4.285 meetings, rehearsal

Tuesday 09/12/2023

In the morning I completed preparing the video for the C&W show. For what I thought was the final time, but of course during and after the rehearsal this afternoon people wanted changes, so I will do it one more time. I edit the material in iMovie. Then I have iMovie export the finished video as a file, which will typically be 8GB in size and takes an hour. Step 2, run that through Handbrake which produces a video of the same resolution that is just over 1GB. This takes 45 minutes. While it runs I go back and verify the exact starting times of each “chapter”, that is each of the 24 musical numbers, like “Crazy” at 17:42. These are in a text file and only need changing from the point where a new song is added. The compressed video is opened in Metadoctor, an app that knows how to add chapter markers, and it loads the text file and marks the chapters. Then I just have to copy the movie off the desktop machine and into the laptop that will show it.

At 10:30 was the writers meeting. This week we were supposed to write about what we’ve been reading. I had written my little essay while in Silverdale, so I was set.

At 12:30 I met with Marcia for lunch, at my request. Marcia is the resident member of the Board, and the chair of the Strategic Planning committee. I wanted to talk to her about what I saw as the unnecessary hiring of a consultant for yet another boring and expensive round of planning. We get along well, we’ve been working together since back in 2020 when we were the volunteer coordinators for the resident Covid volunteer groups. She told me what she understands about the process, but in fact I still don’t see it. But I’m not going to make any more trouble.

At 1:30 I started setting up for the C&W rehearsal. That only took half an hour this time so I was way early. We finally got going with a full run-through at 3:10 and finished at 4:45, so it is well under the 2 hours we’d set as a limit. After I’d tidied the AV equipment up, I could relax for the rest of the day. PBJ sandwich for supper and early to bed.