Bulletin Bloopers

I'm sure you all have had these select ones sent to you via email...

• Bertha Belch, a missionary from Africa, will be speaking tonight at Calvary Methodist. Come hear Bertha Belch all the way from Africa.
• The sermon this morning: "Jesus Walks on the Water." The sermon tonight: "Searching for Jesus."
• Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday at 8 PM in the recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the King.
• "Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don't forget your husbands."
• The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been cancelled due to a conflict.
• Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not pass this way again", giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.
• For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.
• Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.
• During the absence of our Pastor, we enjoyed the rare privilege of hearing a good sermon when J.F. Stubbs supplied our pulpit.
• The Rector will preach his farewell message after which the choir will sing "Break Forth into Joy."
• A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.
• At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What is Hell?" Come early and listen to our choir practice.

and on and on... right?

Well, seeing as how that's my profession, I should probably take offense. However, I have a great sense of humor and can even laugh at my own mistakes. So much, I'll blog it ;) The first made it into the bulletin last week (i fixed it this week) and the second, ALMOST this week. There's almost always one little thing, but these two are hilarious.

The Annual Advent Dinner Mark your calendars for Sunday, Dec. 14, begging at 5 p.m.


and


Sermon Title: Things Goind Unnoticed


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Whew! What a week!

Long long week for me. It was about like Easter. Last week, hardly anything to do at work. This week, completely the opposite. Typically, I just have a few weekly tasks including one church service folder (aka bulletin) to produce. This week, four different things with one major major project.

We put out our semi-annual newsletter. I'm now responsible for finalizing the layout and producing it on the printer/copier. I'm not complaining about this at all, but I would have preferred to do it the week before - or a month before. I'd also prefer it to be several times a year because it could be smaller and less info-intensive per issue and basically for the congregation be more informative and timely. It's 16 pages long made into a booklet format which is 4 pages front and back stapled. Broken down, 4 doesn't seem like a lot, but with almost 300 copies to be made, the copier had to work for about 7 total hours on the newsletter alone. I am SOOOO lucky this week because the copier cooperated nicely. There are other times however, I am sooo tempted to slam the company it's from based on frustrations, but I'm thinking positive here, so I won't go there.

The other three things that had to happen was to get a funeral bulletin done for a funeral Thursday afternoon; the regular Sunday bulletin; and another unusual project, a program folder for an Organ and Hymn Fest we're having Sunday afternoon. Oh, it would have been so nice to have the info for the innards on that, let's say, last week? But no, I didn't get it until Thursday. Nice, huh? I was getting a little crabby by Thursday. So if I know you personally and snapped at you, I'm sorry. I think you can understand though. I was already crazy-busy and was feeling like I hadn't accomplished anything yet and was thinking I wasn't going to finish everything up.

The pastors were a bit overwhelmed, but I truly think I had it worse. They only had to prepare ONE sermon a-piece. Me? I had to produce all four of those items. I truly think it was the inconvenient timing of the newsletter that killed me. It's a really big project figuring out which pages can/should be color and making them on opposite pages for economical printing, yet it still flows and makes sense as a whole. Plus, adding in clip art to flesh out the columns and blank spaces. That can take a lot of time finding the right graphic.

Then silly, me, I volunteered to take care of the bulletin cover for the Hymn Fest. I am glad I did though because I was very much inspired. Maybe I'll enjoy it DURING the hymn fest. If you're in the Cupertino area Sunday, stop by to hear a bunch of musicians (5 organists, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone, 1 timpani, the choir) and the congregation celebrating an upgrade to our awesome pipe organ. 4:00 p.m. at Lutheran Church of Our Savior, 5825 Bollinger Road in Cupertino. Err... stalkers need not swing by of course. I'd hate to have to have someone hurt you. If you love organ music - the classics of course, Bach, Mendelssohn, etc - this is the place to be! (Someone else was supposed to take care of publicity, so if you are local and didn't hear until now, I'm sorry :(
Here's my bulletin cover! I took a bunch of photos of the organ Friday about noon. Then about 4:30 when I was feeling less overwhelmed as 3 of the 4 projects were done, I took more. I spent about 3 or 4 hours last night picking the images and making that collage. Worth it though if I do say so myself.

Amazingly enough, after putting the copier to hard hard usage and only have a few minor paper jams (no codes to stop the presses and pray for a tech to clear the code) I managed to finish my work for the week at the regular time of noon on Saturday. WooHoo! Ok, so I skipped one or two tasks, but they are minor and can be done next week anyway. The bills will get paid and the services will go on as scheduled, and the newsletter already arrived in some people's mailboxes already today! I'm impressed with the USPS, bulk mail is pretty fast.

I'm back from vacation...

I needed some good refreshing time off after the stress of Lent and Holy Week. During Lent we had two services per week that I had to publish bulletins for on top of the regular duties of running the office and then during Holy Week, four bulletins and more prints/bulletin for each of them meaning a lot more time goes into the printing/collating/folding/stapling process.

Granted, I print directly from the computer to our digital color copier, but each bulletin is a three step process in the print jobs alone. First the cover page needs to be printed all alone. Then I flip those over and print the ONE color page (two when folded, but whatever...) Then I place those back in the bottom tray and then print the remaining pages and set the printer to use the cover sheet but not print on it. It obviously prints collated for me but will then in the finisher fold and staple. It sounds all great and hands-off, but it's not. First of all, I can only do it in batches of 50 because anymore than that the printer gets too warm and then the pages start jamming... mostly just fake sensor errors but it still beeps and stops working. And then the finisher tray only holds about 20 bulletins +/- because it's "full" and the entire process stops and it beeps. So every 10 - 15 minutes I have to walk around my desk, head into the copy room and remove the bulletins so the thing will continue printing. That's almost as bad as standing over it or doing the actual work. The good thing is that I *CAN* work on editing the next bulletin or crunch numbers or answer the phone without the majority of the bulletin work stopping like it would if I had to do the manual labor of collate/fold/staple myself. So essentially, the process for each bulletin saves about 2 hours per week. Thing is, I have enough work to keep me busy during the weeks we have just one bulletin to produce.

Christmas is nearly as bad, but not quite because Advent is only 4 weeks as opposed to 6 of Lent and the week of Christmas there are only Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to worry about rather than Maundy Thurs, Good Fri, Easter Sunrise and Easter Festival. And with Easter coming so soon this year, I only had the month of January to decompress from Advent/Christmas and attempt to catch up on filing. Of course during this time I also had to assist our bookkeeper in gathering information and double checking figures on folks we needed to send 1040s to... not to mention ordering stuff for the upcoming Lent and Easter season. So I had been thinking all along that maybe I can squeeze a few days off right after Easter instead of the regular Monday day off and maybe on additional being Tuesday. So I asked, and I received, yay!

I wanted to take a whole bunch of photos and practice my photography skills. I learned a lot about what NOT to do, lol. I was disappointed the filters for the lenses I ordered did not come on the Friday before Easter, so I think that maybe the pictures would have been even better, but then again, maybe not. I don't know that much about using them yet.

I had big plans to hit Death Valley, Mojave National Preserve, Joshua Tree National Monument, Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve and Carizzo Plain National Monument. On Saturday before Easter I decided Death Valley would be a waste of time because I'd have to backtrack a bit and the flowers there weren't popping like they were elsewhere. But I had planned on doing the rest, but that would mean leaving Sunday right after dinner and going as far as I could towards Mojave... maybe camping in BLM land nearby. But I was wiped out with all the hard work I put in and also being in choir having to be at church well before the sunrise - 6:45 I think it was - and not sleeping enough before that. So I said forget Mojave and Joshua Tree and just take off Monday.

It was still worth it. So over the next several days I'll be posting either slideshows or pics just to show off, lol.

In the meantime, I can't go a post without putting in a picture, so
I hope anyone reading this had a Blessed Easter.