Published: February 04, 2026 at 08:30 PM
Tags: fromgravelhill, blog, conferences, gospel, projects, audio-archive, tech, poetry, office-life
The first weekend of February took me off the Island again, this time to Sussex for their winter weekend, and then straight back into the growing pile of projects that seem determined to follow me home wherever I go.
Sussex Winter Weekend
This past weekend was the Sussex Winter Weekend, held at the Saunders Irving Chapel part of the Kingswood University. For anyone curious about the actual meetings instead of just my ramblings, the audio is up here:
https://olearygospelhall.ca/2026/02/02/2026-sussex-winter-weekend/
I was able to travel over with Justin. We got a later start than planned on the Saturday (nothing new there), so we missed the afternoon activities, but rolled in just in time for supper and the hymn sing with a closing message afterward.
This was the first year we weren’t put up in a hotel or motel. Instead, we were sent over to one of the university residence buildings. Two-person rooms, narrow single beds, and just enough space to turn around if you planned your steps first. The bathroom was split in a very practical but slightly comical way, toilet and sink in one little cubby, and a shower so small you almost had to step out of it to change your mind or reach your toes.
The evening itself was really good. The singing was strong, the ministry was thoughtful, and the fellowship was the kind that sneaks up on you — nothing flashy, just a sense of being where you should be, with people who love the same Lord.
After the meeting, a bunch of us — Justin and I plus a few others — slid over to Dairy Queen for a late burger and ice cream. Not exactly diet food, but I’ve long since given up pretending that Christian conferences are compatible with careful calorie counting.
Back at the dorm, a few of us crowded into one room and talked far too late. A mix of joking around, half-serious conversations, and that strange blend of tiredness and contentment that comes after a full day.
Sunday morning was the usual routine: drag myself out of bed, get presentable, and then head to Tim Hortons for a quick breakfast and the required caffeine. From there we made our way to the Lord’s Supper.
The morning meeting was very good. After that came lunch, an afternoon of solid, helpful ministry, and then supper again.
Because we had a three-hour drive back to the Island, we reluctantly slipped away before the Gospel meeting started. We listened to most of it on the YouTube stream as we drove home, which isn’t quite the same as being in the room, but better than missing it entirely.
Conferences almost always come with a kind of spiritual “high” a fresh sense of purpose, a renewed desire to live more for Christ. But, as Marcus Cain has reminded me, if you don’t watch yourself, a conference low can follow just as quickly. You come home to the same dishes in the sink, the same messy desk, the same half-finished projects, and the contrast can feel sharp.
I’m trying (imperfectly) to let weekends like Sussex stir me to steadiness, not just temporary excitement.
VHS Static and Old Voices
Back at home, things have been a little more… analogue.
I’ve still been working away at converting old VHS tapes to digital. Paul MacDonald lent me a small stack that includes some Island content, mixed in with what look like random TV recordings.
To most people, those old recordings would be nothing special. But there are communities online that get genuinely excited about complete TV broadcasts: the original shows, the commercials, the station idents, all of it. These particular tapes seem to be from the ’90s, so I’ve been making a point of getting them captured while the VCR is still cooperating.
Alongside that, I’m still slowly working through the collection of cassette tapes from Peggy Hierlihy. Most of them are in better condition than you’d expect for their age, though a few have stretched a bit, so the pitch and speed drift low. It’s strange listening to a well-known voice sound just a little off.
The laptop has been running almost non-stop, either capturing VHS or recording cassette transfers. All of that is just the first step; every file still needs to be trimmed, cleaned up, named properly, and filed away. At the rate this is going, I’m probably going to need another hard drive dedicated just to audio and video.
Audio, Transcripts, and a Gospel Website in Progress
Over on the Gospel website — https://gospel.fromgravelhill.ca/ — things have moved ahead in fits and starts. I finally got all the conference audio uploaded and properly posted, along with a handful of other messages and articles. Now I’ve reached the less glamorous part: digging through years’ worth of files gathered from various places, sorting, renaming, editing, and deciding what belongs where.
It’s slow, picky work, but necessary if the site is going to be useful to anyone besides me.
Alongside posting audio, I’ve been working on transcripts. The software I’m using does a surprisingly good job, though it still makes more mistakes than I’d like: especially with strong accents, older recordings, or when several voices overlap. Even after clean-up, there are stray errors here and there, but it’s still far better than trying to manually transcribe hundreds of hours.
The bigger question is how to make all of it searchable and useful. I’d like people to be able to search not just by speaker or passage, but actually by content, to type in a phrase or topic and find where it was spoken. There are options for that, but nothing that drops straight into place without thought. So I’m poking at different ideas, slowly.
On top of all that, I’d really like to revamp the look of the site. The plan (in theory) is to build a new theme and layout in the background while keeping the current site online, then switch over once things are ready. In practice, it’ll probably be more of a gradual rebuild. Either way, it’s on the list.
Poems, Grants, and “Maybe Just for Me”
Away from tapes and code, I’ve been stumbling across old poems and sketches again, in notebooks, in random text files, in stacks of paper I thought were something else entirely. The idea of gathering some of them into a small book keeps coming back.
I don’t expect it would ever be a big seller (or even a small one), but I keep thinking it might be worth putting a collection together even if I’m the only person who ever buys it. There’s something appealing about having years of writing and scribbling in one place instead of scattered across every corner of my life.
The simplest path would probably be Kindle and print-on-demand. I’ve also sent a note off for information on the West Prince Arts Guild, since they sometimes help fund small local projects in art and writing. I’m not sure yet if anything will come of that, but at least I’ve asked.
On the more practical side, I’ve started looking into ISBN numbers. The nice thing about living in Canada is that ISBNs are free, which feels like a rare small win in a world where most things come with a bill attached.
None of this is fully formed yet. It’s half-plan, half-daydream. But it’s there, simmering in the background.
Rubik’s Cubes and Small Wins
On a much lighter note: I’ve finally been putting to use the Rubik’s cube I got at Christmas.
I am not, and will never be, a speedcuber. I watched some tutorials, flipped it around absent-mindedly while audio rendered in the background, scrambled it again, and repeated the process more times than I’d like to admit. But somewhere in there, it clicked.
For the first time in my life, I can take a fully scrambled cube and bring it back to solid faces without giving up halfway.
I’m not setting any records, and it still takes me a while, but considering that for nearly forty years I’d never solved a Rubik’s cube at all, I’m counting it as a win.
The Office That Almost Exists
And then there’s the office.
I’ve been trying to get my office/storage room into some kind of usable state again. At the moment, it’s in that awkward in-between stage where it’s cleaner than it was, but still mostly unusable. The piles are shorter, but they’re still piles.
Items have spilled into the hallway now, where the laptop is currently chugging away at yet another VHS transfer. My commentary books, from a previous post, are still lined up along the walls of the spare bedroom. They have already been a big help in study and prep, but I still don’t have a proper shelf to store them on, so for now the floor is doing its best impression of a library.
The goal is still to have the office as a place where I can keep the laptop, the Raspberry Pi, and other “sometimes on” devices set up and ready without taking over my bedroom. For now, it’s more of a work-in-progress museum of half-sorted projects.
Time, Conferences, and Quiet Progress
So that’s where things stand:
- A good weekend in Sussex, full of ministry, singing, friends, and a reminder to guard against the post-conference slump.
- A growing archive of old audio and video slowly being dragged into the digital world.
- A Gospel website part-way between “rough but working” and “I have big plans.”
- Poems and sketches hinting at a future little book.
- A newly solved Rubik’s cube on the desk, just because it makes me smile.
- An office that’s not what I want it to be yet, but closer than it was.
As usual, there are more projects on the go than I can comfortably keep track of, and plenty that are lagging behind. But they are moving, even if it’s slow and uneven and full of detours.
Time keeps ticking on. My hope, in the middle of all of this, is that when I look back, I’ll be able to see that something worthwhile was done, not just in terms of files processed or posts written, but in the quiet, unseen work the Lord does in the middle of ordinary days like these.