This is the start of what promises to be an eventful few weeks.

Mike who cleared the valley in January is back to cut some paths with a mini digger, build a couple of ponds at the bottom and expose what we hope is a dry stone wall at the top. But first he had to clear the nettles which were approaching hip height, rediscover the piles of wood that had been cut 6 months before and move these out onto the new grass path to be collected.

With everything strimmed back you can appreciate the majestic ferns and see more clearly where the paths will go and where we might site a bench down by the ponds. The mini digger won’t be delivered until Friday morning, and I won’t see Mike mid-week while he finishes off his last job.

With a bit of luck tomorrow, Wednesday, Danny and his team will be with us to winch across a tree that fell across the stream and to cut down the smaller ash at the top of the valley that has suffered badly from ash die back disease. There is a pile of logs to collect, cut up and split and some small roadside ash saplings also suffering from the same disease that need to be brought down. There were two saplings of about 15 feet in the valley which were also dead, and I pushed one over with my hand, it was very light, and I now understand why roadside ash trees have to be taken down when they are starting to show signs of dying.

The area at the top of the valley, which was a little boggy, has pooled water, but it hasn’t rained for the last three days. Mike says it might be a spring. He’ll dig a trench with the mini digger, and we’ll see what we discover, we have a warm dry spell coming up, we may be able to create a feature of it, if the water is continuous.

The area around the waterfall is a bit dangerous and we will need to do something to make it obvious that there is a drop of 10 feet or more to the rock at the foot of the waterfall. I’m thinking that one of the grass paths will run down by the dry stone wall, if this does materialise to be a feature, and then run around along the stream edge to just beyond the waterfall. As mown grass it will be more obvious where the bank is, but we’ll need to add some logs to keep the walker from the edge and stop an inadvertent slip.

By the end of the week the piles of logs were all split, including the old logs in the stable which were too large for my electric chainsaw. We now have another pile in the yard behind the stables which looks to be approaching the size of the log pile we had after the diseased Copper Beech was felled around Easter last year. This probably equates to another 5-6 years of fires in our wood burners. With the cost of oil soaring week by week, I will be feeding the fires continuously this winter and trying to leave off the heating as much as we can.

Christian and Danny pulled the tree that crossed the stream back on itself by hooking up a pulley around a massive oak tree in Spa Wood. The tractor with winch created a nice sized hole in the ground as it dug itself in to take the strain, I was standing well back. As the trunk of the tree started to rise a large rotten piece fell into the stream, but apart from that it was pulled out with very little damage to the stream banks. The smaller ash came down half an hour later and there is a nice pile of dead wood to be burnt on Monday.

It is nice to be able to walk around the new field path without coming across a pile of logs. On Thursday I was down at the bottom end of the valley re-examining where the valley paths could be placed when I heard a noise just beyond our boundary in the undergrowth of Spa Wood. I got my camera ready and put it on video and soon captured the sound of a young buck deer, testing out his vocal cords. For just over a minute, I followed his movement through the wood, hoping he would come out to where it is a bit clearer, but alas he didn’t, the grunts just became more distant. Nevertheless, I’ve now got a nice video of the valley bottom and its large ferns before any groundwork begins on the ponds.

The mini digger was delayed coming out to us on Friday until early afternoon and I didn’t see Mike at all, but he assures me he will be here on Monday.

Otherwise, the week has been dominated with trying to put some polish to the first video I was creating for work, although with a presentation to prepare for I’ve only been spending half of my time on this. Two colleagues have reviewed and have been very helpful in suggesting ways for improvement, which is exactly what I needed. Music has been added, and there are now automated transitions between scenes, so that when I come to finalise, I press record and stop the recording at the end. I am using a mix of OBS Studio and iMovie, but progressively doing more in iMovie. OBS Studio seems to be able to create a finished video which is a fraction of the size in iMovie, but as a result you do have more files to handle. On Friday I started to animate the few slides, and this adds an extra dimension and makes the longer sections more fluid.

On Thursday evening I raised the microphone on its stand so that I would be standing and recorded in two takes Week 1 of ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ and after a bit of editing in Audacity this was published to my website. It took two takes because the autocue has a 10-minute limit on the free version. Tanya, one of the WordPress course instructors said “Your sound quality is great in my opinion, and your voice is very clear. I had no troubles following along. Also, glad that you found Reggie”. This was the feedback I needed, I am sure I can improve as I become more practised, but it looks as if I have a good base to start from.

Saturday was wiped out with rain. I did get an hour of gardening done, but when I was starting to get cold and damp and knowing that it wasn’t going to be a passing shower, I retired for the day.

With one episode of my podcast finished I started on the second and finished the day with the four episodes of January recorded and edited. By the end of the third episode, I had given up with the autocue software called Speakflow which I had thought was the best thing since sliced bread when I used it the first time around. Previously I had worked on an automatic speed setting of 1.75 in a scale of 0 to 10. Now all automatic speeds apart from 0 are too fast and 0 is too slow. If you set it to 10, the scrolling is so fast that I doubt anyone could read it let alone speak it. I would think someone has made a change and rendered the product useless. Unfortunately, the free version where it monitors your speech has become jerky and is limited to two minutes at a time before you must hit the Start button again. This is a great pity, as I was just about to subscribe.

The second and third episodes took several takes and a lot more editing than the first which was by far the longer of the three. I decided to abandon Speakflow and opted from Prompt+ but even this seems to not be functioning as expected, but it did at least let me record a fourth episode.

On Sunday morning I was all for re-recording the third and fourth episodes, but I listened to them again and thought that they were OK and decided to publish them. I’ve asked the combined courses community to give me feedback, good or bad. When I return from golf, I’ll have to think about how I can improve the quality for future episodes. The sound quality is I think good, and I have found the settings to allow them to be acceptable as an audiobook, an ACX Check in Audacity. But there are a few stumbles over words, which I should re-record, rather than allowing them to be edited which may not be perfect. The phrasing of sentences and giving a longer pause between paragraphs are also two points that I can improve on. I am not disillusioned by this, I always felt that I needed to learn to speak.

Golf was a slow walk in the park, I didn’t play well, and Peter played OK and amassed eight pars to my three, the first time for several weeks where he had beaten me. We had started just after noon so that we could finish a round before the rain, which we did do. Unfortunately, we lost momentum when we both had errant drives into the wind on the fourth and while we both found our balls, we had waved through the players behind us. Then, by the time we got to the 11th, we found ourselves behind a slow pair and that is when my game disintegrated. I lost a couple of balls and at the furthest point from the clubhouse most of my motivation to play was also lost after my ball bounced square of a new post and returned past the point from where it had been played.

In the evening after golf, I managed to publish through to Apple Podcasts The Diary of a Digital Nobody, and now I can call myself a podcaster.