Open House

Well we just finished having our first ever Christmas Open House. We had about 20 people come through, mainly from our congregation. We had hoped for more people to come, but we enjoyed the number we had. It turned out to be almost the perfect number for the evening. Next year we will probably do the Open House in the afternoon rather than the evening so we can run it a little longer. My perception of the evening was that it was not only enjoyable for us, but that all those who came enjoyed themselves as well. There was lots of conversations the whole time, and the people certainly didn't seem anxious to leave :) Unhappily, the dogs got rather excited when the people started to arrive so they needed to be put in the backyard. Eventually they started to insist on being let back in, so we set up the baby gate to keep them out of the living room, and they stood behind it with these mournful looks. Now we face one problem . . . What do we do with all the left over food?

Levies, levies everywhere.

For those of you who follow the RIAA quest to eliminate p2p file swapping you may know that in Canada we have this wonderful thing called a levy which is added to all blank media that could be used to make copies of copyrighted material. That means that if I purchase blank tapes, cds, dvd, and the like I pay a certain amount per item that goes to the various organizations like the CRIA (Canadian version of the RIAA.) This is bad enough as I work in a church where we record our services on tapes, CDs and on video for local television broadcast which mean we pay the levy on in house productions and backups of our computers. Just recently our wonderful government added this levy to mp3 players. Putting aside the idea that this assumes that the only reason anyone would want blank storage media would be to copy copyrighted material rather than assuming innocence and having to prove guilt, even this extortion of our money is not enough for the CRIA. Now they are intending to start a legal campain against those who are swapping material, although they are already getting money not only from those evil file swappers, but also from hundreds of thousand law abiding citizens who are using their video tapes to tape family gatherings, who are using their cds to back up their computer data and the like. Needless to say this is starting to annoy me. They CRIA either has to be happy with the levies, or tell the government to remove them and pursue people through the courts. They cannot have their levy and eat people up in the court system too.

Flu, fly away!

The flu has hit here. Annette was feeling sort of achy for a while, but then on the 11th, it turned into what we at first thought was a bad cold. The symptoms got worse, and we realized that she had the flu. It put her off her feet and in bed sleeping from Saturday until Monday, but at this point she seems to be getting better.

At this point my hope is that is will not get this as I really don't want to be put out of commisson during the Christmas season as it is one of the most busy seasons for me. I need to preach extra services and of course there is all the family and other Christmas gatherings. Although I enjoy them all, they still take a toll both in time and energy. Hopefully, the flu will fly away from here, and leave us alone."