Crash course on iMovie

So I managed to film my friend Lucy shaving her hair off for SPCA yesterday, but the challenge was turning it into a short video clip. I have only once played around with iMovie briefly but I had a baptism by fire last night trying to assemble something for today for SPCA and Lucy to post. I got the basics and managed to put in music and fast forward, all seemed to go OK, although cutting sections and choosing the exact point to add music were a little fiddly. All good, but then trying to export the jolly video from iMovie, oh my hat! What a mission. When I converted it to a file it produced this massive document that was way too big to email or whatsapp. I tried to Zip the file but it didn't seem to do anything. Tried Dropbox but it took all evening and still hadn't loaded. I then tried uploading to Facebook directly from iMovie. This wouldn't accept my password. I was really tearing my hair out by this point and wondering if a whole evening of editing had been wasted. Eventually gave up and went to bed, and this morning as a last resort tried uploading the humongous file directly on Facebook. Blow me over, this actually worked - I couldn't believe it. So, thankfully, the video was shared. Oh, but the snag - Facebook won't allow you to share copyrighted music, so alas the video may not have sound on Facebook.

If you would like to make a donation towards Lucy's head shaving for SPCA and are in Zim, the Ecocash number is *151*2*1*06326*amt*5555# 

The online board games yesterday with my friends and sister and brother-in-law were a lot of fun. Went for a lovely walk around Ballantyne Park this morning and then headed to school for a couple of hours work. Done all my photocopying for next week now - oh yeah. On the way home we passed by a friend's gate. They are doing take away meals from home and as a birthday present for my mum gave us a free pizza and some butternut soup - Tenji Mutiti, it was delicious. Can highly recommend.

To see more about Ballantyne Park go to https://www.facebook.com/bibi.eastwood/videos/10162149107200051/

Online games and head shaving

Had my Friday past paper Zoom session this morning with my class. Still have someone annotating my maths explanations, which is really annoying, but I threatened to stop the session and not offer any further help to anyone if it continued and it promptly ceased. Mid explanation though my one student suddenly leaped up and charged through their house with their lap top as they wanted to show me a horse at their back door. I didn't catch that this was what they were doing and wondered what on earth was happening. Thought they maybe needed a loo break and were taking their lap top with - oh my! It ended up being a long session so I need to break it up in future. One mum has suggested that instead of giving the class a social interaction time at the end of the lesson, like I started doing yesterday, I could give them a brief break and social half way through. I am just worried the social may continue afterwards. I give them free reign of my shared screen in this time and they seem to want to see who can cover the screen with the most writing and squiggles in one colour compared to each other.

I need to just do a bit of prep for next week but otherwise have a relatively free weekend. I have been asked to help record a friend shaving her head for SPCA tomorrow lunch time and then am scheduled to play some more Jackbox.tv games with my sister and friends in England and here, which I am looking forward to. My sister wants to do a Zoom work out later. We did a Zumba intense cardio yesterday. I want to do a bit more art and finish reading The Last Resort and Three Sisters, Three Queens.

My mum has just got back from trying to get some groceries. She queued to get in to Bon Marche and queued at the till, only to get to the end and find out that First Capital, our bank, is offline.

Anniversaries

Today has been long and a lot of work. Got to school just after seven this morning and have been working pretty much non-stop since. I had to do all the marking of work returned by the parents and then assessed a new student who it looks like will be joining my class. Was trying to do the Schonell reading and spelling age test at a distance and with a mask on, but it was tricky. From my marking, one student made me chuckle, they were asked what shape was at the bottom of a pyramid. The answer should have been a square, but my student replies, "Eygpt!" I guess the original pyramids had Egypt as their base but, no.

I did my French WeChat lesson to China from school and today we did la maison. The little girl was very chatty and good at repeating things but it was harder trying to extract things from the little boy, although he is a very good little artist. Am quite enjoying it but wish we could use Zoom rather than WeChat but it's blocked in China.

Today is a little bit of a hard one, as it is the anniversary of when Matt first asked me out after we got back from an Nyanga trip. Am trying not to dwell on it but at the back of my mind there are always the what could have beens and why's.

Soul renewing

Today has been a good day. I was able to get my water colours and paint brushes out and try an interesting approach guided by Sarah Fynn. The idea was you do a continuous line drawing of your surroundings and then once you've captured as much as you want down, you then use view finders to select three boxed areas of your line drawing and in each of them use only two colours (which you can blend together). Teamed cadmium yellow with black (don't know the technical name for that :P ), French ultramarine with burnt sienna and then viridian with alorizon crimson. Once you did your squares you then worked with those six colours and made your picture come together with as much or as little abstraction as you liked. Sarah highlighted that you need to work with your white space as that can sap a picture of it's life and vitality and equally you should make your dark areas flow.

Guess what I drew here?

I am enjoying the element of freedom with lock down as I am not tied to a desk all morning and I can be flexible with my time. Tomorrow I have to go back in to school to collect work and I am to assess a new student. We await what government says at the weekend again to see if schools will be reopening or not any time soon.

Heard a story of a lady in South Africa whose father is dying up here in Zim. The borders are closed at the moment so as a desperate last resort, the lady actually walked across the dry Limpopo River. She managed to see her father and made it across.

Thoughts of Africa

Continent of our birth,
whose sunshine and red earth
have moulded our childhoods
and much of our lives,
yet makes it so hard to survive.
Poor leadership and rampant greed,
with the ever present face of need.
Severe drought and famine
we have known
and what of the seed that has been sown?
When will the endeavours of so many
result in benefits and not disgrace?
The cradle of humanity
and yet from which many flee
to seek a life where it may be easy
no shortages, inflation or poverty.
But are these shores welcoming
and all that they seem?
Some make it but for others
it is a new form of slavery.

Another day, another Zoom

We got to school on the smell of an oil rag this morning, as we are very low in fuel. There seems to be a fuel shortage again now people are starting to move around more. The empty light was on but we refilled from our jerry can at school, but once that is gone we're in a pickle. The commute from Milton Park to Borrowdale must be at least 20 km.

Didn't get all the work I'd set back from some students. For some this is the second week running and the culprits are some of my grade 7's who are writing entrance exams next month. I am not sure how their parents think I will wave a magic wand if they don't do the work. Still have monkeys annotating my shared screen in Zoom while I am trying to go over past papers with them all.

It's amazing what new enterprises have taken off with Corona. I know of people making masks to order but I got phoned just now by a second person offering to sanitize the school for when schools reopen (we think soon). So yes, we don't know when the government is going to set schools to reopen but it is suggested they might do it in phases, starting with exam classes first. The school has already got an infrared thermometer and we've just had the school painted. A parent is going to sanitize all the classrooms etc. for us. I don't know if we'll have to have a Corona test. One of the staff had a family member return from overseas at the weekend. You have to pay for your accommodation in a hotel that has been designated as an official quarantine centre. My colleague's relative was told on arrival though that there was no transport to their accommodation so they had to phone their family and be driven by them to quarantine. Kind of defeats the point. We wait and see what the government is going to come up with regarding schools.

Of fires, Africa Day et le Français

Today being Africa Day, it was ostensibly a public holiday. However, I first had my Monday intro to the week's work with my class on Zoom and then I had my first French lesson with two Chinese five year olds who ordinarily would go to the French School here, but due to Corona are back in China. I managed to work out how to tell who is posting on my shared screen in Zoom and gave that student a bit of a fright by saying, so and so please stop posting on the screen. They couldn't resist straightening my diagrams a little later on but I had to ask if they were paying attention to what I was actually saying about perimeter and not just obsessing over my wiggly shapes. The French lesson went fairly well. I had two hard working five year olds and they did sweet drawings of themselves and their families and I tried to get the vocab across. The little girl claimed she had seven sisters and nine brothers so couldn't fit them all in. Obviously China's one child policy no longer holds or she may be getting her numbers a bit wrong.

There was a massive fire on Monavale Vlei as we were leaving to go to school to prep for tomorrow's book hand out. The fire brigade came and they managed to put it out eventually but it took a couple of hours. Wasn't near our house, but close to houses where I have house sat in the past. Depending on lock down I may have a house sit in June.

Photo credit: Jill Roberts from Monavale

Photo credit: Jill Roberts from Monavale

Photo credit: Jill Roberts from Monavale

Photo credit: Jill Roberts from Monavale

Photo credit: Jill Roberts from Monavale

Photo credit: Gretta Mackenzie

Photo credit: Gretta Mackenzie

Had a bit of time out this weekend. My sister organised an online games afternoon with our cousins Jaimie and Carly, in Cape Town and London respectively. We played Drawful 2 and then Quiplash which were fun. Jaimie has an alternative that you can play without Zoom as Zoom did keep timing out, but hey, technology is amazing.