Yesterday was a special day at church: our pastor’s last Sunday. Their good were packed on Saturday, all but the furniture, which ten of the younger men were going to load up Sunday afternoon and so they are off. To Columbia Tennessee, an outer suburb of Nashville. To a larger church in our denomination.

We had Mark and Kelly for almost seven years, and little Ivan for less than two. No one suspected this was coming, as everyone was happy with Mark and hoped he would be our pastor for years to come. Unlike past pastoral changes, I had no inkling of this coming. Previously I’ve been able to sense that a pastor’s ministry was drawing to a close in the congregations I attended. This time, not so. The transition was abrupt.

Transitions happen in life all the time. Not always as momentous as a pastoral change, but they happen. I wrote once before in this blog about this, using the words of Pamela Tudsbury, a character in Herman Wouk’s Winds of War and War and Remembrance: “Some moments weigh against a lifetime.” I’ve had a few such moments in my life, but it seems to me that transitions often happen gradually. Condition A changes to Condition B. You’ve been in Condition A for a long time. Then one day you wake up and realize you’re in Condition B. How did it happen?

I’m in the midst of two such transitions right now. At CEI, it appears my time as a corporate trainer is drawing to a close, and I’m transitioning back to being a project manager. I have no official word of that; in fact, my supervisor hasn’t talked to me about my status since the last round of layoff last month. With those staff cutbacks we are no longer large enough to either need or support a full-time trainer. Every week I find my time more and more consumed with managing project, less with training issues. Is this a permanent situation? Stay tuned.

The other transition is in my writing “career”. But this transition is confusing at the moment, the ultimate direction not yet clear. I haven’t worked on a novel for about three months. I wrote only one Suite 101 article in April, three so far in May, with one more in draft status, one other in research status. I’ve written no other freelance articles during that time, nor submitted anything. Poetry no longer comes to me either by inspiration or perspiration. I continue to monitor writing blogs and forums, and of course keep up this blog. In the last month I’ve critiqued only one poem at Absolute Write, doing it last Friday.

So what’s going on with my writing? Am I losing my desire to write? Ideas still come to me, and I capture some of them. Ideas for improving works I’ve already written but not yet published still come. I’m still spending a little time researching markets and marketing methods, as well as studying the craft. But as to actual writing, very little accomplishment.

The problem with transitions in progress is recognizing the start, middle and end. It’s kind of like a stock chart. After the price movement is over, the signals that it was going to make that move are obvious, but as the movement is in progress, one doesn’t see it, or refuses to believe that’s what’s happening.

With this writing transition, all signs seem to be pointing to this as the cause: The dream is dead. I don’t want to believe that. I’d rather believe it’s just the busyness of life in these couple of terribly busy months. But I’m afraid it’s the other. The key piece of evidence, of course, is that I haven’t submitted anything to potential markets. I have enough things written that I could be submitting constantly. But it seems the work of making the final selection of the market(s) and actually going through the motions of making the submittal, just don’t excite me, and so I don’t do it.

So where is this transition taking me? I don’t know. Stay tuned.

My attitude is definitely better today. The parking lot is paved! I spent about 5 hours there at the church, watching the work, keeping the contractor honest, and participating in the few decisions that needed to be made. Around the corner and across the street, the old derelict house is down! My chasing down the last permit yesterday provided some fruit. It should all be hauled off tomorrow, and hopefully the lot dressed up.

Back at the parking lot, the next three days will be quite busy and eventful, as they clean and seal-coat the south part of the lot, then maybe on Friday they can stripe the whole thing, weather permitting. Also tomorrow they should pour the new concrete entrance, replace some sidewalk, and maybe even replace the old exit with new concrete. It’s a lot to do, but they might just make it.

I was supposed to spend some time tonight working on the contractor’s pay application, but a large chunk of my available time was taken up with a call from our son. I hadn’t spoken with him for quite some time (a month perhaps?), so there was much to get caught up on. So my writing time and contractor pay application time for tonight are gone.

My work in general is fixin’ (as the locals say) to get really busy, as our Transportation Dept. head goes on an 11 day foreign mission trip and I pick up his work. So writing time will be virtually non-existent for the next two weeks, except maybe for working on my new Life Group lesson series. I’ll try to keep up on blog posts, maybe even increase them, but no promises.

Today was an emotionally draining day. The contractors won’t show up for work either at a decent hour or at all, and the church parking lot remains a patchwork of asphalt strips and gravel base course that now needs to be re-graded and re-rolled. The City shut down our house demolition project for lack of a $50 tax–I mean permit. We had our State permit, but I didn’t know a city permit was needed as well.

Those two things threw me for a loop, even as I got back on one of my three flood studies and found out it may not be as bad as I thought it was. Perhaps less work, although I will have to have a CADD technician help me with the mapping. How nice it would be to know AutoCAD.

So I’m still not able to write much, here or anywhere. Be patient with me, and I’ll be back.

Although, the dream has taken several steps closer to the graveyard.

It’s been an energy-sapping, emotions-draining, mind-numbing kind of week. I’ve been dealing with the plagiarism issue I wrote about on Monday. That’s taken care of for me, but a number of my colleagues at Suite 101 are still dealing with it.

The church parking lot project just drags on and on. The contractor who is supposed to do the paving has said every day he would be there first thing in the morning, finish the last little grading, and then schedule asphalt deliveries. He didn’t show at all Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday his grader operator came. He worked an hour or so, left the site in marginally better condition but not even close to ready to lay asphalt on, and went off to smoke crack, or whatever it is he does the other 23 hours in the day. Today I called his boss at 10:00, and he said he had a crew en route and had just been waiting on the asphalt plants to “fire-up today”. I told him the site was not ready for asphalt. He said he’d come by, which he did, and between him and the crack-head they got the site ready for asphalt. Of course, rain is forecast for tomorrow, so that means most likely we’ll have another Sunday with the lot unfinished. And my credibility in the tank.

The labyrinth weir project drags on and on. We got something done on it today (around 6:00 PM), and I can see the end in sight, but there a many conference calls to go before I sleep. Meanwhile, our transportation department head is leaving for a foreign missions trip next Thursday, and I’ll have to do his work for 12 days. Oh, and the man who is volunteering his time watching my parking lot job is gone for 10 days beginning tomorrow. Then there’s my two flood studies I really need to get finished, and another one I’m supposed to start.

Of course, this is the peak season for yard work right now. If it doesn’t rain Saturday, I’ve got a couple of wheelbarrows full of oak pollen to pick up and remove, gutters of pollen to clean, and two right-of-way strips to mow–oh, and weeds to pull from the rock yard. Or maybe I’ll just spray, and say to heck with environmentalism for a weekend.

I sure don’t see time to write for the next two weeks, except whatever I can sneak in here.

The rains held off, which means the contractor for our church parking lot project was able to get some good work done. Which means he is working towards laying asphalt on Thursday. Which means the project might be finished by the end of next week. Today I helped him layout the new entrance to be cut in. Tomorrow I’ll give him sketches on the rain gardens to be added. A log loosened from the logjam. Oh, and I called the second contractor, the one who is to demolish an old house across the street where we hope to add some overflow parking. A small log loosened.

Today I was able to figure out why the floodplain modeling results were not displaying correctly on the Little Osage Creek project in Centerton. FEMA had given me comments concerning this, thinking the results were wrong. I was pretty sure that the results were correct, but that for some reason the output tables were not displaying properly. I made little progress on it last week. Today I took more than an hour to go through some program manuals and some sample projects, and figured it out. By 5:00 PM I had printed a very nice looking encroachment table, with the right results. Tomorrow I should be able to get it turned in again. A log loosened from the logjam.

This evening I brought some work home, the printouts of the outside peer review of the labyrinth weirs on the project I’m not supposed to talk about–some kind of confidentiality agreement they failed to mention to me until the last couple of days. I worked on the calculations the peer reviewer presented. The calcs were correct, but his presentation of the key equation had a typo in it, repeated in two places. In the morning I’ll inform him of his error, with gladness in my heart. Unfortunately, if when the reference I ordered arrives I learn that he rightly applied the equation and variables and adjusting constants, it will show that our design won’t work as intended. Still, this is another log loosened.

This evening I found time to read a couple of articles in Poet and Writer, working my way slowly through the issue. The next one has come, so I need to get on it. Then I came downstairs and completed two sets of passage notes for the Harmony of the gospels, and began a third before breaking to write this post. This makes two nights in a row I returned to my routine from before tax time. Two days doesn’t make a pattern, but I came close to that pattern on Saturday. This isn’t writing that is likely to ever lead to publishing, but it’s writing, it’s enjoyable, it’s Bible study, and it feels good. Another log loosened.

I’m not sure when I can declare the logjam broken apart and floating downstream, but it’s getting closer. Probably not till the parking lot project is finished and I fully make up the time I’ve been siphoning off from my employer’s expectations. I worked three hours at home the last two days. I probably have another 6 to 8 to go before I’m back even. When I finish this mag there’s many more to go. Plus the m-i-l’s taxes. I think once I get back on those, probably in a week, and get them done, I will declare the jam broken and the river running free.