Saturday Already

So, here I am getting ready to go to my legislative committee meeting this morning and I have not posted since the first legislative day. The convention is so intensely covered by the ENS that there is not much that I can add. I have started to post a couple of times, then overwhelmed by sleep have gone to bed without successfully saving my draft. Pretty pathetic. The house of deputies continues to work very slowly. Our electronic voting system seems to be beyond the technical skills of the house, probably because we are too old to know how to program our own VCR's, etc. There seems to me to be quite a lot of unnecessary speech on the floor -- people asking questions or making observations from a microphone which would have been better dealt with in a private way, people saying micro-editing things on the floor, offering views which would have been better done at the hearings, bits of legislation coming to the floor which have to be withdrawn and worked on more. One session caused John to comment that it was like some kind of comedy program. But everyone is playing nicely. Highpoints for me have been: seeing old friends, the PB's forum on reconciliation at which our own John Danforth did a fabulous job and then Dr Jenny ten Paa spoke completely differently and absolutely wonderfully, the liturgies which are wonderfully varied and all extremely well done. Each day there are "visual preludes" displayed on screens. These are lovely slideshows of original art, which also play during communion. I wonder whether some of the triviality on the floor is related to Windsor Report Anxiety -- maybe if we fritter away our time we'll never have to get around to the tough decisions.