This week is quite busy with a multitude of events and activities going on. That's the reason why I haven't posted much in the way of updates the last few days.
The weather here is finally spring-like. We've had clear skies since Sunday. I've even seen a few kids about town in shorts (in low-40 degrees). The Narrows outside our window, which has for most of the winter looked rather gray, is now a deep blue as it reflects the blue sky overhead.
A few of the leaders from the Alaska Conference are in town for a couple of days. According to the Conference calendar, Petersburg was only listed for them to be here one day, but upon their arrival, I discovered that they were here for two days. We had planned on them being here Tuesday, and then we would hold and Agape Supper and Communion on Thursday. But with them here tonight also, I decided to move the Agape Supper to tonight. That meant calling around to make sure people were aware of the change in plans.
Last night we had our children's choir sing a few songs. The two non-Adventist families came with a number of their other children, so our supper and the singing portion of the program was quite well attended. Because it was getting late in the evening, they had to return after our song service portion. The choir sounded great, despite our 4-strong size, and alleviated some of the concern I had about them performing for the (virtually) whole town at the Good Friday service. I had a video of the singing made, so once I find a bit of breathing room, I may be able to get it uploaded for your viewing.
I've been on the bicycle regulary this week going back and forth between home, church, and post office. The roads are now dry, but dusty.
The power supply unit (PSU) for my Dell desktop PC went out last night. I had just installed one of Microsoft's infamous security updates, I told it to restart, but it seemed to get stuck shutting down. So I forced the power off, and then when I turned it back on it wouldn't start up properly. Rather, the case fan near the CPU went into hyperdrive, as if the temperature sensor had gone bad. Since the last major change I made was the security update, I thought that perhaps it had somehow corrupted the BIOS settings. I shorted the CMOS, and tried all sorts of combinations with cards and such, but it simply would not come on.
In hindsight, I should have suspected that when the POST beep didn't happen, that it was something way early on in the power-up cycle -- say the power supply. I dug out the PSU tester that I purchased in my previous life and after I plugged it in, discovered that the -5 volt line was dead.
After spending a sleepless night (yes, I still worry about these little things that go wrong), I went out this morning to see if I could find a PSU in this town. As I was afraid of and suspected, it is another of those "not stocked here" items. I ordered a new unit which will be arriving hopefully sometime next week.
In the meantime, I realized that the PSU in the computer I use at church is a newer unit that would work in the Dell. But the compuer at church is also needed. So I spent part of this morning going through a number of boxes in order to locate an extra PSU that originally came with the kit that was used to build the church PC. Hopefully after swapping the extra PSU into the church PC, and the PSU from the church PC into the Dell, all two PCs will work. If not, I will have a much more serious problem on my hands.
I'll still want a new, spare PSU around for the next time one of them goes out.
I guess the "good" to come out of all this is that I might be able to build a whole sermon around the issue of bad PSUs, replacing them, etc. That was another reason why I had difficulties getting to and remaining asleep last night -- I was trying to work out the different angles, as well as see if there was something in the event that could be tied to this Easter weekend. We'll see.
Tomorrow I really must settle on the topic as well as most of the outline for this Sabbath's sermon. I also need to craft my 3-minute message for the Good Friday service.
I also need to get things started with a Stop Smoking series that we would like to hold later this month. Again, after I get past this week, I should have the time needed to organize the materials that I purchased.
I meant this to be a quick update, but it looks like it ended up being a complete update.
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