Unexpected Things

I got to work early, returned Father's guitar he lent to me, unlocked the church and prepared myself to read at the early Mass. That went relatively smoothly.

People seemed to be in a bitchy kind of mood today. One lady was upset about some homeless folks on the property, saying she thought they were doing "the sex". The main instigator in that group was nice to me early in the day, but started drinking after the Mass he attended and yelled at me saying we didn't feed him enough so he was forced to go out and steal, and then I would be paying $400 a day as a taxpayer for him to be in prison all because we didn't feed him enough. As soon as the cursing started, I just walked away.

Another little old lady I wouldn't have expected to get so cranky said that the lector last week read too fast and she "couldn't hear a damn thing". Sigh.

At one point during the morning, I was plugging away on a course I am teaching in the fall when our new priest wound up at my door. This was the first time in a week he had deemed me fit for conversation, a fact I can't quite wrap my head around since he seems very friendly with everyone but me. Apparently the boss told him to get me to help with an email issue he was having. After making my first excursion ever up the steps to attempt to fix the problem, I went up and down the stairs about four times trying to get Outlook to cooperate and replicating the settings on my computer. In the end, I managed to get his email coming in just fine, but for reasons beyond my comprehension it won't send messages out. I gave up and told him to phone a confrere who is more technologically inclined than me.

Between the last two masses, the boss came in and said that he was considering starting a Children's Liturgy program, or else a babysitting program. I did my usual theological rant against Children's Liturgy and started to warn him about some of the issues he might not have considered around a babysitting program, suggesting instead he might just change it into a crying room/quiet room for parents. He didn't seem to appreciate the feedback at this very early stage of discernment, so I shut up and sent him back to say Mass before he got bitchy too.

I'm ready for a nap.