What a palaver!

This morning was the special Culte de la Réforme (Reformation Sunday service).

That meant there were lots of hymns to type in from A Toi la Gloire and various extra bits to put in the Powerpoint. The order of service arrived early, before I even went to the student centre, so I set to it.

Well - I did a typo in the chorus of a hymn, which meant that FOUR TIMES we sang le flamme instead of la flamme. FOUR TIMES! The irony was that I know perfectly well that flammes are girls, and I had said la flamme about 5 minutes earlier in an intro I had to do.

Yes - today it was my turn to introduce the confession of faith and the offering.

Well that's ok, now I have my natty PowerPoint remote, so this morning was the first time to use it in anger.

And it didn't work! We went from page 1 of the confession of faith to ... stubbornly stuck on page 1!

How irritating!

Still, the offering bit went OK.

Then Sammy had done this slide for 2 Tim 3:16, with words twirling and all sorts - but he left out that part of the service completely, so that meant that during the short prayer after the reading I had to press the button several times to get past all the twirls onto the blank slide just before the final hymn.

Andy (PowerPoint man in Deeside), I never appreciated you like I should have.

R E S P E C T, man, respect.

Comments

Alan said…
There's a postscript to this. Carol had to use the same PowerPoint in the afternoon at St Aubin de Blaye, and she had just the same problems. Nightmare.
6:35 pm
Anonymous said…
Have you thought of using a program like Easislides? You can download it free from www.easislides.com and it avoids many of the problems with powerpoint.
7:29 pm
Alan said…
Thanks, T, I'll look at it.

Le Patron http://lepatron.tapor.ualberta.ca/ would catch wrong genders, but I was in a rush this w/e! I normally run the text through it. It's a great genderchecker!
7:40 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A bit about music exams in UK and France

They're really different. I think I have already mentioned that while in the UK people generally find a private teacher for their instrument, or do it through a school scheme, here there are municipal music school, conservatoires and so on. The situation is a little more complex than I had first understood, because the schools vary in the rigidity of their organisation: the most, the conservatoires, next the municipals, then the associations. Our music school is an association, but it tends to apply the standards of the municipal schools with its programme of cycles, etc. Britain - grade 1 to 8, grade 8 being roughly equivalent to A-level, pre university/conservatoire. France - 3 cycles, each taking about 4 years, with 3ème cycle being roughly equivalent to grade 8. Theory of music - UK to take grade 8 you need theory grade 5. In France you study theory alongside your instrumental studies, very slowly. Catrin's flute music is MUCH more difficult than the stuff she does in theor...
Read more

Good news from my sermon buddy

Yesterday we went over my script from August 13. There really wasn't much she had taken exception to. Once or twice she wondered quite what I was getting at (they had the same problem at Deeside, I think...) and I do have difficulties with the word " de ", but then she said "Who doesn't?" So I felt very encouraged. I also took the opportunity to ask her about one or two things: 1) Direct preaching. Like I used to in Britain, I preach saying you - using "vous" when I am talking to the whole wide world and "tu" when I want it to feel as if I am addressing each person individually. French preachers tend to say rather "What will we do, what will one do". So I asked her if she felt my way was too direct, too brutal for the French ear. She said "I think you can get away with it with your English accent". In fact several people have commented on how much they appreciated being spoken to directly in preaching. 2) Liaisons Last...
Read more

A brief sortie to North Wales

 Following the Great Keswick Debacle, when our volunteering at the Keswick café was sabotaged by our assorted indispositions, we had airline tickets to use up. Yes, we had not taken travel insurance, so we paid even more money to change our tickets to fly for a short visit to North Wales. This time we were able to go. We passed extremely slowly through a very crowded Bordeaux airport but in good time to get our plane. All seats in the terminal were taken so we leaned against whatever we could find while waiting to board. Hey, bags need seats, too! though sometimes pointing out to Pat, "No, that's a bag seat", makes the bag find a new refuge on the lap of the person sitting next to it... Once on the plane we quickly found our allocated seats - right at the back on the left hand side - stowed our bags and the flight was smooth and uneventful.  We had 30 minutes in Manchester to disembark, get through immigration , hustle off to the station and board our train for Shotton. I...
Read more