AV Club

Not much has been going on here in the land of sand and skyscrapers. We’re plodding along, thankfully still in school, but Josh is still working from home. Camille goes to campus every day and Caleb goes 2 or 3 days each week and the rest is online. The biggest change to our schedule has been church starting up in person 2 weeks ago.

Masks on, groups of 2, seating every other row, but it’s better than being stuck at home! We are meeting in person, but in limited numbers, so are also live streaming each service. The technological wizardry that goes on behind the scenes to make that happen is incredible.

This is one of 6-8 tech/camera people working on a Friday morning: The Producer. All the feeds from the different cameras, computers, slide overlays, sound, etc all come to him and he chooses what is broadcast at the moment. Since they needed volunteers, I joined the AV team last week and I’m one of the people who is in charge of throwing the correct slides over the stream, whether it’s song lyrics, name tags, preaching slides, video clips and whatever else is needed. I thought it was going to be as easy as advancing the slides in powerpoint. Um, no. Technology has advanced well beyond what it was the last time I did this and the night before I was scheduled for service I had a nightmare that I had forgotten to set up the projectors and couldn’t find the Clear All button so all the slides were displaying on top of each other.

Thankfully, I had Caleb to help me with the projector set up (Thursday evening service has a small tech crew of 2), and to show me how to get the image from the computer onto the wall and I was able to use the Clear All function without issue. Not bad for week 1. I’m committed to in-person church so I’m happy to volunteer. Whatever it takes to keep us meeting.

The Thursday night location requires that everyone, even those from the same family, sit 2 meters apart. It feels a bit like we’ve all been put in Time Out.

Ramadan begins in 2 days, Inshallah, based on the moon sighting and all that, but I’m not sure yet how it will change life for us. Last year we were in the middle of Covid (are we still in the middle of Covid? Please let us be past the middle) so we spent the month sitting on the couch and there may or may not have been a curfew at that time. I think most things were closed/restricted and we were doing school from home so Ramadan 2020 had a very minor impact compared to all the other restrictions in our lives at the time. I could go back and check my blog for April/May 2020 to see what it was really like, but I don’t want to relive that era until we are well past it.

For Ramadan 2021 we’ll be in school (as long as we don’t have multiple positive tests in our biweekly school testing), malls and restaurants are open, and things are mostly normal. Fake normal. We still can’t have people over to our houses “legally” and only 3 people in a car, (but in tonight’s carpool we had 6 . . . ) so the rules exist, but implementation is questionable so bending is happening. But with Ramadan starting there may be a stepped up reinforcement of the rules and fines. We’ll see . . . Still no school sports, but we have both kids signed up for sports with outside organizations — Caleb is running and Camille is swimming.

Something that makes me happy: when Camille and Caleb are getting along. It’s like spotting a unicorn, but I keep hoping for it to appear.