The Weekly Wrap-Up: May 27-29, 2020

Yes, those dates are correct. I needed an extra day after the long weekend (isn't it weird how often that's the case?), so I didn't come in until Wednesday.

Good news is, I had a lovely weekend. I saw my parents for the first time since January, which was fantastic and weird. I got to help plant the garden and have some excellent home-cooked meals. It was really nice to see more human beings, but I won't be making a habit of it just yet.

Or I might be. People are slowly trickling back into the office, a few hours at a time. We still keep our distance, but I can't deny that I'm getting a little tired of how quiet it is. And that's me saying that.

This week's project has mostly been editing VCP lessons. There are a lot of them, and they seem to keep multiplying. (Pun intended.) But I'm making pretty good progress. It's definitely going to take a while, though. I've also been proofing the final Outreach pages for release online. You can find it here.

Sorry it's short this week, but I guess art imitates life in this case. I've been spending so much time in my own head lately that I don't really need to work out my feelings in the blog. Please continue to pray about my health. It's extremely frustrating, and of course, doctor's visits are not exactly happening right now.

I hope you guys are doing well and being safe. There's a lot of really sad stuff happening in the world right now. Of course, we know that hope can only be found in Christ. I pray that people will turn to faith to make sense of what we see around us. I love you all.

Bye.

The Weekly Wrap-Up: May 18-22, 2020

This week is brought to you by A.V.

As in audio/visual.

Because all normal things have abandoned us, we're revisiting how everything works now. Which, currently, means that OMS is rethinking how to do Orientation. As you may remember, I usually play a small role during Orientation week - namely, helping teach a history of missions. However, there won't be an in-person training, so our training and development team have been trying to figure out what to do. Ultimately, they decided that half of it will be done via Zoom while the other half will be done via pre-recorded sessions. One of those was my session with Carolyn. She recorded the audio last week, so I spent this week putting together a timeline and some hopefully fun photo elements. (Yes, this is what my plea last week was about. Thanks for the suggestion, Frank!) It actually turned out pretty well, I think. As soon as it's been approved and YouTube verifies my account, I can share a link. It's 37 minutes long, though.

Yes, I listened to 37 minutes of Christian history at least 15 times. Or at least little sections of it over and over and over again. But I'm pleased with the final product. And hopefully, it can (and will need to) be used multiple times until all of this time of assumptionlessness passes.

Other things I've been doing - finally finished my one file-clearing project, but there are always more hiding in the deep recesses of computers. I may get on that, and I may not. I'm also continuing my work on the Spanish booklets. It's going well, albeit slowly. I do a little at a time before I get frustrated with adding and deleting elements. But at least one of them is in a decent place. And I got to edit the online additions to the Outreach magazine. It's just a few more articles, but we still want them to look perfect.

Otherwise, it's been a standard, quiet, lonely week. Still not many people in the office, but people are trickling through more and more, testing the waters. I think it'll be at least another week before we start to see people returning on anything like a regular basis. But who knows, maybe a long weekend will inspire them to return sooner.

This week has been rough as far as health stuff goes. I've been having more dizzy episodes, and I'm also on an antibiotic for other stuff, so that's fun. Plus, I'm not sure how much longer I can mentally deal with the craziness. You can only be at DEFCON 3 for so long before it starts to take a toll. All that to say, your prayers are appreciated.

I hope your Memorial Day is a time of blessing and remembrance.

Bye!

The Weekly Wrap-Up: May 11-15, 2020

My brain is a little bit like molasses today, so bear with me.

We were wondering if more people would be in the office this week, but I think everyone is so used to working from home now that they don't want to deal with people again. Or they are still being conscientious. Who knows?

Anyway, it's still just me and Sarah in the ECC hallway. We're still plugging away, though we are on separate projects now, so we might go an entire morning without actually talking to each other.

So, projects: I'm trying to go through some of our backlogs to weed out stuff we no longer need. I save everything, and very little of it is actually ever needed again. So I figured this is a good time to get rid of it. I also finished the two new booklets in Mizo Chin, which was not easy, because a lot of it looked like this:

Lots of text right on top of each other. It's a bit of a headache.

I'm also trying to figure out how to assist with Orientation via video. For the moment, that means spending a lot of time in Microsoft Paint. I haven't used that in years, but it is serving my purposes currently. I'm trying to find something that will record animation or a drawing, so if you have ideas, let me know.

I've been ruminating on our current situation a bit, and I've had some thoughts. First, I now hate the phrase "these uncertain times." It's become a euphemism for COVID and anything that makes people uncomfortable to talk about, and I want to strangle everyone who says it and remind them that we have always been living in uncertain times.

Second, I believe the more appropriate phrase would be "now that our assumptions can no longer be made..." Because even though we couldn't be certain of things, we still made assumptions. I'm not certain I have milk for that recipe, but I assume I can make a quick trip to the store to get some. I'm not certain I can see my parents this weekend, but I assume the following weekend will be fine. I assumed I would be able to go to the mall when I needed a new outfit. I assumed I could go to Hobby Lobby for new Spring decorations. I assumed that leaving my apartment would never be grounds for possible arrest.

We made a lot of assumptions about life on this planet, and a lot of them have been challenged. I could live with uncertainty - it's the thing I'm most certain of. But to have my most basic gut reactions suddenly brought into question is really messing with my brain. And now, I feel like I'm in this weird limbo. Things are opening up, but maybe not, and you can go some places, but it's probably better to wait, though we have no idea how long that will be, and maybe you should just stick to your bunker until everything is all better. We assume it will be, someday, but in these uncertain times, who really knows?

Umm... sorry for ending on a downer?

Bye!

The Weekly Wrap-Up: May 4-8, 2020

This week was so much quieter than last week.

I'm quite pleased by that.

Granted, I feel like I've been reliving all of last week. See, we recorded each session, and so this week, I've been editing those recordings. I don't have to listen to all of it, but there are big gaps where we did breakout rooms and such, so I thought I'd be nice and leave those out for anyone watching later.

Also, we did a debrief of last week on Tuesday that turned into 'we're doing this again in four weeks, who thought that was a good idea' that I mostly stayed silent for. I know when to pick my battles.

Otherwise, I've been working on the new booklets in Mizo Chin, which mostly makes me want to tear my hair out. I forgot how much longer Mizo is than English. Lots of moving text and images around.  I think it took me at least an hour (and four extra pages) to get booklet 65 flowing properly.

I'd add more, but I've been feeling off again this week. Lots of dizzy spells, so I'm going home to hopefully get some sleep this weekend.

Bye!

The Weekly Wrap-Up: April 27 - May 1, 2020

Okay. Where did we leave off last week?

Oh, right, I was freaking out that I might have to run a Zoominar from my apartment on a laptop that is stealing wi-fi from across the street.

FORTUNATELY, we avoided that eventuality. In hindsight, it seems like a lot of hassle for no reason (the test was negative, thank God), but we were trying to be responsible citizens and keep everyone safe. Just to be sure, we did come on Sunday night and sanitize everything in our hallway. It also gave me a change to reprint all the stuff again after the facilitators made changes over the weekend to their presentations.

Because why not?

I have an excellent filing system.

Yes, this was the week of the big Zoominar for ECC. It was a big (virtual) gathering of our Church Multiplication Facilitators, or CMFs. They are the ones who travel to different countries and meet with national church leaders and pastors, giving encouragement, training, providing resources and support, and generally facilitating the multiplication of churches. Go figure. Because they are usually traveling quite a bit, we really only get them all together once a year in Greenwood. But this year, no one is allowed to travel. So attendance was pretty good. We had about 45 total participants, facilitators, and tech members, and as far as we can tell, each session was quite well attended.

Me, trying to figure out why technology makes life difficult
and yet is so useful at the same time.

We started on Monday and had sessions through Thursday. There were two main sessions every day, one at 9 and one at 10:45ish. There was a 15-minute break in between the two main sessions. Then we had either regional meetings or some kind of chat/presentation at 1:30 and another at 3. My job was to start the main sessions and the regional chats, share whatever slides or videos the facilitators asked for, and set up breakout rooms for the participants. (Zoom has a feature where you can have several smaller meetings inside of the larger meeting. You can put people in a room randomly or manually, and I did both.) I was also a scribe for a day, but my computer apparently didn't like that, so Sarah took over, much to my great relief. I also was a DJ, playing music during the break. No one asked me to. I just did it. 

It sounds kinda simple on this side of things, but trust me, it was very stressful at times.

Note the calendar.

Honestly, most things actually went really well. 

No, really, they did. We had some hiccups, a slight murder or two, but no catastrophic failures or Zoom bombers, so I'm pleased. I wouldn't want to do it all the time, but we pulled off something spectacular in a pretty short amount of time. We are the dream team.

(What's that? There's another day of sessions in May and one in June? I think I'm on vacation then.)

Point is, we had a good week. I wouldn't want to do it all the time, but I feel like we did some good stuff this week.

Also, it wouldn't be us if we didn't have some kind of visual representation of each day. We chose balloons. 

8 balloons, 8 main sessions. They are old, so it took some effort to pop them, but we prevailed! (I should probably clean those up sometime.)

I did say it took some effort, right?
Also, balloons are loud when they pop.

That's about it. That's literally all I did this week. Mike gave me today off, which is good, because I was bone tired. I still came in to take care of some small stuff, but I'm looking forward to a quiet weekend. 

Not like we have any other kind right now, is there?

Bye!