Random blogging

Well, today appears to have been one of the five days of summer we're going to get this year, the other four all happening just around Christmas.... It didn't start off all that promising but turned into a lovely day so we took the opportunity of going for a nice long walk this afternoon, doing some of the Riverbank Trail along the side of the Hutt River. Always a nice walk along there, especially in the late afternoon sun, and we finished it off by picking a huge bagful of wild blackberries for dessert tonight. Went especially well with the slabs of ham I had cut off the bone and fried for proper home-made hamburgers with real ham. Mmm. Something to be said for waiting to buy ham on the bone until after Christmas when all the prices fall like a stone!

I'm now sitting with that pleasant tiredness you get after a long walk, enjoying the feeling of Lush Pied de Pepper on my feet (and the wonderful spicy cinnamon smell of it too!), feeling pretty relaxed. It's a good feeling. There's been a lot of rush and stress the last few weeks: two of my colleagues have just resigned (they both got headhunted!) and there's a bit of slack to be taken up. They haven't left yet but are winding up a lot of stuff, so there's plenty for the rest of us to do.

I got a slightly scary piece of mail today. It was my summons to attend the Electoral College for the purposes of electing the next Anglican Bishop of Wellington at the end of March. And it is a summons: all current voting members of the Wellington Synod must attend (lay and ordained) and you're not allowed to be absent unless you've got a seriously good reason. The rule is that when a Bishop announces their retirement, the current sitting Synod members become the Electoral College and no replacements or changes to those elected representatives can be made by parishes until after the Electoral College sits (so we can't rig the vote!). So, I get to be involved in selecting our next Bishop. What an opportunity! I've known about this since before Synod last year but it's all getting rather official now.

An even scarier piece of mail will arrive in about three weeks: a very confidential packet containing the names and profiles of those people who have been nominated into the process. One of those people may be our next Bishop - I say may because the vote of Electoral College needs to be ratified by the House of Bishops, but apparently it's fairly unusual for the diocese's choice not to be taken.