Hey, how're you doing? Sorry you can't get through

...just a qwik note to all you friends, family and other fone callers out there; should you be planning to ring our home phone sometime soon, please DO leave an answer phone message. Due to the number of people calling about our flat recently, we've gone for a policy of no longer answering the phone until we hear who's calling. So, if we're in we promise to pick it up once we hear it's you. Sorry for the inconvenience and please feel free to direct hatemail - no, sorry, to direct prayers of goodwill towards our landlady who's to blame for the whole argy-bargy...

Do you wanna see me do the shimmy again?

Ello blogging world. Its been a while, I know. I know, I know, I know... Sorry! Been busy. Spent some time trying to take a holiday. Failed. Well, not entirely, but it didn't work out the way I'd meant it to. So what? So I'm back in work mode and trying not-very-valiantly to get stuff done. Good grief, it's hot out, BTW - thought I was going to get fried running errands earlier...

(I'd love to claim this was my picture, but alas no, it comes courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bodensee_Sonnenuntergang.jpg)

This is where I spent my attempt at holiday-making. Lake Constance, or to be precise, the Bregenz (i.e. Austrian) end of it. Nice place - you even get a view that's remotely sea-like in that you can't see the shore on the other side for some parts. That's where I'd really liked to have gone, of course - the ocean. This was good, too, in its own right. Just not long enough...

(This one courtesy of www.erlebnis-segeln.de)

Came back from that to a busy week (last week) doing, well, not much in terms of achievements. Just small stuff like tidying and cleaning up the house, getting bills out, cashing cheques, doing laundry, arguing with my landlady, etc. Chores that had not been done for a bit. Oh, and on Thursday I gave my first ever lecture at Heidelberg University. (Yes, please feel free to "ooh" and "aah" and send me fanmail.) I was invited as a guest speaker to a lecture on management skills for pastors/ministers. Now, to those of you not accustomed to the German way of running churches, our "Landeskirche" (main Protestant denomination) hires pastors for their theological qualification, full stop. You don't necessarily need to know anything about people management, business, administration, etc. All you need is a degree in (theoretical) theology, which means that anything church life throws your way in terms of admin, management challenges, etc. will be stuff you learn how to do on the job. The good thing is that people (including, fortunately, some of the pastors in question) have begun to realise that, hey, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if those leader guys actually knew what they were doing. To this end, there's been a lot of discussion (which really helps, of course) and sage nodding of heads, but not much else in terms of curriculum changes for theology students or so. Which, as you can tell, is something that annoys me as someone who hopes to be one of those pastors some day and who happens to have a background in management training. So, when I was invited to speak at this (admittedly small) lecture on the topic of communications management for pastors, I jumped at the chance. So, how did it go? Well, not that bad, I guess. It was hard for me to identify particular areas of people management skills that we could have worked on within the limited time of just one lecture, so I plumped for the basics and drilled them on giving good feedback (and receiving it, of course). Not rocket science, but I did feel it was worthwhile doing, especially judging from the feedback I got from participants at the end.

(Image courtesy of www.sequencelearning.com and no, I'm not on the pic)

What else? Well, the weekend was nice & peaceful except for the fact that we got showered with phone calls from people wanting to rent our flat and wanting us to show it to them. We handed in our notice a while ago, and it turns out our landlady had been advertising the flat (without telling us) since the beginning of last week. Not only that, but she (who lives in Bavaria) was giving out our home number and my cell phone number to all and sundry, telling them to call us and arrange to see the flat. She didn't think fit to even let us know people were going to call! Obviously, our feathers were ruffled and I did my very best to let her know so (which I'm hopeless at - my inbred "well now, you can't just be rude to people just because they annoy you" always comes out in force in these situations where I should really be sounding stern and business-like. Makes me feel so terribly Fawlty-esque sometimes...) over the phone. We haven't heard the end of it yet, though - people are still calling despite my request for her to change her plans. Ah well - I guess I needed to learn to be coarse and aggressive at some point in my life, so why not now. Grrrrr! (Yes, I know that sounded lame and pet-like - I'm trying!!!)

(This one courtesy, once again, of the Beeb http://www.bbcprograms.com/pbs/catalog/fawltytowers/images/0102fawl.jpg)