I think, if I’m forced into saying it, that the moon lamp has only had a total of a day’s rest since I got it, and saying that, I think I’m basically afraid that I’ll burn it up before I can make the move. I don’t want to do that. The alternative is, of course, allowing the depression to take over and I just can’t afford that. I need to be able to focus.
The fact that I don’t want to write to anyone is proof to me that the depression is deeper than I thought. Writing letters or journal entries has always been fun and productive for me. I just can’t seem to get to it these days and that’s never happened. At least, not in a very, very long time.
Taking down the tree is a sad thing, and I really wanted to leave mine up, especially since it was so cute.
Seems like the FC meeting might be rather exciting next week when Princess Leia joins the fray! Oh to be a fly on the wall!!
And yes, “It’s just being mean (stingy, niggardly, chintzy) for the Finance Council to say we all have to do everything out of our own pockets.” I don’t know of any place, any more that allows fundraisers. Unless it’s the Girl Scouts and their cookie sales.
I got my clothes ready for church tomorrow, but I don’t know if I’m even going to make it. Right now, I have an ache that runs down the left side of my neck and I don’t know what it’s from. I just know it’s new and I don’t like it.
I’ll get you a new moon lamp if the current one dies, so don’t worry about that.
I had an ache in the neck like that earlier this week, but it’s gone now. Maybe it was stress over the funeral. I already had it before the van issue, so it wasn’t that.
I just emailed to Princess Leia that we, the church volunteers, aren’t concerned about the funding as much as we are about the disrespect to us and the open defiance of all the systems and procedures we have in place.
Last year, several of us concluded that it would be really good to have a Parish Communications employee, a one-stop-shop for getting information to the parishioners. Instead of having to deal with five different people for different media (bulletin, email, social media, slides on the viewscreen on Sunday, etc.) one person would take the information and get it out all different ways.
We put together a proposal. The youth director presented it to the Parish Council. They agreed. She presented it to the Finance Council. They agreed. The pastor agreed. Then, instead of advertising the job in the parish, diocese, etc., the business manager offered it to the young man who had been Middle School Youth coordinator, but had been offered a job at another parish.
He’s a nice boy - I’ve known him since middle school - but he would have been terrible at the job. His social skills are worse than James’s or Vlad’s, and his organizational skills were sufficiently lacking that Lourdes and Josefina said, “Good!” when told he was going to another job.
Anyway, he turned it down (good), and then the parish council, goaded by the Stewardship cabal, asked what the delay was in advertising, taking applications, interviewing, etc., and the business manager said since we didn’t have anyone yet, she had decided the church really couldn’t afford it and wasn’t going to try to fill the position.
And as of now, still nothing has been done. I need to remind Leia to bring that up on Thursday! It’s not the first time there have been shenanigans about hiring. When the Director of Religious Education post was vacant a couple of years ago, Tom the Son was (semi-ironically) interested in applying. I called the secretary and asked about the qualifications and application process, and she said, “You’ll have to talk to the business manager.”
So I called her, and she said, “Well, we don’t have a job posting with the qualifications and an application form yet.” I blew a gasket, because they’d done a mystery hire the last time the job was vacant, and the person turned out to be terrible. The next time I saw Leia, I explained the situation, and that the program was in trouble because of the jerk woman foisted on everyone, and that if they weren’t transparent about the entire process and using the widest possible advertising, so that the parish felt good about the person hired, all the volunteers would quit.
And the person eventually hired has turned out to be good. They also had a good process for hiring the Middle School coordinator boy, with an interview process that included parents of children that age ... and he wasn’t truly bad at it, just not all that some would have liked. (His mom was helping him for a while, but then she got involved with her own mother’s illness, and the son started to flounder more.)