Tuesday 14 March 2023

Rota booking time

It's so nice to wake up and the room is still warm enough not to need to bury myself in the duvet while I wake up. More flowers are opening up, and the Spring equinox is only a week away. After breakfast I edited Sunday's sermon and worked on a Wednesday address for week hence, as tomorrow's is already done. A fair morning's work. 

Caroline emailed the rota for the last couple of weeks of my stay here. It means this coming Sunday will be my last visit to Alhaurin, not Palm Sunday, the way it was when I was here nine years ago. The pictures taken at the service are still there in one of my Google Photos accounts. I had hoped for a repeat, but never mind. Do what's useful, that's what counts. I also had a list of dates from Father Stewart for helping out in Roath Ministry area for the first three months when I get back, at St German's and St Edwards mostly, as suits his need. Lots of dates to enter into the diary!

An appeal came in from Ruth on the Parish WhatsApp prayer group for someone to cover her daily office stint tomorrow as she's been having trouble uploading and 8-9 minute video via WhatsApp, and has yet to master posting files to be hosted by YouTube. I've done this almost since the beginning of the regular daily prayer webcasts a year and a half ago. I was forced to do it as the memory of my phone at the time wasn't adequate to the job within WhatsApp. 

Three of us on the rota use cloud video hosting, the other three use WhatsApp directly, but it looks now as if it may be 'all change'. WhatsApp video postings are capped at 30mb, about two thirds of the size of an average file uploaded. It may be something to do with a change in the app's ability to compress videos. Or, something to do with Morning Prayer having longer Psalms and Gospel lessons in Lent, taking files over the upload limit. Not a problem with YouTube thankfully, so far. 

As I have a fair amount of time to spare, I volunteered to do Ruth's slot for her this week. I wanted to do this at the end of the morning but couldn't as for a second day running there was persistent noise and vibration from a pneumatic drill breaking up concrete  a hundred metres up the road. I felt sure the noise would stop at two when tools are down for lunch, so I did the recording when this happened, except that the noise started up again five minutes later, so I got lucky!

After this I walked to Los Boliches and took the train to Fuengirola, then walked from there exploring side streets and another section of the Paseo Maritime before turning back. I caught the L3 bus from the Mercacentro back to Los Boliches, as it was 26C and I was overdressed for the increased heat. I needed a few things from Mercadona, and walked back up the hill from there to the house. 

After supper I washed a few things and left them to dry on the line overnight. Then I assembled a video slide show to accompany the audio recorded earlier and posted it to YouTube after supper. As there was no biblical reflection to accompany it, the task didn't take long. Rhiannon arrived to stay with Clare. She has film extra work on the 'Casualty' set down in Cardiff Bay. The three of us chatted for a while on video and then it was time to get ready for bed after quite a demanding day.

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