Quarantine Cymru - day Eleven

More rain in the night and early this morning. It's cooler now. By breakfast time cloud dispersed enough to let the sun in for a while. For most of the day it remained overcast and cool, with more rain in the evening. 

Clare cooked us perfect veegan breakfast pancakes again, our Saturday treat, whatever the weather. She also went out early to collect the antibiotics I was prescribed yesterday. She's going to need a holiday after making so much effort to look after a quarantined me since I returned.

Today I worked on recording the eulogy for my sister Pauline's funeral next Friday. The script that Nicky sent me only needed minor modifications to make the text flow nicely. I know how I'd like to record it, but can I set up my HX90 camera somewhere in the house where it's quiet and suitably lit for static head and shoulders footage? I settled for the front room eventually, where it was possible to sit on a low arm chair with a blank wall behind me. In Ibiza this was so tricky to do without a camera tripod but now back home, it was easier than I anticipated once I found the right place. 

The text took nine minutes to record, and I managed to do it without fluffs in one take. Reading for the most part from a script out of camera sight wasn't easy. On reviewing the footage I was perhaps more conscious of eye and head movement than a one off viewer might be. TV news readers have a auto-cue reader to enable them to look straight into the camera most of the time. No such luck for me, and learning the script off by heart wasn't an option, as I'd ad lib too much, and then it would need more editing. I hope it will be good enough. Let's see what Nicky and Jules think.

I had another go at using the Windows 10 video app, which I learned to use in Ibiza on quite a powerful machine. It's very user unfriendly with no help files to show you how. It fails to tell you that you must put all the photos and video clips you intend to use into the same sub-folder of the Photos folder or the app cannot use them. It does tell you that you must make a sub-folder without explaining its purpose. Plain daft. Once I'd figured this out, I was able to make the app work as intended. It allows you to make a slide show, or to incorporate video and slides into a sequence that will be rendered into a MP4 video file a third the size of the raw material. I've found out this much by time wasting trial and error.

I started wondering a plan had been made to include a slide show of pertinent photos covering my sister's life span, and mentioned in my covering email to Nicky when I sent her the YouTube link to the uploaded video. She likes the idea and I have landed the job of making one. I just hope they can come up with a few more photos than one which I already have in my digital archive.

We've been assailed by recorded messages once or twice a day this week tells us that a sum of sixty pounds has been taken from the Amazon Prime account neither of us have. You press button one for a help line, where either someone will attempt to con personal details from you, or the response you made will register the line as active so you can receive other scam calls at your number. As scam call systems use a random number dialling routine, this may act as a basic filtration routine to make the dialler focus on live numbers. So important not to respond.

How annoying that the UK government is abandoning its two week quarantine requirement for inbound visitors from select lower risk European countries including Spain from next weekend. Too late to benefit me with only three days to go now. Ironically there are localised infection spikes in several countries, Spain among them. Thermal sensing of passengers is being introduced at airport terminals and nobody with a temperature will be allowed to board so they say. Is the desperate wish to resume some degree of normality undermining the need for prudence and caution?