Long, Probably Depressing Day Tomorrow

I haven’t mentioned it here previously, but things aren’t so good just now at my beloved Holy Moly.

We’re just… so small, and we’ve been in a budget crunch since forever. There’s other stuff – just “stuff,” okay? that we either have to solve or work on. On the other hand, new people trickle in the doors most weeks (some really great new people!), but the “old hands” are exhausted and tempers sometimes fray.

It seems like we have committee meetings every other week now. We’re all working on ideas for short-term and long term goals, and tomorrow a meeting after church is likely to be long, mentally exhausting, and frustrating. On the other hand, we had another such meeting earlier this week that made me feel cautiously optomistic that we’re capable of not only keeping the doors open, but opening them wider than we currently seem to be doing.

Our eyes are being opened along with those metaphorical doors, but we still have a lot of work to do.

I was up all night last night.. yes, until about 530am, working on implementing Bookqueue for the Holy Moly blog with an Amazon affiliate account added in. It shouldn’t have been that much of a struggle, but it was, and there’s still a bit (just a bit now) to do.

And then this morning I got a call (I was still so groggy) asking me to put together a flyer listing the various Holy Week services, as we’ve decided that traditional print advertising is just a tremendous waste of money, when the bulk of our “Christmas service visitors” were there because of inexpensive fliers we printed off and distributed, rather than the small print ad we ran in one paper.

So then today I was also re-vamping the Holy Moly website with the schedules (more there to do, need to copy the schedules over to the sister parish’s page) and also sending emails to the two local papers who reliably publish free “religion and church news” items on a weekly basis. I’ve learned, once again, that telling the Daily Harold to print an announcement of an ongoing, weekly event until a specific date won’t happen – they’ll print it once, and then you have to re-send it to them for the next date, or send multiple emails, one for each date.

So, yes, the Harold is going to receive a bunch of notices, and so will the Sun-Times. The Trib, not so much, I’ve never succeeded in getting much joy out of sending them stuff. I have an address, though, so I’ll send it tomorrow anyway.

And then I have to hit all the little local suburban links for Pioneer Press – annoyingly, they only accept submissions on webforms… one for each of the 6 or 7 little suburbs that might send visitors our way for Holy Week or Easter Vigil.

And yeah, I’m not ready with my one project, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem, since I already have all the text boilerplate ready to cut and paste below one of two images.

We’ll see how it goes. The life of a church lady is never easy.

But if you’re shopping for Episco-books, consider going to the church blog and shopping there. In a couple of minutes, a general Amazon search box will be there, too. As Fr. Ted says, “it could mean a few shekels.”