A Comedy Of Errors

If I needed further proof that nothing is going to be straightforward over here, this weekend sealed it!

Firstly the magazine I've been designing for the church (apparently I am like the second saviour of Hope Church because I can use Photoshop and CorelDraw with some proficiency!) was going well until yesterday. I'd spent all week designing, modifying, consulting, searching for artwork, etc. To meet our print deadline I had to work on it on Saturday and I went to open the file and "BOOM!" CorelDraw says, "no"! Somehow it just wouldn't have it. I went to the backup and all was well. Just one of those things, I thought. Wrong. So after working on it for another 5 hours on Saturday and splitting it into two smaller files (in case file size was the previous problem) I'm just ready to come back to it and save it in final form when the same problem happens. ARGH! I can't open saved files because Corel just crashes! Even earlier versions are not loading. This is seriously bad - a week's work down the tubes and one very disappointed church leader. So we tried it again today and for a brief moment it worked (long enough to get our print versions ready). But when we tried to change some mistakes the same problems came back and we just cut our losses and went with what we had. Scary moments though!

As if that wasn't enough there was another hiccup the same day. My friend Niemesh, who is now in Durban, was kindly going to bring a case full of stuff for me. I'd looked (so I thought) or Virgin's page and was sure it said, 2 x 23kg bags allowed in economy. Anyway, he got to Heathrow and they wouldn't take my bag! Not only that even some of the more urgent items that could have (and should have come) as hand luggage were left in the case! So my dad went and picked it up, and at least it's all there. Still, got to look at shipping some stuff now!

I think I'm going to use this last month to illustrate James 1:2-4

"Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."

For all the problems I'm actually in good spirits and things are really looking like they're going to open up into some great work over here. I'm sure none of this will be wasted!