Sunday. 7.25 a.m. Up early as usual. I'm certainly not one to lounge around in bed. When I was growing up on a farm, there was no use staying in bed after around 7 a.m., because there was always something to do on the farm. Although I didn't become a farmer, basically because of the thought of working with my brothers and father, who were always arguing with each other and making life really unpleasant (goodness knows what it was like for my mother, but I have a vague idea.) I think, if you stayed in bed, you would have the curtains opened and noise and people were moving about, and because Malting Farm house was freezing cold during the winter (no central heating!) you'd wake up with ice on the inside of the windows, you would have wanted to find heat somewhere or other, such as the kitchen, which had an Aga cooker in it, which was fuelled with coke, and was permanently on. Also, none of the bedrooms were exactly private. You had to go through one room to get to another, such as my bedroom.
It is relatively quiet this morning, on the weather front.
I don't know whether I mentioned in earlier posts about buying a DJI Pocket 2 video camera. It's a small and extremely neat little camera, which is deceptive. It doesn't look much, but it produces really amazing quality footage and even has stereo sound which can be recorded and has built-in microphones. It utilises a gimbal system which means, when you move about, the picture is always stable. You save what you record onto a card, the same way you save onto a memory card on a digital camera, which I have also. You have to be very careful with the memory card, which is tiny, no bigger than the nail of your little finger. When you put it into the slot in the camera, it's important to push it in until it clicks and make sure it doesn't jump out and get lost, very easy because it's so tiny.
I have done a couple of test videos, in an attempt to discover how it works. I have done a walk along the banks of the Grand Union Canal, but for the last one I had the camera set wrong and when I played it back, it was a speeded-up video, but I managed to set it up correctly. My biggest problem has been the ability to see clearly on the tiny monitor. But I have now bought a rig that enables me to put my iPhone on this and connect it to the camera via Bluetooth. Using the app that works with the camera, I saw more or less exactly what the camera sees. The gimble works so I can have a steady, level picture, making it easy to video when walking.
Yesterday (Saturday) there was what you might term a lull in the weather. The sun shone, which meant I had an opportunity to go out with the video camera, attached to the new rig. I walked around Oldbrook Green, and it was far easier to hold the rig with the camera in place, alongside my iPhone which connected via Bluetooth and I could use it as a viewfinder. The image was stable, and the whole experiment was a great success.
There is a sign of spring! I saw snowdrops on the opposite side of The Cricketers public house, in the area with a bench, amongst the trees.
Monday. 7.45 a.m. It's another calm day on the weather front, although Storm Herminia is the latest 'weather event' to hit the British Isles.
4:20 p.m. The weather has taken a bad turn. The sky has been dark nearly all afternoon, but just a few minutes ago, there were two deafening thunderclaps, followed shortly by a powerful hailstorm. I stepped outside to check, and what I found wasn't rain but hail. It vanished as quickly as it arrived.
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