The real work begins now...

The bishops finished their retreat today, and after the big plenary tomorrow, the hard work of the conference will begin.

Yesterday was a lot of fun. As well as the more mundane stuff of updating the site and getting my administration in form, I had to chase up some stories. By the end of the day, we needed an update on the retreat, so I decided to go and chase it up. When I left the building in which I'm working, coincidentally all the bishops were coming back from retreat for their dinner, so I decided to doorstop a whole ton of them.

The first I came to was Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church. Then I found Bishop Michael Hough from Ballarat. I thought, "Two caucasians, hmmm - better get some diversity" so I stopped someone else who just happened to be the Archbishop of Myanmar! I was able to tell him how we in Australia are very aware of the situation there and how closely we follow it. My final (or so I thought) bishop was Archbishop Sebastian Bakare of Harare. Fancy chancing on that quality lot by simply picking at random! Still, it's hard to pick anyone at random here and not find someone outstanding.

So, feeling rather pleased with myself, I took my soundbites off to the news room where equally coincidentally, the Episcopal Church's unofficial briefing was taking place. I even got to ask a sensible question. I headed back to my office to write it all up - and there in the foyer was the Archbishop of Canterbury. So I asked him how *he* thought it was going, and he was very jolly about it. He must have been absolutely exhausted.

This afternoon I'm covering one of the Spouses' self select sessions, and this one's on Mission to Streetworkers. Should be quite interesting. Then this evening I'm going to a gathering of Aussies at the conference, somewhere posh I think, and then there's a knees up with the comms people at a pub later. Should be fun!