For the last 65 weeks, I’ve been working with Pastor and our organists to put together online services for YouTube and Facebook. This past week, I finished up editing my final one, at least for now. Our pastor has taken a call to Colorado and while we call for a new pastor, we’ll have a vacancy pastor from Beautiful Savior in Everett. They already have an online worship option via Zoom so that means no more video editing for me! (Members, watch your email and our Facebook page for more info.)
There are so many things that went right with these online services.
On March 4, 2020, I had just finished a new PC build specifically intended to be a more powerful video editor. Less than THREE WEEKS LATER, we had our first online service. The timing of that was truly a blessing because not only was I doing all that video editing every week, but this became my main machine for working from home. The new PC, dual 4k monitors and standing desk were all March purchases and I’m so glad that I dove in and did them all.
As the lockdown started, I was just starting to learn Davinci Resolve. My first full service edited with Resolve was March 29 and it seemed to take forever. I had taken an online course via lynda.com which helped a lot, but I still spent a lot of time looking for very basic commands in a foreign interface. It was trial by fire and that first service took me 8-10 hours to complete. But producing a video every week was a great way to learn and by the end, I had it down to 3-4 hours.
Early on, I’d watch the video on Sunday morning with trepidation wondering if I had left any big mistakes in there, but as the videos started coming earlier in the week and I got better at editing, my family was able to watch the services on Saturday morning. I watched with a notebook handy to mark down anything that needed to be changed. My Saturday night sleep improved dramatically!
I had set up Backblaze for cloud backup of the church computers years ago, but we really got our value from that service. When we started these recordings, Pastor was trying to upload gigabytes of video to me from his home connection. Since that was mostly wifi based on laptops that would power down automatically, etc, it was unreliable. Then we hit on the idea of just putting the files onto the main church computer and letting Backblaze transfer them to the cloud for us. Our internet at church is very slow (about 1GB/hour upload) but it was reliable and that was the most important thing. Once it was uploaded, I could log onto Backblaze from home and download the specific files that I needed.
The final tally was ~150 videos! In addition to the main service videos, I also posted the children’s sermon and sermon separately. All three videos got uploaded to both Facebook and YouTube so I guess that’s more like 300 videos. In addition to the Sunday content, We had some midweek services and special videos as well like the group hymn. If you’re looking back through the list, I’ve unlisted some of the full services on our YouTube channel because I’m tired of fighting bad copyright claims on public domain music, but all of the sermons are still there and I’ll leave a few of the services as well.
I’m looking forward to having a bit of extra time in my schedule and being a participant in the online services, but I’m thankful for all of the skills I picked up along the way. Learning new things is fun but learning new things to enable others to worship during lockdown was even better!
I couldn’t decide which comic to use so why not celebrate a little and use both.
WE GOT THE VACCINE! 402 days after our family lockdown began, Tyla and I had got pokes in the arm that will help us learn how to fight the virus. It was fairly easy to find a shot via covidwa.com and we only had to drive a few miles from our house. It’s not quite as fast as Neo learning kung fu, but cranking out a vaccine this quickly is still an amazing collaboration between researchers, tech providers, doctors, epidemiologists, politicians and average citizens.
Tyla and I will be fully vaccinated by June 1 which aligns pretty well with our plans to stay in lockdown until Elijah is out of school. It’s really tough when he gets sick during school so I think we can hang out at home for a couple additional weeks to help him out.
A quarter of our state is fully vaccinated, many countries are barely getting started, we don’t know how long it will last, and there are endless arguments still in play, but I want to take a moment and say WOOHOO! Thank you Lord!
Philippians 4:4-84 Rejoice in the Lord always! I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not worry about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Last year Microsoft committed to removing more carbon from the atmosphere than it puts into it by 2030, and by 2050, it will have removed enough to make up for all carbon it has ever put in. This isn’t one of those things where a company pays to not have a tree cut down to make up for their emissions, and it doesn’t ignore things like employee travel or the shuttles running around on campus. They have a follow up post from a couple months ago to talk about how it’s going and there is a whitepaper that goes into more depth.
When you think about the amount of power consumed by the enormous datacenters that Microsoft runs around the world, this is a staggering task, but when you read through that blog post, they show that it’s possible. The efforts of a single company aren’t going to change planet directly, but investments this big will have positive side effects like technological discoveries and encouraging other groups to make similar pledges.
The auction at Elijah’s school runs for through the end of this week. I have two items in the auction. One is the “but first pray” sign and the second is a wood American flag. Last year my donation was mixed in with some other items to create a “basket” for Elijah’s class but this year my items will be solo. This will be one of the first times I’ve seen a dollar figure attached to one of my projects by the general public. You can check it out at https://events.readysetauction.com/lutheranschoolassociation-zionlu/auction2021.
The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him. Now I have told you.” Matthew 28:5-7
Today we take extra time to celebrate Jesus’s resurrection. He took our place on the cross and died for all of our sins. His resurrection from the dead proved his power over sin, death and the devil. There’s nothing we can do to earn heaven. It’s a free gift available to everyone who believes.
Have you seen the flu stats this year? It turns out that masks, social distancing and 20 million more flu vaccines than last year are great ways to fight the flu. This is the lowest flu activity in 25 years. The stats are incredible. For example, over the last three years, there were an average of 177 pediatric deaths from influenza. This year? One.
The same number of tests were performed as in a normal year but only a tiny fraction of them are coming back positive so it’s not like they’re just getting reported as COVID instead. The CDC pages show the numbers by type of testing lab and each one tells the same story but I wanted to see the numbers all up so I pulled the raw data and made my own charts. The first chart shows the number of tests being run for each season (the series title is the year of the start of the season and each new season starts on week 40 of the year). Obviously the current series isn’t complete yet but up to this point, we’re running a comparable number of tests.
And of those tests, here are the counts of positive tests. I can’t figure out how to show the current season on the same chart as the others. The counts are so tiny compared to previous years.
There also aren’t nearly as many flu visits as normal this year either.
This is some feel good data! It’s fun to flip through these charts and see how much the flu season was stopped in it’s tracks while we fight back against COVID. If you want to dig through the data yourself, here are some links: source, source, source.
We’re more than a year into this so let’s check in on the progress. Locally in King County, we are thankfully way down from the peak after Christmas and levels are now around where they were in October. There’s a uptick in cases over the past couple weeks and if past trends are any indication, that usually means we’re heading for another peak. The trend we’re seeing here is being echoed in the rest of the world as well as cases are on the rise again.
The state has been relaxing restrictions over the past few weeks and the vaccine rollout is in full swing. Around 16% of the state is fully vaccinated with 28% having received their first dose. There are about 6 million adults in the state. Today 3 million are eligible and about two thirds of the eligible people have received their first dose. Over the next week, another 2 million will be eligible and on or before May 1, the final 1.2 million will be eligible. (source) If the current rate of vaccinations in our state stays the same, we’ll have about 3.5 million vaccinated by May 1. That’s a lot of data to swallow but the key question that comes out for me is how quickly should we be adding people to the list? If we go too slowly, we risk not keeping the pipeline full and wasting days and vaccines. If we go too quickly, we risk missing some of the most at-risk people who may have trouble getting to a vaccination site. But how many people of the people currently eligible are not planning to get the vaccine? Our current plan is to hop on the list as soon as we’re eligible and trust that the decision makers are doling these out fairly. I’m curious to see how long our wait will be when that happens.
It’s wonderful to see the vaccines going out much more quickly than planned. I pray that enough people get the vaccines and that the vaccines are effective enough to see a more permanent drop in numbers. Then we wait to see for how long they are effective.
The loosening restrictions and quick vaccine rollout has thrown me back into the world of figuring out how to adjust our own behavior. For a long time our personal guideline has been to reduce the amount of risk we put into the system. In the big picture, any contact outside your house increases risk and the more the risk rises, the more cases we have and the more people die. So we helped by keeping our risk input very low. If I catch it and take up a hospital bed, I want to know that it was because I was doing an approved activity and being as careful as I could. But now that a lot of the highest risk people are vaccinated, the math changes. It’s less critical if we have ten teenagers get sick than ten octogenarians. A lot organizations are putting a higher focus on hospitalization rates and indeed, those are looking pretty good around here, or at least we have some buffer capacity available.
And yet, we’re still hesitant to expand our bubble quickly. Regardless of whether we are exposed to COVID, increasing our contact with others means that we are increasing our risk for catching a cold, the flu, or other common sicknesses. If any of us have any sickness, Elijah can’t go to school. And if he gets any of those symptoms, it means that I have to drive him for his third COVID test. I’m not sure my dad heart can handle watching him get another brain tickle. So yes, we’ll start expanding out a bit and it’s great that we can technically invite vaccinated people into our home, but we’re still not going to be pushing the limits of the guidelines. Tyla and I will hopefully be finishing up our shots around the time that Elijah is out of school and then we can really evaluate stepping out of our bubble to socialize more. But we’ll figure out those details when we can see what the world looks like at that point. For this entire school year, Tyla and I have been almost totally isolated to give Elijah the best shot at a good school year. His school has done a great job following all the guidelines and fostering a positive attitude. We’re not going to give up now.
Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be overwhelmed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. Yes, I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. – Isaiah 41:10
One year ago today Microsoft sent us home for at least “three weeks.” Little did we know at the time how serious and life-changing this pandemic would be. So why does it say day 356 at the top of this post? Elijah’s school didn’t start staying home for a bit longer and when his school closed, it really set in that something serious was happening so I used that as the start date for our family. As scary and confusing as it was, it almost feels like an easier part of the pandemic because we were more united.
So here we are “one year” later and two vaccines are getting spread around the United States faster than expected. About 8% of all people in Washington state have been fully vaccinated. Those two vaccine pipelines are in full swing, but now there’s a third joining the mix from Johnson & Johnson. This one has some advantages in that it can be stored for months at refrigerator temps and it only involves one shot. The downside is that production is just starting up on that so it won’t give an immediate big boost to the numbers, but pharma giant Merck announced that they are going to devote two entire plants to producing J&J’s vaccine. I love the cooperation and it gives me more hope that my family will be vaccinated by the end of the year.
The other big challenge for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is, surprise surprise, public perception. The J&J vaccine is “85% protective against the most severe COVID-19 and 66% effective in moderate cases.” (source) So why would the FDA approve it if the other vaccines are 95 and 98% effective? The problem is that the numbers are difficult to compare because they were tested against different strains of the virus. We don’t have stats for the efficacy of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against the current strains.
Maybe we will need additional shots or new vaccines in the future, but hopefully these early vaccines will be enough to let us open more businesses, ditch the masks, and socialize again. None of it will be “normal” and the change will be gradual but it feels like maybe we’re through the highest death rates, at least in the first world countries.
John 14:27 Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, and do not let it be afraid.
Elijah’s school has a charity auction every year. Last year I made coasters with the school logo on them. This year I thought I’d make a sign since those are so popular. I ended up with a sign that says “but first, pray”.
I didn’t want to just make a painted sign. I wanted the words to stand proud of the surface. A laser cutter would be the right tool for the job, but I don’t have one and our maker space is closed while the pandemic rages. I bought a handful of cheap 1/16″ CNC bits assuming that I would break a few of them in the process.
My first attempt was cutting everything out of MDF. That worked ok for the large “pray” word but the smaller individual letters didn’t hold up. The MDF wasn’t strong enough to hold together at that scale. I then made them out of 1/4″ poplar and they worked fine. I sanded and painted everything, but then I realized that I didn’t have a great way to keep those tiny letters stuck on the wood. I was nervous that one little bump might knock some of them off. After trying a few things, I decided to use my Cricut to make a stencil for the individual letters and then I glued on the bigger word.
I finished it off with a keyhole slot on the back so that it could be mounted easily on a wall. The keyhole bit I have is a 1/4″ shank so normally I put a different collet on the router in my router table, carefully measure and align everything and then pray that it all works. This time I realized that I could just stick the keyhole bit into my CNC and manually drive the machine to get the cut exactly right. It was so much easier!
The end result looks pretty simple but it took a ridiculous amount of time, especially when spread into the tiny amounts of free time that I’ve been able to devote to it. Hopefully it raises a few bucks for the school.
I heard that my nephew was going on a ski trip with some kids from his school and it reminded me of a college ski trip. In the spirit of writing down stories from my life, I thought this might make a good entry.
I was very much on the fringe of the group that was going. I knew one person well and maybe had seen a couple others in the group of about a dozen or so guys. I had only been skiing a couple times and decided that I’d try snowboarding for the first time.
On the trip up, we were in a caravan of cars and we got pulled over. We weren’t speeding or anything so it was a bit odd, but our driver started crying. Yes. He was crying in a car full of college guys. The officer said he pulled us over because they had reports of a group of guys sticking their heads out of a sunroof. Someone in our car kindly pointed out that our car didn’t have a sunroof and we were on our way. The officer wasn’t wrong though. It was someone from a different car in our group.
The ski event itself was… painful. It was my first time snowboarding and I had zero lessons. I spent most of the day by myself (since I didn’t know anyone and couldn’t keep up) and most of the day was spent falling down. I remember the next week of sitting in those hard desk chairs being pretty painful.
As we were driving back from the ski resort, one of the drivers noticed he was having trouble with his clutch. We were staying at someone’s relative’s house and the dad/uncle/grandpa/whoever showed him how to drive a manual transmission without a clutch by matching RPMs. It was enough for him to make the few hour drive back to Purdue but I wonder what his transmission looked like at the end of that.
The night after skiing, we had a bunch of sleeping bags and air mattresses on the floor of the living room. It was a loud, smelly place to sleep but somehow I still managed to stand out. When we woke up in the morning someone said, “Hey Ben, how did you sleep?” “Fine… why?” Apparently I had been sleep-walking (not an uncommon occurrence for me). I had grabbed a blanket and was holding it over the window yelling about blocking out the aliens. Great.
I can’t imagine doing something like that trip as an adult but when I got back I thought the whole thing was awesome, and I learned a valuable lesson: skiing is better than snowboarding.
Online Church Services
For the last 65 weeks, I’ve been working with Pastor and our organists to put together online services for YouTube and Facebook. This past week, I finished up editing my final one, at least for now. Our pastor has taken a call to Colorado and while we call for a new pastor, we’ll have a vacancy pastor from Beautiful Savior in Everett. They already have an online worship option via Zoom so that means no more video editing for me! (Members, watch your email and our Facebook page for more info.)
There are so many things that went right with these online services.
The final tally was ~150 videos! In addition to the main service videos, I also posted the children’s sermon and sermon separately. All three videos got uploaded to both Facebook and YouTube so I guess that’s more like 300 videos. In addition to the Sunday content, We had some midweek services and special videos as well like the group hymn. If you’re looking back through the list, I’ve unlisted some of the full services on our YouTube channel because I’m tired of fighting bad copyright claims on public domain music, but all of the sermons are still there and I’ll leave a few of the services as well.
I’m looking forward to having a bit of extra time in my schedule and being a participant in the online services, but I’m thankful for all of the skills I picked up along the way. Learning new things is fun but learning new things to enable others to worship during lockdown was even better!