Another Saturday lie-in and pancake breakfast to start the Sabbath! But not much of a day of rest for me. I was determined to prerecord all six services of Morning Prayer for the coming week to upload daily, rather than take the risk of doing it live each morning and having unforeseen technical failure or me failing to get myself properly organised to broadcast the live feed on WhatsApp.
I've had an unprecedented run of good days since the operation, and it's been a joyful relief to get through each day with minimal discomfort or pain, and plenty of energy to enjoy everything I do. Unconsciously however, I remain on the alert against a reversal of fortunes, just when I least expect it. 'So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall!', as St Paul reminds us. It's happened before and it was upsetting and demoralising. I expect this mindset will change eventually, if the final op is the success hoped and prayed for, but making fairly fail-safe plans is what I need to do for now, and I'm not ashamed of that.
Having already prepared the texts for each day, producing around thirty five minutes worth of recordings took me the two and a half hours that remained of the morning before lunch. The sky was overcast and I had to juggle with lights pointing at the ceiling to give the illusion of being in the full daylight. As editing footage wasn't possible due to the video rendering problem I failed to resolve yesterday, each day's video had to be done in one take. It wasn't as easy I as thought.
My eyesight is deteriorating due to the cataract in my camera viewfinder eye. I need a very strong light to read fluently these days, and technically it wasn't possible to put a light source close enough to me and not affect the video recording. If it had been bright and sunny outdoors, I could have got away with it. I noticed in the playbacks that I fluffed some of my words and didn't quite get the sentence flow right, normally not a problem. But it was a good idea record them in advance. Doing it live in the early morning, when my eyesight is often at its worst, would not be such a good idea!
I certainly needed a siesta after lunch today, so it was starting to get dark by the time I got home have my afternoon circuit of the Parish streets, occasioned by a trip to the chemists to get some Tea Tree cream. On my way around I had a conversation with Mother Frances, about including the Church in Wales special prayer for Advent in the daily office. I explained that I'd recorded them which surprised her I think, but she understood why once I explained myself. I promised that I'd make a supplementary audio recording of the prayer, with accompanying slides of the texts, which I though I could do easily enough. Famous last words however.
The slides were easy enough to create, and I used a couple of photos taken of the NHS prayer station outside St Luke's which has stood in the locked porch of the church since early in the pandemic. I thought I might be able to use Google's old Picasa app to make the audio and slides into a video. I did the job fine until it got to the rendering stage, working as intended, but consistently failing to complete the job, getting stuck at 98.9% and not saving. Bizarre.
Then I tried using the online Google Photos, having succeeded with stringing together some stills of Kath and Owain leaping into the air on Oxwich beach into a crude stop motion video. Another fail here however, as this app offers lots of themed templates of photos from your collection trawled together by their fancy image recognition AI Cloud software. As for letting the user decide what photos they wish to make into a slide video, forget it. There's no custom option, or at least none that is plainly visible on the otherwise user friendly interface.
I stopped to watch this week's double episode of 'The Valhalla Murders' on BBC Four and eventually, settled for using Windows Movie maker, going strong since Windows 7, and installed on my Windows 10 machine alongside a newer app that does the same thing but has a mystifying user interface. This did the job nicely. It didn't take long, and ran as expected in WhatApp. Altogether, it was an annoying frustrating evening, but I was relieved to have everything resolved by my my usual midnight bedtime.
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