Non Inspiring Pictures. And (Hopefully) Inspiring Pictures.

Late last week, we had a lighting strike at our church which fried a theater lighting system, the main computer, and over half of our PA system.   The only thing that Sir Strike (unfortunately) ignored was our 15-year old projection system which has a tendency to hum along merrily without bothering to show half the color spectrum. That makes for some lovely onscreen graphics, let me tell you.

At any rate, Saturday was Steve’s and my “Don’t Panic But We Need To Get All This Up and Running By Tomorrow Morning” day.  Steve was in frequent contact with the amazing Wyatt  trouble shooting the computer damage to find out which parts were fried and which parts might still be working.   Turns out there was nothing we could do to get it running in time (we’re shipping it out to Wyatt for repair today) so I started working on transferring files from the working part of the computer over to my laptop so that I could  finish the bulletin and get the songs and sermon graphics ready for projection on Sunday morning.  Steve also spent a long time with our sound man getting things transferred from non working channels to working channels so that we could at least limp through the music on Sunday.

At one point in the long and frantic day, I had a modern monitor, my laptop from home and a really old monitor pulled from a storage area to test what was working and what wasn’t.   I felt like a regular computer geek!

As you can see by the red cooler, I packed a lunch when I went in because I knew I would be staying for the duration.   And I did.  A very long duration, might I add.

Oh, and since I’m showing you pictures of my office/church sound room, I just have to tell you about the chair in the foreground.  I got it from Freecycle and it cost me absolutely nuthin’!  I have used Freecycle to pass stuff along that we don’t need anymore and also have gotten a few nice things there.  It’s a great site.

Anyway, as for how the Lightning Strike Crisis ended, we ended up cobbling a whole bunch of things together so that we could (just barely) make it through the service on Sunday. And now this week (when we were already in Near Frantic Mode preparing to leave for Florida in just one week), we’ve also got to get all the systems up and running because we certainly don’t want to leave behind nonfunctioning equipment for the people who will be working in our place while we’re gone.

And in related “happy news,” this is what the switches in our home office currently look like.  Completely unrelated to any lighting strikes, the electricity in the entire room just stopped working on Friday. My handsome, handy, hubby is in the throes of trouble shooting and fixing that problem, as well.   Do we know how to have fun, or what?

And just because I would feel really bad if I left you with only non inspiring pictures on this Monday morning, here are a few lovelier photos from a recent morning bike ride.   I tried to take pictures of the bridge from as many perspectives as possible, which was really a fun thing to do.