One of the first things I noticed today was that Bruce, our beloved and spoiled chihuahua, had peed on my camera. My good camera, the Canon 10D (yes, I know there are nicer ones out now). Fortunately, he’d only gotten a little on the lens shade and it cleaned off nicely, but still. When I told Amanda about it, the conversation went exactly as I envisioned it, which was something like this:
“Guess what Bruce did today?”
“What?”
“He tried to learn how to use a camera, but he couldn’t so he got frustrated and peed on it.”
“Which camera?”
“My good one. He only got the lens shade thing, and it came right off.”
“Well that’s good. But the real question is what was a thousand dollar camera doing on the floor?”
Yup, I was practically asking for it. But don’t worry, folks, the camera’s fine.
The rest of the day was mostly uneventful until the evening time when we had our small group meeting. Ben and Jessica Lambeth arrived a little earlier than usual. We usually all get together at 7:30, and by 7:40 when nobody else had shown up yet, we figured nobody else would. Amanda asked if I should call everyone and I said no, that we had all talked about how nobody shoul dhave to call about it. Ben agreed with me on the principle of it. Fortunately, Rob Peterson and Kristen Barriner showed up minutes later. The first words out of Kristen’s mouth were, “Rob apologizes for us being late.” It was funny.
Unfortunately though, Paul and Kim Ayars never showed. No call, no show nothing; and this when I had told Kim last week that they were supposed to be leading the lesson this week. I know Paul mentioned they might look for another group that fit more of what they were looking for, but still. Well, fortunately since we’d decieded to call last week a social, it was my turn to lead this week. Honestly I was a bit nervous about it, and it didn’t help that this week’s chapter, about “When Things Go Wrong” meandered a little and covered a lot of stuff. But everyone agreed that we had some good discussions and I think it went off just fine. As nervous as I was about facilitating the week’s lesson, I was even more nervous about leading the closing prayer, since I’ve never been much of one to pray out loud, but Amanda and Kristen both said I did a fine job of that too. It’s nice to have supportive, encouraging people in your life.
In the hour and 45 minutes or so between the time Rob and Kristen got here and the time everyone left, a massive, thick spiderweb was spun on our porch, right in the walkway. I don’t remember who first ran into it, but Ben saw the spider and clapped it to death. It was nasty because, like the web, the spider was pretty huge.
Zach Dotsey