UP at the crack of dawn – well, not quite, but 7am’s pretty early for me!

Lots to get done in advance of the first episode in my Smokehead Sessions series tonight. I manage to get a load of content created and posted on my socials before I have a Zoom session with one of my guitar students.

First job is to set up the competition to win a bottle of the Smokehead featured in the livestream. Having learnt form the past, I’ve decided the best way to run it I to ask a question during the livestream, give a link to a form where the question can be answered and confirm the entrant is eligible and set a closing time, ie: 9pm which gives folks a good 10/15 minutes after the livestream ends to submit their entries.

Once done I start planning the the livestream and working out how to set up the studio, lighting, sound and camera/s. I take break when Betty drops by for a coffee and to see if I can help with couple of wee things.

I take another break when I remember that I;m meant to be smoking the bacon-wrapped pork loin that was meant to be done yesterday…I get the smoker fired up, temperature stabilised and the meat in then get back to the studio.

As usual, it takes me ’til just a few minutes before go live to get everything set up and working the way I want it. Luckily, things seem to go well for the livestream – no technical issues or major cock ups. Watch it here.

The competition format works too – after dinner I take all the correct, eligible entries (there’s a few wrong answers, a few chancers from outside the UK pretending they are residents and a load who haven’t completed all the necessary information) and put the names in a spreadsheet along with a unique refenrce number.

I ask Margaret to use an online random number generator to pick a number between one and the total number of entries and we have a winner. Phew!

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