Going Dotty

My family would say "going?" I'm feeling the pressure a bit at the moment! I have loads to do and very little time to do it all in.
Some of it is work related - I have my service for Sunday to finish today, and the Youth Alpha session for Sunday afternoon and a powerpoint for Guides Youth Praise on Monday evening. (We find it hard to get our uniformed kids and families to come to Church Parade on Sundays. We still have 4 a year but also offer short fun worship on the nights that they meet. Church members attend too. These are really successful and relationships with parents are so much better!)

This is in order to free up Monday for me to write my seminar for Tuesday when I have to talk to my MA class on how the desert fathers help modern Christians with the control of the passions. The subject is actually a lot more interesting than the title sounds. The desert fathers lived as hermits in Egypt in 3-5CE. Their sayings and stories are recorded and they are a wonderfully human lot. Here is one of my fave stories - just makes me laugh!

Two brothers had lived together for many  years and  they had never fought with 
one another.
The first said to the other, "Let us also have a fight like other men."
The other replied, "I do not know how to fight." 
And the first monk said, "I'll explain. Do you see this brick?
I'll take this brick and put it between us.
And I will say it is my brick, and you will say 'no it is my brick'
and we will argue whose brick it really is."         
So the first monk took the brick and put it between them
and said, "Brother, this is my brick."
The second monk looked at him and said, "If you say so, brother."

Here's another one 

The story tells about Abba Macarius speaking to another monk, asking how he is going. The monk replies, ‘I’m great.’ Abba Macarius replies, ‘I sometimes have trouble with sexual temptation.’ The monk, relaxes, saying ‘ I, too, sometimes have trouble with sexual temptation. How can I be helped?’.

Actually it goes on further with Abba Macarius confessing lots of things which the other monk is finally able to say troubles him too.

I am sooooooo nervous about the seminar. So much so that it is giving me font burps! (no actually I don't know why when I cut and paste text I can never get it all to look the same. Even when I fiddle around with sizes etc in Blogger. )

I also have to sort out the conservatory/craft room. I had a shelf of stuff in the kitchen but we have just had the flooring redone in there so Phil took my shelves down and we decided the kitchen is better off without them. BUT there are now boxes all over the place with no home to go to in the conservatory and it is SUCH a mess. Also the guest room (I know, how la di da are we...) is in a total mess - some of it stuff that needs putting away from the summer hols (blush) , my mum is coming to stay for a few days on Wednesday and Phil and I have very little time when we are both home at the same time in order to make it look presentable. Aaaargh.I won't even talk about regular chores piling up.

Oh and its church fair weekend after next and I really need to have made more stuff. This Saturday is taken up with a larger Church meeting in London and a quiz at one of the churches.

So I better get on with my post and get my nose down to sermonising then.
I'm really going Dottie today as our DCM challenge is

Sparkle and Bling

We are sponsored this week by Louise Brigden (the designer of Dottie and George plus a whole host of other fabulous images) and Charmed cards and Crafts (the shop who sell the downloadable images) and there are prizes to be won with a random draw!.
Here's my card. I chose to colour in Dottie myself using prisma pencils. I printed up three images and layered them, just subtly. I find it helps when I don't keep within the lines! I did my usual thing of colouring first and then hunting out paper that matches. I remembered that I had been saving up these Dreamstreet papers that I actually wish I had used straight away as I am not AS keen on them now for some reason! Found them eventually. "relax" speech bubble is also from one of the papers, I just added a few etra words. There is some obvious Prima bling but I also used a fair bit of glitter glue on the bubbles. See?
I can't cope with the font changes that won't do what I want any more so I am going to stop now!
Have a great weekend