Wednesday, June 3

The sky was darkening and windy when I left this morning. In the morning I began to do the video editing for the summer course, and then alternated between making backdrops and dealing with administration. There are four external students on the course, who have each paid 50€. The stakes continue to rise.

I paused for a Skype meeting with Jutta. The changes Fred has imposed to deal with Tommy’s departure are going to cause us a lot of pain, and Jutta and I needed to work out our response before the emergency team meeting tomorrow. We also discussed the fact that I have to clear 300 hours in my timetable to make way for some new responsibilities. Next year I will be paid for my participation in Nobanet, and for managing the Lynda accounts. These means that Andrej will have to teach more, or we will have to rethink some courses.

I suggested that we run the summer course as a MOOC in Period 3 and have the second year students take that as the new course on interactive storytelling. Jutta was not as enthusiastic about this as me but, one way or another, it will happen.

At 16:00, after a hard day staring at the screen, lining up the backdrops and editing the video and sound, I made a crucial mistake. I attempted to rectify this and, in doing so, compounded the error in such a way that there was no possible way to undo it. I had a string of video bits with unsynced and possibly missing sound, and I wanted to cry.

As Robert pointed out to me, “that’s the way it is with digital editing”. He was right. The original file still exists and I can do it again tomorrow. Am I on a tight deadline? Yes. Have I completely wasted a day? Almost, but not quite. It should be faster to do it a second time, ho ho.

By the time I left for home the weather had completely changed and I stepped out into a bright summer day.

This was a day of disaster. Irma and I went to Prisma to get some shopping and while we were there a conversation went bad and then spiralled out of control, to nobody’s delight. This happens occasionally. There is a term for it: grief.

Now I am out for a long walk, and watching the sun start to go down. I am trying to catch the sunlight and barely managing.

By the time I go to bed the cat will still be out playing in the sun somewhere.