Unexpected new mini-project

I walked to St John's and celebrated the eight o'clock this morning for four people. Fr Mark arrived at the end with Rose Dymond, one of the staff of the St Padarn's Institute, to introduce her to the church set up. I was delighted to discover that she was an ordinand of the Diocese in Europe whose journey into ministry started in Leipzig, followed by Den Haag, then a spell as Rector of Bedwellty before recently joining the Institute staff. I then celebrated and preached at the St Catherine's Parish Eucharist.

Yesterday, I had a call from Andrew James the Vicar of St Andrews Major and Dinas Powys to ask if I could cover his Sunday duties next week, as he is about to start a period of sabbatic leave. As I've committed my time to help out in Canton while I'm here, I referred him to Fr Mark, who said he could manage without me next week. In all my years of ministry, I've never visited either church, although I've driven past both many times, taking a short-cut back home from Barry via Leckwith. St Andrews Major is a 12th century country church, St Peter's is in the suburban Victorian village expansion of the Parish. I must be sure to take my camera with me.

Last Tuesday at choir practice, Anna gave the gathering some musical feedback with a couple of recordings made of them at their last concert, which was, coincidentally at St Catherine's. She asked if anyone could make a YouTube video slideshow using these 'best of the bunch' tracks with some photos of the choir performing. Nobody present seemed able or willing to take this on, so I said I would give it a try.

This evening the respective image and audio files arrived. First, attempted to use the rather long in the tooth version of Picasa, still in use on my computers, but wasn't satisfied with the result. Then I hunted for Windows Movie Maker, unsure whether it had been swept aside in favour of other Apps by updating the operating system, but I found it was still there and working, so I started again. This wasn't easy, as it's several years since I last used it to edit video clips, and had forgotten how. Even so, by the end of the evening I emailed Anna with a couple of rough cuts of the tracks to see if this project was going in the right direction, pleased to have recovered a modicum of mastery over this piece of digital kit. Not something I could have anticipated doing a week ago.