Well, the walk with ‘Pip the Dog’ went all a bit wrong this morning. We used the other flex lead so that was totally fine. Whe. We got nearer to our usual farm track that leads to the water tower, we saw a dog walker with 2 dogs coming towards us on the same side of the road. Trouble is, it’s a main road and no way I can cross to get away from those dogs, Pip doesn’t really do well with other dogs, but I also need to get away from the human, reality these days! Luckily for us there is a road off the main road, so we could cross and wait in the side road until the dogs and human pass us. Phew that was lucky.

Now I have met that human and the dogs before down the farm track, when he told us that the track was blocked by some gates. We turned around that time only to discover on the next day that the gates were shut, but just held together with a flimsy rope. Exactly the same thing happened today, so I undid the rope and continued on our usual walk to the top of the hill and then a walk across some fields and back again.

However I noticed that the farmer had obviously been down the track the day before because there were loads of lumps of cow manure littered on the track and for some reason Pip loves smelling every single bit of it. In the past when we rescued her, she has rolled into cow poo before, so I was especially on my guard and had to keep saying, leave, leave, leave, no Pip leave. It was tiring. Anyway when we got to the fields, they were also littered with bits of cow poo. I had kind of expected this, because there were huge mounds of the cow poo deposited a few weeks ago when lock down first started. This must be the time when the farmer does what’s called cow muck spreading and leaves it to ripen on the fields and then will plough the fields. Yep that must me what’s going to happen.

I decided to carry on but the same thing happened Pip was smelling non stop and I was shouting LEAVE! No, this isn’t going to work, so we turned around not even halfway across the fields and went home and both of us were clearly dejected by having to curtail our walk. Basically we can’t go back this way anymore, so will have to explore a totally different route tomorrow. You can see Pip below, not looking that happy!

When we got back, Pip was looking very strange and didn’t want to eat her breakfast and basically looked poorly all day and never ate a thing until the evening, poor dog, she must have picked something up from sniffing all that cow poo!

Guess what I did the rest of the day. Yep you guessed right, more testing of Jitsi, audio, video, sounds, other guests, external webcams, software downloads, anti-virus, instructional PDF, you name it, we did it.

So where are we now?

Well it’s definitely Jitsi for the online multiple drummers! Audio via an external professional Microphone and it works brilliantly! We’ve obviously sorted the Internet speed already. Job done on all fronts!

[embed]https://jitsi.org[/embed]

Thankfully it’s Easter weekend, so I’ve got 4 days off from testing. We also heard today that lock down will continue, but we have no idea for how long as yet. I can’t say I’m surprised in the slightest, I believe lock down will continue for 3 months and possibly until the end of the summer.

Expect the Unexpected

Expect the worst so you won’t be disappointed

Stay in the zone people!

Michael de Groot