were comparing their favourites during our lab period today, and at first, I thought I was mis-hearing them. But no. These students, who weren't even alive when Chuck Norris movies were cool, are suddenly all over him.

I don't get it. I've probably seen every Chuck Norris movie ever made - I dated a guy who was a huge Norris fan - but the cinephile in me has erased most of those memories. Despite that, I have to say, I find the Norris websites confusing...

Intellectual stimulation (or lack thereof)

I've been feeling the isolation of being in a place NOT the same as the university that will grant me my degree when all is said and done.

I knew it would be a tradeoff coming here - that work, life, kids education etc. would be easier, but writing the dissertation would be harder. But it's felt particularly poignant over the last few days because:
a) I received email notice about a workshop that I'd badly love to attend but can't since it's 3000 miles away
b) A friend and colleague is defending and I won't be there for it.
c) I'm realizing that with the end of the semester (for most people) that everyone is busy and I should not expect responses to the various queries I have sent over the last few weeks.

I've tried to alleviate some of the isolation by attending events at the local university, but with the term winding down, those will also dry up over the summer. We did go to the local sciencecafe last month, and I hope to go again this month, but that's only one evening every four weeks or so, and doesn't really satisfy in the way that attending a lecture or defense would.

I'm taking summer off from one of my jobs, so I'll have more time for writing, but with the summer also come even fewer opportunities for intellectual stimulation. At least the internet is a (poor) substitute, that will hopefully keep me going till I get through the writing!

Patience

Everytime I start a new academic or work project, I label a new file folder. I'm going to either have to go buy more folders, or stop beginning new projects because I've only got one left now. I'll give you three guesses which option I'll choose, and the first two don't count!

I'm a rather impatient person. I've been trying to get better at it, but I do tend to want things to happen faster than they tend to. I'm thinking that might be why I keep taking on so many projects. While I'm waiting for other people to do their part of a project, I get impatient and go start a new one. Then all of a sudden I've got a huge number of projects on the go!

Patience is a virtue.
Virtue is a grace.
Grace is a little girl,
Who doesn't wash her face.

I recently worked on a project for a government client. Talk about slow! Everything has to be approved by many people at many different levels, and just getting an answer to a question can take a week! That was hard to get used to.

But academia really isn't any better. I find myself getting a bit annoyed at the seasons of academia. Last spring/summer, I sent off three proposals for book chapters or articles to various places, all of which were conditionally accepted (to my surprise!) Each indicated they would respond and send revision requests by the fall. It's now April and I've yet to see those revision notes. I also know I won't see them till May since it's the end of the term, but I find myself a bit annoyed that none of these projects seem to have happened on schedule. I'm suspecting that's the norm in academia, but it doesn't make it any easier while I wait.

I'd just really love to finish these projects off, file them away, and concentrate on the current ones. *sigh* But I'll just have to wait till I hear back from the people who have the power to publish them.

Have patience. Have patience.
Don't be in such a hurry.
When you get impatient,
You only start to worry.
Remember, remember,
that God is patient too.
And think of all the times
when others have to wait for you*.

I am hopeful that someday I'll learn patience. I have been learning to be a more patient driver over the last few years. Perhaps I'll be able to do the same for the rest of my life as well. It's just that there's so much I want to do that I don't want to wait in order to be able to do it! That includes academic projects, which is my challenge: to focus on what's happening right now, and leave everyone else's schedules to them.

*These are the lyrics to a children's song the girls would listen to on one of their favorite tapes. For the full effect, you'd have to be able to imagine a turtle singing them in a slow, low voice that sounds like a record being played too slow.

New genre

I'm venturing into a new scholarly genre in three weeks time - the poster paper.

The genre is primarily used by scientists (including social scientists) so those of us in the humanities usually don't have the experience of publishing this way. But I submitted an abstract to a conference on genomics (the science of genetic information), specifically to their section on "liberal democracy and genomics" and it was picked up as a poster paper.

So now I have to figure this genre out!

Looks very different from the kind of writing/publishing I'm used to doing, that's for sure!

It does offer me the opportunity to think beyond just words to describe the work that I'm doing, which is not only a novelty, but something I've been wanting to do for a while now. (I've been thinking about creating a dissertation-based website where I can include dissertation-related material that wouldn't necessarily make it into the dissertation itself)

I think producing this poster presentation will actually be very productive as I work to adapt my research to this kind of format. I'm expecting that in the act of translating my work into this new genre, it will reveal things about my research that I haven't really thought about before.

Certainly, thinking about my research into the novel I'll be discussing - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - as a scientific project, with a background discussion, methodology, results and discussion, will require me to approach the novel and my work on it from a different angle than I have to this point.

I realize what I'm doing might be construed by some as a kind of "disloyalty" to the discipline. After all, the 2006 presidential address by Marjorie Perloff to the MLA called for a return to a more conventional definition of the English department, with less cultural studies and perhaps even less interdisciplinary work and more literary work. The debate of whether this is a good idea or a bad one is too large for me to engage with right now, but the point is that presenting a poster paper certainly isn't staying faithful to the (original) "literary" nature of the discipline.

But I'm looking forward to it. Wish me luck as I try to remember what a science poster presentation is supposed to look like!

Happy Blogversary

Five years.

I don't think I necessarily had any notions of how long this blog would last when I first began, but I probably wouldn't have guessed it would be going five years later.

During the time, many things have changed. Pictures and video are much easier to embed now and the whole Blogger interface has changed. But mostly I think things have stayed the same. I still seem to blog about the same kinds of stuff, maybe I blog a bit more about my dissertation work, but considering its LARGE role in my life, that seems natural.

When I first began, I thought the blog would be a way for friends who were far away to keep up with what was going on in my life, instead of having to write the same email over and over. But it very quickly changed, partly because I realized that the people who I email are not necessarily the same people who read the blog. So as a kind of mass email, it has failed.

But the blog is just the medium, and its purpose (at least for me has changed). One of the things I really have found useful about blogging, particularly as I blog about the dissertation, is that it has taught me how to talk about my academic work in a way that is less formal, and a bit more approachable. Now, before you protest, know that I do recognize that I've still got a long way to go before my writing about the dissertation really becomes approachable, but I'm starting to see differences, and if for nothing else, the blog has been instrumental in making that happen.

So here's to five years - who knows what's yet to come?

The horror, the horror...

Okay, "horror" is probably too strong a word for it. But the inability of so many people to use language to effectively express themselves is really starting to get to me.

Maybe it's because I'm getting old.

Maybe it's because I'm marking first year composition papers.

Maybe it's because while taking a break from marking first year composition papers I tried reading the letters to the editor section of the newspaper.

Maybe it's because I started reading favorite blogs during another break from marking first year composition papers and came across my buddy Jim's comment that BostonNow is limiting its reader-generated section because

Thankfully, the paper seems to have realized that most people who would blog for free in this situation are either terrible, desperate, or a little crazy, so they've cut down on the amount of space given to re-printing them.

Together, these events have conspired to convince me that the number of people capable of using language to accurately convey a coherent, well thought out argument (about anything!) is drastically falling. And it's not just people who have an excuse. About a third of my class are ESL students, which means they often say things I can't understand, but I do understand why they're having difficulty expressing themselves. Another 10% of my students write like I would expect high school graduates to write.

But it's the other half of the class whose inability to manipulate the language with any dexterity that (collectively) convince me we're in serious trouble. They grew up here, speaking the language since they learned to talk, writing it all through their formal education so far, and yet they could not write an argument to save their lives because they can't grasp simple concepts like "every sentence needs a subject and a verb". They prattle on in their writing like they do when they speak. And although I've yet to see someone type out "you know what I'm sayin'?"*, they're coming real damn close.

It gets really frustrating, because there's just so much that they have not learnt to this point, that even covering the basics would take far more time than I'm allotted to teach them. I'm supposed to be teaching them the higher writing functions, but I feel like I only teach those functions to that 10%. The rest I'm just trying to get caught up. It's exhausting and depressing at the same time.

*the answer to this query is usually "no" since the phrase is used to avoid actually saying what it is that the speaker is convinced he/she is saying.

Big Dog

I've seen a much shorter clip of Big Dog before, but this one shows some really interesting scenarios that the robot works through - hills, ice, being knocked off balance. You might want to play it with the sound off (or down) because Big Dog does make a rather annoying sound while operating.

Big Dog was produced by Boston Dynamics.

Best $30 I ever spent

This week I made an appointment at my old hair salon. I haven't been to it since I moved away five years ago - partly because I was gone, and then once we came back, there was little need since I was wearing my hair long. Not to mention, it's location isn't very convenient.

This week I made an appointment and when I got there said "My hair is a disorganized mess. Make it better" or something along those lines.

I wish I had done this months ago. Although I've lost some of the length I had last week, my hair can't by any stretch of the imagination be called short. My stylist didn't recognize me, but hey, last time I saw her, my hair was about 3" long, so I can understand. But she is just as fabulous with long hair as with short. I cannot believe how different that cut has made me feel!

It isn't just the hair. I look in the mirror and feel like I look younger, more beautiful, happier. I know it's not just the cut, but eliminating the frustration I sometimes felt when it was a couple of inches longer has worked wonders. I never would've thought a haircut could do that, but it did. Amazing!

Sunshine and wine

The sunshine in California was absolutely wonderful! I adored being able to sit out on a patio, drinking wine, having great conversation with good friends, then eating barbecue, more wine, and a tour of some really gorgeous country. Life could be fun if every weekend included a day like that...

I suppose if I really did get my wish, I *could* get bored of it after a while. Not the sunshine or the wine. But I suspect I'd run out of interesting things to say to interesting people.

I guess it's a bit like what my mother told me when I complained that I couldn't have my favourite meal every night. She told me that if I did, it wouldn't be my favourite anymore and I'd get tired of it night after night. What made it special was that it was so rare.

So I suppose a Saturday afternoon in Napa/Sonoma with good friends (and wine) could fall into that category. But I'm also pretty sure that it would take a lot of Saturdays for me to tire of it! Such generous and wonderful friends I have!

San Francisco

Conferencing is going well - We're about half way through the conference, and so far everything that I wanted to do or to see has gone off without a hitch.

I saw my advisor yesterday - gave her a chapter (which she seemed genuinely glad to receive), listened to her paper (fabulous!) and had dinner together with a number of her colleagues, which was fun. I don't quite think of them as my colleagues, but I suppose if I want to joint their ranks soon, I'll have to get used to that!

My paper went off fairly well this morning too. We had a miscellany of papers on the panel, and I wasn't quite sure how they would all fit together, but it turned out that they fit very nice - and that's always a good thing when that happens. I'm moderating a panel later this afternoon, which promises to be a lot of fun as well if the conversations I've been having with people are any indication, so I'm looking forward to that. Here's hoping the rest of the conference comes off without a hitch too!

Sleepy and fat

I'm not surprised by the latest finding that sleep deprivation leads to weight gain. I've always known that when I'm the most tired is when I feel like I just want to eat! And the more tired I am, the more fat I want in what I'm eating. Though I also tend to drink more when I'm sleep deprived. Not intensely tired, just not getting enough sleep.

It makes sense I suppose that when the body hasn't had enough sleep, it needs extra energy during the day and you feel hungrier. Good thing I've been (mostly) getting enough sleep - otherwise I'd be ballooning!

(Un)forgettable

A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were laughing when we figured out that our boss was confusing the two of us. Before we figured it out, we'd both been confused at various times because he would tell one of us something and think the other one knew it. We had a good laugh.

But I don't feel like laughing any more. Today my boss mistook me for someone else! Now there are three of us who he is confusing... or maybe just confusing me with two other people. I've often been mistaken for someone else before, but this strikes me as a tad ridiculous.

I guess I haven't made a good impression, or at least haven't made a memorable one.

This day in (blog) history

March 13th must be a good blogging day. Since I began this blog, I've written a post each March 13th, so I suppose now is not the time to stop posting...

On March 13, 2007, I wondered what the world needs with another English major. The answer was "a lot!"

On March 13, 2006, I introduced yawp.

On March 13, 2005, I struggled with figuring out what of the mountain of things that needed to get done I would do first. Coincidentally, I'm struggling with the same thing today, except the list of things that HAVE to get done first - the urgentnotimportant - is longer than it was that day.

On March 13, 2004, I celebrated the return of a working computer and the easing of academic requirements for a particular course.

So, what's going on today?

Well, I've got way too much marking to do. We're only in the second week, and I feel a little overwhelmed. Already. I think it's mostly because I didn't get a break between the last term and the start of this new modified term. And I've got to create a podcast for one class next week that I'll be missing for the PCA conference.

At least the conference paper is mostly there. It needs some theory in the middle, and I'll need to trim up the plot descriptions in order to stay under the time limit, but I think it's doing what I want it to - that is, to provoke conversation about the definition of the vampire. At least I hope it will. The conference schedule itself is getting really hectic with meetings, dinners etc., so my down time will be minimal, but if it's at all like other PCA's I've attended, I'll enjoy myself immensely.

The good news is that I think I circumvented the virus that was trying to take me down earlier this week. On Monday I started feeling that heat and itchiness around the eyes that usually signals a cold and on Tuesday, my cheeks (sinuses) started aching too. Today, neither area is feeling any worse, and if I can take good care of my body for the next few days, I may have dodged the worse of the bug. Here's keeping my fingers crossed.

So this March 13th post is pretty boring. But it's not like it's the first time I've posted a boring post. Thanks for suffering through oh my faithful reader.

I have no idea what to title this post

Writing has been very challenging for me lately. I've felt the absence of writing peers desperately lately and could really use some encouragement as I slog through my current phase of writing.

It's not that the writing's bad. It's just that there's so much going on right now that prioritizing is becoming a problem. You know, that feeling when you have so much to do that you don't know where to start? There are just so many things that are "urgent" and "important" or even just "urgent" and "not important".

I really do try to categorize things according to that cross section, where urgent+important gets done first, urgent+notimportant and important+noturgent get done in various combinations next, and noturgent+notimportant get done last. But it's interesting how both noturgent and notimportant can so quickly change into urgent and important when you don't get to them.

Lately,

• a job application
• taxes

have been urgent+important

with

• student marking

always taking up the urgent+notimportant category.

Yes, you heard what I said. My student's writing is not as important as mine. Mine will dictate what kind of job prospects I have. Theirs is loose, casually constructed and sometimes done under duress because they have to take the course. But I am paid to respond to their writing and they need that feedback in order to complete the course in time, so it gets categorized as urgent. But it takes away time from what's really important to me.

I've actually made some progress, but most of it has been of the rearranging/editing kind for the dissertation, so it isn't really growing. Harder to see the progress when you're shuffling things around, though the shuffling is a really good thing. I was trying to pack way too much stuff into my introduction, and by distributing key sections of it to other chapters, I managed to chop its monstrous size in half. Now I can build up the parts that need building without feeling like the introduction's becoming a two headed monster!

But before that oh-so-important task of dissertation editing, I need to finish writing the conference paper for next week. It's about half there, but it's really unstructured right now and needs some form to hold its bagginess together.

The Tomorrow's Professor blog has had some interesting posts on writing lately, particularly about how to unclutter your writing, but I find that much of their advice is to do things I already find myself doing. No help there. Apparently I know what to do, and I'm doing it fairly efficiently. I'm just not doing enough of it. Simple.

Sometimes I think the frustrations I have writing the dissertation are similar to the frustrations dieters or smokers have. I can read all kinds of books, get all kinds of advice, but when it really comes down to it, I just have to write. When you're trying to lose weight or quit smoking, you can spend all the time in the world talking about it or reading about it, but it really comes down to action. If you want to lose weight, burn more calories than you take in. If you want to quit smoking, stop putting cigarettes into your mouth and lighting them.

If you want to write a dissertation, quit whining and start putting words on paper.

There. That's my advice to myself. Do you think I'll take my own advice?

Being mom

The other day I walked past a storefront at the mall called "The Mom Store" and although I didn't look in, as I walked past, it didn't seem like it was a store for moms per se, but for babies because it was filled with strollers, cribs, toys, bath aids etc. And I found myself thinking what a misnomer the store was - it should've been called "The Baby Store" (though I suspect that name had already been trademarked, hence The Mom Store).

Then this week, I came to the realization that the gradebook I'm using is running out of room and I'll need a new one.

Yes, I know there are online gradebooks, but I prefer to record attendance and grades on the spot in an actual book. And if you're going to accuse me of being a luddite for doing so, you haven't been paying attention to this blog.

My point is, I've been searching for a replacement and every place I look, the only record books I can find have little hearts, or teddy bears, or stars plastered all over them. Ugh! What do high school teachers use? Are you seriously telling me that they ALL just use Excel? Nobody uses paper anymore? In not being able to find a plain record book suitable for adults, I'm a little offended that "teacher" seems to equal "grade-school teacher" only. Just like the "mom" in the store name mentioned above really translates as "woman with a baby".

-----

There have been several times over the last few years... okay, actually, the last couple decades... when I've come across various arguments about being a mother and identity.

Often the article (or more lately, blog post) has been written by a woman who is about to become a mother, or who has recently become one. These writers often worry that their careers will be damaged, that they will talk endlessly of their children (much to the boredom of others around them), or that they will somehow lose their identity.

Their arguments all just feel so disconnected from the reality I live in.

I've been trying to work out why. Am I defective? If everyone else feels their identity is forever changed by having kids, why don't I feel the same way? Did I miss something? Does that make me a bad mother?

The nearest I've been able to figure out is that having children when I was young meant that I skipped over all that worrying about identity and careers and such. Not that I'm advocating having children young. Or advocating not having children young. It's just that I think having children young inherently skips over this question. After all, when you're in your early twenties, you have yet to establish the career that could be potentially damaged by having children. Not having had a career before the kids came along, meant that my worklife post-kids couldn't really be compared to worklife pre-kids since the pre-kids part was so short (and was what I would define as "work" as opposed to "career").

And how do you worry about eroding your "identity" when you've barely begun to develop it yourself? I can see how living as an adult for a decade or more before having children, could make the decision to have children feel like an entire change of identity. I understand those kinds of changes that make you wonder who you will be without ____ [fill in the blank with whatever is relevant] I suppose when you've only been an adult yourself for a few years, becoming a parent gets mixed up a bit with becoming an adult, so that being a parent seems like a natural extension of adulthood. No traumatic change here, just part of the package. Not that mixing up adulthood and parenthood isn't without its (potential) pitfalls, since separating them again after the children grow up could create problems.

I think it's telling that whenever I might try to do so, I have great difficulty imagining myself as not-parent. Some people can remember not being a parent. For me, there never really was an adult me that wasn't a parent - what adult years I had that were childless were short and so close to adolescence that they sometimes don't even seem to be adult. Adulthood and parenthood are really one and the same thing for me - they're synonymous in my vocabulary. Again, not a good/bad thing, just the way it worked out.

All this isn't to say that having children at a young age is a good thing. On the contrary. There are a lot of things that I did the hard(er) way because I was doing them with the kids. For instance, it would've been nice to be an adult student without balancing family life the whole way through. And I know there are things that more financial stability (which older parents usually have) would've provided my children that they didn't get. Then again, we simply lived the lives of a family living at or below the poverty line. There were plenty of other people in that boat with us, both with and without kids.

So it's not a matter of good or bad, just that for me, I never experienced an identity crisis in becoming a mom. But I do feel like we generally forget that "mom" isn't a cookie-cutter label. It isn't just "woman with a baby" or "woman who gives up career" or "soccer mom" or any of the other labels we so easily slap on it. I'm still a mom even after my kids can get their own breakfast (ah! sleeping in again on the weekend), dress themselves, drive a car, fall in love, live with their boyfried, have kids of their own etc.... It never ends. My mom is not only a grandmother but still a mother as well.

So why do I feel like I'm being pushed out of the category of "mother" now that mine are growing up? If there's an identity crisis here, it will be learning to be an adult without being viewed by society as a mother at the same time.

Articulating a teaching philosophy

I've been trying to write a teaching philosophy over the past few days. It's an interesting exercise fraught with what seem like numerous pitfalls. Advice ranges all over the place and the lists of "do's" and "don'ts" seems endless. I've decided the only real solution is to focus on what I do and let the advice go its own way.

But when I think about how I teach and why I teach the way I do, I find that my teaching philosophy seems to be a result of negotiating between contradictions.

On the one hand, it's important for students to see the relevance of what they do in the classroom to their lives.
On the other hand, they need to learn basic terms, ideas, and critical habits whether or not they're "relevant" to their lives.

On the one hand, post-secondary students are adults.
On the other hand, especially junior post-secondary students are not experts in the conventions of their field or the academy and they need to be taught the behaviours expected within the post-secondary educational setting.

On the one hand, I am not an entertainer.
On the other hand, I need to gain and keep the attention of my students if they are to learn what I am trying to teach them.

On the one hand, I am the one expert in the room.
On the other hand, collaboration with peers can be a powerful way of learning.

On the one hand, students need to know how to use available technology in order to succeed in their fields.
On the other hand, I need to use the best tool available to convey an idea, even it its one of the simplest tools available (like say a pen and piece of paper).

On the one hand, course objectives are there to set ou the minimum expectations for everyone in the class to achieve.
On the other hand, each student comes into the class with their own strengths, experiences, weaknesses, and goals, and I need to be able to recognize and respond to those differences.

On the one hand, the semester is very short.
On the other hand, what I teach can last a lifetime.

See what I mean? The way I teach and the reasons that I teach the way I do seem to arise out of these conflicts. I use technology, but only when I think it will be the best way to convey information or to facilitate learning. For example, I've always like to teach film. But films are between 1 1/2 and 2 hours long usually, and unless you have a three hour time block, it's difficult to show a film in its entirety in one session and then have a significant discussion about it. But showing a film and then discussing it several days later also tends to be less dynamic because the students don't have the experience of watching it immediate to mind. But the last time I taught a film, I required the students to log onto a threaded discussion and continue discussing a film we watched earlier that day, which provided an immediacy that you can't get by waiting for the next class meeting and generated a good conversation. In this case, the technology is a tool that helps me provide the students with a richer learning environment.

But at the same time, I also often use a comprehension exercise with my students that requires them to graphically represent one of the readings they've done. I supply the markers and colored paper - they supply the interpretation. It's simple, but students regularly tell me that having to visually represent a written text helps them understand the text better.

So where do I stand on technology in the classroom? Well, it's nice to have (when it works!) but it isn't the solution to every pedagogical problem.

So what do I write in the teaching philosophy about technology? I suppose I'll just have to say "it depends". But I think the tension produced by all these conflicting ideals is what produces my explanation of how I teach and why I teach the way I do.

It just seems unsatisfying to say that my teaching philosophy emerges out of contradictory impulses.

Church Bulletins

Thank God for the Church ladies who type them. These sentences actually appeared in church bulletins or were announced in church services:
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The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.
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The sermon this morning:
"Jesus Walks on the Water."
The sermon tonight:
"Searching for Jesus."
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Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.
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The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been cancelled due to a conflict.
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Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say "Hell" to someone who doesn't care much about you.
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Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.
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Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not pass this way again," giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.
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For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery down stairs.
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Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir.
They need all the help they can get.
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The Rector will preach his farewell message after which the choir will sing: "Break Forth Into Joy."
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Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.
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At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What Is Hell?"
Come early and listen to our choir practice.
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Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.
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Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.
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Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.
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The church will host an evening of fine dining, wuper entertainment and gracious hostility.
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Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM - prayer and medication to follow.
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Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10 AM. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B. S. is done.
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The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.
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The Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.
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The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
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Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.
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The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: "I Upped My Pledge - Up Yours”