After another great walk with ‘Pip the Dog’ and after failing to have fixed her flex lead, we walked with a bodged up lead, but it went on without incident. And only after we came back, having completed another great walk with Pip, I realised that actually we do have another flex lead in our house, although the length of the lead is definitely shorter, but we will manage. At least I don’t need to go out to a store to get a new lead until this pandemic has passed and pass it will.

Most of the rest of the day was spent on the same project, establishing an online Taiko Drumming solution for my Taiko teacher James.

I did a quick test with my wife Clair who was sitting downstairs in the kithcen and I was upstairs and we used Jitsi. I am so delighted to say that this system worked perfectly. What worked even better is playing a YouTube video inside of the app without any issues of lag, absolutely wonderful indeed!

Then I tested it with James my Taiko drumming teacher and the video of him was very bad. We then proceeded to go down a deep rabbit hole to discover that after all, his broadband speed was fine, but his access to broadband via WiFi was pants. We know what needs to happen, he needs to purchase a device that connects to his router remotely but then connect to his laptop via a hard cable, the same set up he has for his streaming of TV services. We finally after several weeks have found the solution for a much better quality of live classes in the very near future. Phew a big sigh of relief. Now we’re going to test the new system with a few other students tomorrow morning again. This will be the umpteenth test of live two-way video streaming that we will be doing. Fingers crossed this will work and it will be the correct solution going forward.

My wife Clair was on duty for her Mum, doing her weekly shop and provisions for the next week. Whilst she was out she was also contacted by her youngest son, Luke, who also needed some supplies. She came home first, to go back out again. Whilst she was back, I was upstairs and had just made a cup of peppermint tea, so I wanted to go down to greet her, but didn’t want to leave my tea upstairs, so proceeded with cup in hand to start walking down the stairs and I slipped at the very top of the stairs and proceeded to slide down the whole length of the stairs, tea cup flying into the air, tea flying all over the walls and all over the carpet on the stairs. I didn’t luckily break anything, just a few bruises, I hope but as I’m sitting on the couch right now, my backside and hip are very sore indeed. I bet I might have a few coloured bruises tomorrow!

Today I heard on the news that we had a further very large amount of deaths in the U.K. due to COVID19, 938 in one day, soon we will reach over 1000 deaths in a day and the overall total is in excess of 7000. Its tough to comprehend how many people that is. I know from attending Tony Robbins UPW at London Excel in the past that 10,000 people is a huge figure and I’m sure we will be up to that figure quite soon. Just a massive RIP to all those folks, who have died prematurely.

A peaceful relax this evening I think and another day tomorrow of online Taiko teaching experimentation.

More writing tomorrow. By the way this may be a boring journal, but because it is my journal and yes it is public, I don’t actually need people to like it or enjoy it, it’s more a record for me, but decided to do it publicly on Medium, which means I’m slightly more driven to do it every day!

Michael de Groot