The holiday season is drawing to a close – and for a change I do feel VERY relaxed after spending a lot of time away. It has been great laughing with the family and the weather for camping has not been too bad (we have been home for 3 days!)

Before going away for the first of 3 holidays in the caravan, I set my ‘out of office assistant’ in Outlook to say I was away until the end of August. Although this was not strictly true, and that I would be back for 3 days between each break it was easier than confusing myself and others by leaving a more complicated outlook response.

It’s been unexpectedly great as this has left me space to get rid of loads of piled up admin, outstanding phonecalls and filing rather than feel I needed to immediatly respond to peoples emails unless they were particularly urgent. Most importantly for the next term I think I have solved the frustrating issue of my slow laptop – although it has taken most of 2 days to go through old files, delete old programs, defrag, clean disk etc etc etc. One process took over6 hours and I left it running overnight. A job that needed doing – but when do you ever have time to do clean up jobs on the computer which take 2 days.

I’m now wondering whether to use this Outlook setting on a semi regular basis to help me not check immediatly and feel the need to repond to email which can be quite distracting. I’ve noticed over the lst few years that the downside of email is that people expect instant answers. This holiday while fishing with the children, or sitting on the beach, or kicking a ball etc etc etc I feel God has brought to mind the image of Jesus writing in the sand a few times which seems to me to challenge this culture of instant response.

Anyway – this is a boring rambling post to remind myself more thn anything – I shall write later about our exciting holiday times and the laughs we have had – but for now … its time to get the cravan ready to go away again for the bank holiday weekend which looks like it will be very sunny! I do feel, though, that I am the only person in the universe not heading for Greenbelt … how did that happen!?