Birthday video

I slept nine and a half hours and woke up refreshed. Normally Clare is up well before me, but she slept late so I got breakfast ready. I had a call about a funeral mid morning, and an email from Area Dean Fr Dyfrig finalising the duty rota for St German's for the next three months. I finally got around to unpacking the LED ring lamp I bought in the Cribbs Causeway Mall on Tuesday. It's meant to be used with a mobile phone to illuminate a person being videoed, but I need illumination on my workstation keyboard, as I now find it hard to see it clearly, since the top light and window cast shadows over it. I think it's going to be useful, although positioning it where it can't get knocked and broken was a problem that could only be solved with a help of some gaffer table to stick to the chest of drawers. Not very elegant, but functional until I can think of something better.

We took delivery of a whole salmon and lots of fillets of different kinds of fish, all for the freezer enough to feed us for a couple of months. Clare cooked some fresh hake fillets for lunch. Fish soup tomorrow. Afterwards I walked around the parks and down the river bank from the Western Avenue bridge to the cricket ground. Twice I saw a small brown bird flying low over the water moving in an erratic aerobatic way. I'm sure it wasn't a wagtail. I think it was a dipper. I was told by a fellow birdwatcher a few years ago that there was a dipper's nest in the fish ladder tunnel, but I've never seen any activity there. It's the first time I've noticed this flight behaviour. so maybe ... must check.

After my walk I got around to converting photos I took at Kath's birthday last weekend into a slideshow video to the accompaniment of Stevie Wonder singing 'Happy birthday to you'. I whittled down the 98 pictures to 80 and used the old Picasa app to create a WML file to upload to YouTube. 

We listened to the News Quiz on the radio at supper time, hilariously satirical as ever. Then I watched the two part fourth episode of 'Crimson Rivers', another well made flic movie ruined by an implausible ending involving a secret hi-tech laboratory at the heart of the crime. Scriptwriters don't seem to understand how impossible it is to construct such a facility without anyone noticing the evidence this generates, not least in supplies and maintenance once it's up and running. Science doesn;t happen by magic.

Annoyingly my slideshow video showed the wrong birthday date, as Kath pointed out and I was unable to edit it. Then she sent me a couple more of her photos, plus a video clip, so I had a second go, using the Windows 10 video making app incorporating these, and wrote a title screen to use that I knew was what it meant to say. Second time successful and that much easier in this app, as it's now what I use regularly.