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.

sorry about the delay...

it's been a lot of craziness going on

Last weekend I got a phone call from home telling me that my grandma died. Dad (his mom) said we've got to make plans so think about it and call back the next day before they call my aunt and uncle and let them know what our plans are. Then he says, have fun the next day. Ok, so I did, but occasionally throughout the day and the next and well all this week, I was sad and then got distracted, then sad, then distracted... etc. Luckily the distractions far outweighed the sad reflective moments.

The next day I spent in Boston all day and I'll get to that in another post. I think I left off at the previous Tuesday, so I've got a few days to fill in first.

Then there was the day of travelling. Dang terrorist plans screwed up my day. I had hoped to spend some time doing something in the morning, but noooo I had to be at the airport 3 hours before my flight instead of the 1 I had originally planned.

My new full-time job started this week and for the beginning of the week, the old secretary had her last day and we went over all kinds of things. Where things are that I ususally haven't run across and procedures on things that happen only a couple times a year at most. So that day was shot.

Yesterday was my first day on my own and because together we didn't really get the regular day's work done I had Tuesday plus Wednesday's work to do. Oye. And today was really busy because I will be taking Saturday off so I need to finish up producing Sunday's bulletin tomorrow, so I created 90% of it today so I can start printing about 10:30 or so to give me time to collate and fold them by 5 so I can go home and pack and do necessary laundry. Ugh... my brain is fried just thinking of all i still have to do.

Oh, and its actually a very good thing grandma is dead. She's with God and she has had really bad dementia so that she didn't recognize anyone and wasn't happy or healthy either. But still I will miss her. I did say my goodbyes last January which was the last time I saw her because I just knew I'd never make it back again. Didn't really want to either. It sucked to see her like that.

My new job

I have either been promoted or demoted depending on how you look at it. The good news is that I now have a full-time job that comes with benefits. YAY!

I will be taking over for the secretary at church who finally decided to go back to school. I'll be starting the full-time work in the middle of august, and right now I need to negotiate my pay. The offer is for the same pay the current secretary is receiving, but that is waaayyy too low and I know I'm worth more. It's not only way below average for a secretary, but basically the job is more than that. It's office manager combined with executive secretary. Granted this is a church, so I'm not gonna be greedy, so I did some research and the average pay for a secretary is $45K in my local area. The low end reported was $35K. The offer is for $28K. Hmmmmm... that doesn't seem quite right. Part of the problem is that the secretary before this one never wanted much money because her husband was working too, and she was only working to fill the time and the church needed a new secretary. The current secretary was very young with little experience as a secretary and so she accepted such little pay. On top of that, the annual raise is only 2%... that's going to accumulate over the years, and continue to slip behind normal comparative pay. So I plan to negotiate for $35K,the low end. That would be sufficient. And the good newsis that there is a precedence for comparing the salary to industry standards. I'm using non-profit standards. 15 years ago or so, the two women sharing the job (my mom and another) were told they should look into industry standards to give the church a good idea what they should be getting paid. The church does want to pay a fair wage. So hopefully it'll work for me too.