It was Sunday, so we made our usual trip to the Farmers’ Market with a walk through town afterwards. It was a warm morning, and the streets and parks were much busier than they had been a month ago.

The Billy Jones Wildcat Railroad was back in operation and there was a long line of people waiting to buy tickets and ride. It was good to see, but I’m glad we weren’t planning to join them.

This afternoon and evening, I finally sat down to work on the Spring Almaniac; I hadn’t done an Almaniac for several years but thought this would be a good year to get back to it. I finished two of the ten chapters today and am pretty confident of most of my answers.

We took a couple of other walks, too, which gives me the excuse I need to share a picture of a Japanese Flowering Cherry in the neighborhood.

Diane read Torah and I led services (on Zoom) for Shir Shabbat this morning. There was a Bat Mitzvah at the same time, so we couldn’t livestream the service to our BoxCast channel; instead, I had to record it and upload it later.

Recording was easy enough; I just had to push one button. But to make sure I didn’t lose track of what I was doing, I did the recording on a different computer, starting early and ending late. I wanted to trim out the time before and after the service – which I thought would be easy.

I opened the recording in QuickTime and figured out where I wanted to start and finish; then I tried to trim the recording and couldn’t find any way to just enter the time I wanted – or even to drag the trim bars reliably. Then I tried iMovie and had the same problem.

I finally gave up and installed ffmpeg; then it was easy to trim the recording to the exact times I’d found and upload it to BoxCast.

But I don’t think normal people would find it plausible to use ffmpeg and the command line to do the job – I must have missed something in QuickTime and iMovie. Right?