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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
Over the years, I don’t think I’ve been to many moving services in church. They’re a rarity rather than a regular occurrence. However, a few weeks ago we had a missionary couple back home for a visit (the first of two missionary couples in fact, that have been home in recent weeks), and the wife of the couple told us a very moving story about her trip to an island off the coast of Africa. It wasn't moving because the events in the story were particularly remarkable, but because of the way in which she showed great humility in exposing her weaknesses before the congregation, and helping others see that even missionaries need to keep on growing in God.
Having been brought up by strict parents who never showed her love, she finds it hard to reach out easily to other people in any physical way like hugging. But in this island, the children expected that she would touch them and hold them. The only problem was their hair was infested with lice, they had open sores, and they were often filthy. The woman told us how she had to keep on asking God to help her in this, and finally sensed that He told her that if He could come and live amongst ordinary everyday human beings with all their junk and rubbish, then she could do the same. And, with some difficulty, she did
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The last few days at work have been a mix of getting on with the jobs that are mine particularly and fitting in lots of little tasks that become mine because I’m number three in the team of three. Not officially bottom of the ladder, but certainly sitting on one of the lower rungs. That’s fine. After years of managing the shop, I don’t need any extra responsibility.
One of my jobs there is to keep the office blog going (Mission Resource); sometimes it’s a bit of a task fitting this in between everything else. At other times it makes a refreshing change from tasks that become a bit mind-frazzling. It’s not the sort of blog where I can let myself loose, however. It has more of a focus than most of the blogs I write, and that’s okay. Every so often I manage to sneak in a personal opinion, but for the most part I have to save those for the blogs where no one’s going to smack my hand if I step out of line.
On another tack altogether, I’ve just been checking out the HitTail result for my Travel Diary blog, which has kind of done its dash as far as new posts are concerned, because I ain’t travelling
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One of the accountants at work is away for a couple of weeks to Australia – to one of those places on the Gold Coast where the sun never ceases to shine. Apparently.
Last time he and his wife went away it was on one of those Pacific Island cruises, though fortunately not the one that went through the storm which threw everyone on board off their chairs and smashed crockery and threw stuff out of cupboards. Not such fun
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We bought a new DVD player a few weeks back, because our old one suddenly died. The new feller is one of those with a hard drive, so you can record straight onto the machine, and then basically treat what you’ve recorded like a file on a computer: copy it, paste it, throw it away – whatever.
There’s so much it can do we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of it yet, but we managed to record the opening series of the Olympics, which was far better than trying to watch it after midnight. Superb opening with some stunning effects, wonderfully imaginative use of fireworks, extraordinary co-ordination between thousands of performers, amazing visuals, and an incredible pre-teen girl who sang with enormous confidence, in spite of the fact that 91,000 people were watching in the stands, and billions more were watching on television. Is that too many superlatives? Not really. Each Olympic opening ceremony outdoes the previous one, partly because the technology improves exponentially every four years, and partly because each nation probably feels they’ve got to outdo the previous host.
My son came round tonight and burnt a DVD of the hard drive copy of the opening – took a few minutes of sussing out the very detailed manual, but we got there. Even managed to format a disc ourselves later on. Who says old people are beaten by technology
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At a site called Next National CEO you can take a survey regarding whether you think John McCain or Barack Obama would make the better CEO of the USA.
A firm called Personnel Decisions International has set up the site. They’re a consulting firm that regularly has to assess the leadership qualities of top CEOs. These characteristics help determine what a candidate for a particular job’s leadership abilities are, and whether he or she will fit a particular company.
They’ve looked at the next President as the CEO of the country, and given you the opportunity to rate McCain against Obama in terms of vision, insight, trustworthiness, courage, confidence, and energy. Besides these are the ability to get things done, being an inspirer of others, being a good judge of people, being able to influence others
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I’m not doing much accompanying of singers this year. I’m due to play for a young lady for an exam in a few weeks, but that’s about the sum total of my accompanying work for the last few months. And I won’t be playing for Brent Read, one of my favourite singers, because our dates clash: he’s doing the Competitions in Dunedin the week I’m doing a play.
I used to accompany people all the time. It was never work, but something I really enjoyed. Though of course the better the singer the more enjoyable it is. For instance, I was just checking out Claire Barton on Google, and found several references to her, from very enthusiastic fans. She was someone I played for from about her mid-teens, I’d say. She always had that special quality about her that told you she’d go a long way, and she will. (Ana James was another young singer I played for at that time who’s now on the world stage.)
Claire’s won several major competitions in New Zealand, missed out (this time round) on the Lexus Song Contest, although the radio broadcast of the final night made me think she should have been placed more highly than she was. But that’s competitions for you
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283 Posts dating from December 2006
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