Another early rising on a sunny morning, and out of the house for my dentist's appointment by twenty five past eight. As it's half term, the roads were less crowded than usual so I arrived at the surgery ten minutes early. Mr Benfield the dentist inspected the damage and said that the repair job would be straightforward, and I was booked in for a midday appointment on 13th June. He didn't do a temporary filling, as I assumed he would. Perhaps because he could see that the remainder of the tooth was healthy, with just a portion of the original filling still in place. Ten minutes later I was in the nearby Lidl's superstore buying stocks of nuts and smoked fish at decent prices. Back home for breakfast by half past nine. Quite a good start to Friday for me!
I started to work on next week's Corpus Christi prayer video, and soon had a sense of déjà vu about it. In almost all cases the readings and prayers for a Thursday vary because the calendar date and day vary over a cycle of seven years. Ascension and Corpus Christi are on a Thursday whatever the date. I hunted in my digital archive for a previous video and found that the readings for last year were identical. I had already written a different reflection, and the intercessions were also a little different. I wondered if I could edit together the first half of last year's video and the second half of this year's if I prepared this first, using Microsoft's Clipchamp video editor.
On the surface Clipchamp has all the necessary facilities to make light work of this, but in practice this was not the case. It frequently crashed at each stage of the process. My windows laptop is powerful and fast enough to do the job, and my broadband connection is moderately fast, but the app was simply not good enough.
I tinkered around with this all morning until it was time for a chat with my old friend Roy Thomas, now firmly established in Spain, working from Madrid. He's bought property in Alicante now and can see himself staying in Spain for the foreseeable future. We chatted for more than two hours, then I went for a long walk, enjoying the sunshine, picking up annoying rubbish where I could. Today it was half a dozen crisp packets and just three drinks containers.
Finally after supper I caught up with the bereaved father of a man whose funeral I'm doing on Tuesday. He said that he's not been at home much recently but driving down to the seaside, as home is too full of painful memories just at the moment. Now we've talked I'll be able to prepare the funeral service more fittingly, and spared the worry of tracking him down over the weekend.
I spent the evening tinkering with Clipchamp to see if I could learn what made the app crash frequently, but without bothering to uninstall and re-install it, just in case there was something wrong with the version installed on my laptop. Instead I went my study workstation, as least as powerful as my laptop if not more so. I'd not bothered to install Clipchamp on it before, but once the device had sync'd with the laptop, I was able to load the two video component files, edit them and render them into the final MP4 without a crash. There's a difference in sound quality between the first half and the second, as they were recorded in different rooms but that doesn't matter. The fact is, I've learned that I can re-use old video material if I need to, but it is a fiddle in terms of my weekly daily prayer videos compared to making a slideshow video, the way I have done for the past two years.
Another attempt to get to be earlier tonight, and maybe get a bit more out of a fresher earlier start.
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