A whole week without posting - how remiss.

Well, the good news is that I seem to be effectively over that last round of cold etc that started at the beginning of December. It more or less wiped out 3 weeks of work and required me to convalesce over Christmas, so goodbye and good riddance to those bugs! I am so grateful to be better!

This has been a week of gearing up for 2012 for the business. At the end of last year changes were made to the diagnostic assay for which I sell controls, requiring that all the values for that kit were re-analysed to establish new ranges, and, together with some additional testing in the current kit, I have been doing that work. This will also justify sending customers and potential users a mailshot to stimulate interest.

On top of that it is always good to service and calibrate equipment when there's a quieter patch, so I've been servicing and calibrating the pipettes I use. This means I can be sure that they will deliver the (tiny) volumes of liquid they are supposed to with known accuracy and precision, and also confirms the work that has already been done is valid.

And finally, having moved on from my previous employer, I'm doing work for them for one of their clients which will hopefully be ongoing, so I've bought certain bits of kit and additional materials that will be needed for that - ended up spending a couple of hours researching and purchasing bits and pieces Friday. This week has also been VERY spendy!

So what else is happening?

Monday night we saw Ian B from Heyford Park licensed to work in Bicester and particularly for Emmanuel Church Bicester. My good friend Rachel who heads up the worship there invited me to come play for the band and I was able to get Mark from Heyford Park along to sing too - he's a great singer and fitted in really well. She'd asked me to play electric, but after the last 3 1/2 years here I nearly couldn't do it - in all honesty I've felt completely crushed over worship, and while God has been gracious in that time, it's felt so difficult. Chris was good and encouraged me to go for it, and Rachel was wonderful with her encouragement too, before and after. It feels like now is a time for restoration and healing, and that's where my expectation is.

I'm speaking again tomorrow, this time off Ephesians 2 1-10. It's a mixture of encouragement, theology and gospel message, and will hopefully be more than just words. I'm getting a little faster, but still seem to have to invest a lot of time to be thorough enough and to ensure I don't say anything overtly stupid or disconnected. Chris is also good for a sanity check.

At the moment, particularly now the lurgy is over, it feels like the time has come to take up the slack, start working, planning and above all, to not just give in to wishes and desires of self-entertainment and sloppy conduct. This is a partial success so far. I just need to spend much less time on the internet and more time doing other things - almost anything else that won't cause problems.

And there's more study for the licensed lay ministry to be done. Next weeks episode is dealing with apophatic prayer, which sounds like something with a carbon ring structure and a few amino groups and a Chlorine stuck to it.

There you go - a week in one compact-ish post.