This week has been one of a little more rest than I was accustomed to in November. Since first flight, things are a little slower at work, and I have my weeknds and evenings to myself again. At least for now. I’m sure at some point in the future that will all change again.

So this past week was generally unproductive. I accomplished nothing significant. It was dedicated to let my brain relax a bit and allow me to catch up on a few things. I watched a few movies, was able to spend some quite time at home, and – my favorite – be able to spend time with the youth again.

During the month of November, I gave up any commitments outside of work. I was being asked to work nights and weekends and the conflict of trying to keep my personal life as well as my work life was too much. So I only had a work life. There were only a few times during the month (until Thanksgiving) that I was able to do something that wasn’t work related. They were only possible because nothing required me to be at work at that time. There were three days during the entire month that I didn’t work: the first day and the last two. Some required 24 hours continuous, and others simply overnight. I rarely got more than 5 hours of sleep at a time, and learned to sleep and be awake at pretty much any time of day. It was not much fun. I hope I don’t have to do this again, at least for a long time.

Today (Sunday) I started an interesting experiment. We had our Sunday School Christmas program at church and the Sunday School leader asked me to take pictures or video of the kids as they sang and performed. I have been interested in media for a while and have aquired some video and audio equipment, and very quickly came up with a somewhat complex plan. OK, so it’s not nearly as complex as most of what you see on television, but considering I’m only one person, and very much an amateur at that, it was a bit of a stretch for me. I ended up having three people take video for me – one in the center and on either side. I also had three channels of audio recorded from the sound system. I took still photographs myself. The plan is to get everything imported and manually sync them with each other, then I can cut between different angles from the three video cameras. I’m not sure how this will turn out. I’m importing the first video as I write this, so we have a long way to go before I can see much for results. The end result will be a DVD, and hopefully it will not turn out too bad. While this is mostly an experiment for me, I have a little experience with video recording. At the retreat in October, I had the sessions recorded, and things didn’t go too badly, but I had a few difficulties, particularly with audio, and wanted to resolve that in the future. This is why I recorded separate audio from the main mixer this time. It will add an extra layer of “fun” trying to sync everything together, but hopefully the result will be better.

So that’s my challenge for this week: see if I can do some major video editing.