I'm feeling that end-of-year slump coming on. Yes, last week was Spring break, but it doesn't matter. The 10-week internal clock that I spent 9 years developing on the quarter system is telling me that it should be time to wrap things up soon. But there are still 6 weeks to go.
I went to the chiropractor because my neck was still bothering me in the mornings after my self-imposed deadline. There were some tests and some x-rays, and the basic result is that my neck doesn't bend... at all. Normal necks are supposed to curve backward and mine don't. One might surmise that this is a posture thing (because I do know that my posture is less than perfect), but the convincing x-ray was the one where I was looking up, and the neck was still straight.
I was also amused by my lack of reflexes in my right arm. The bicep reflex is the reflex where they hit the inside part of your elbow and your hand is supposed to twitch. I've never thought that it would be possible to fail a reflex test, though it would make no sense for them to do this type of test if it you couldn't fail it. It was a strange feeling to know how my body should be reacting to the test and watching it not react at all.
The chiropractor found some evidence of a neck trauma, which I can't really place but know happened. Somewhere in my memory, I recall having an injury with my head moving forward, and I distinctly remember a sharp pain in the middle of my neck. And by middle, I mean the middle if you were to look down from above, not the middle halfway between the skull and the shoulders. It was kind of behind the throat, but not at the back of the throat. It was "down" from there (as if you swallowed the pain and it got stuck partway down). It was probably a basketball injury, but that's based on the fact that most of my injuries are basketball injuries.
I'm still waking up with a stiff and sore neck, but it has only been a week of treatment (and it's not as bad this week as it was last week). The long term treatment is to un-straighten my neck, but apparently the joints have settled into this position pretty tightly, so it's going to take a little bit of time before they are loose enough to be corrected. It's expected to take a couple months, and I decided I don't have enough excuses or the right types of excuses to put it off or not do it.
Church stuff has gotten weirder... again. The new elders have hired an interim pastor. They hired an internal candidate, which is a little strange to me. Given that the church is in need of a lot of administrative capacity, and for someone to come in and do an assessment, this is a bad sign. Unfortunately, he's not a good preacher. It reminds me a lot of when I first got to that church and the interim was an outgoing administrative pastor. If I had not known that the church was on the verge of a new senior pastor, I would not have stayed.
On Sunday, there was a "State of the Church" address, which I found to be a little bit disturbing. It was a lot of talk, and there were moments where it felt like battle lines were being drawn.
I have written a letter to a couple of the Elders who talked to me and asked me for some insights. I know that they want to do the right thing, and so I did a little work (with the help of the small group) to formulate some ideas of where we think the church should go. We are generally concerned that the church will draw inward towards itself and become an "old person" church (which is only slightly more polite than calling it a dead church). In the last 3-4 months, the church has managed to drive off a large chunk of the under 40 crowd, and unless a change happens the trend will continue.
I'm in no hurry to stay and in no hurry to leave. It's still a matter of watching and waiting.
I have no decent transition and a bunch of random thoughts that don't deserve their own paragraph. So I'm just going to mash them all into one paragraph: I'm still waiting for my tax refund. Homemade doughnuts are good, but homemade jelly doughnuts are better. I need to put in some extra time into my textbook next week and get it done. I dropped off my car for an oil change and new tires, and the shuttle driver thought I was 18 years old. I played poker last Friday for the first time in a while, and lost a multi-hundred dollar pot when my AA got cracked by 33 that managed to find a 2-outer on the turn. I hope to take a practice actuary test tomorrow.
