State of Alarm - day Thirty Three

Twenty degrees today, clouds and sunshine, warm enough for me to shed pullovers during the first half of my daily 10k. The lizards were out in force, chasing around, I came within half a second of snapping one biting the other's tail. It's the third time I've seen this happen. I'll get lucky sooner or later, the longer I stay here. Like snapping the elusive hoopoes in Al Andaluz. What I did manage to get photos of was a big green lizard scaling the wire netting fence. Its attention had been caught by a flying seed on a parachute stalk, resembling an insect in movement. Amazing, and over so quick!

It's as warm as I mistakenly thought it'd be when I arrived six weeks ago. Should have checked! I spent a lot of time talking on both the landline phone and WhatsApp today, but still succeeded in being productive. Last Sunday I did a short Easter video message. I wanted to try something a bit different this week, and was inspired by watching the video of Fr Jorge's discursive prayer in the little Opus Dei chapel in their Wandsworth Common house, which sister June sent me a month ago.

What I drafted as a brief reflection on life in lock-down translated easily into prayer. Rather than talk to camera, which seemed to me a bit naff - 'nothing to see here' - I set up a camera pointing at the little makeshift altar I set up for the blessing of Palms two weeks ago, and prayed from behind the camera. The sound was very good, but the lighting contrast in the video wasn't all that good. It was nice to do something different though.

Then I set about recording the components of Sunday's on-line audio service of the Word, which included the sermon, that could be done while waiting for the audio files of the readings to arrive. It was more than I expected to get done in a busy day. I'm feeling the benefit of having the Linuxed Compaq laptop available for use now. The batch of audio files I made this evening would have then taken me a fiddly hour's waiting if not longer, while converting them from M4A to MP3 formal via a Cloud app, laden with adware. I installed one little app on my Linux workhorse which did the lot in under a minute. That's what it means to have full control of your own free software device with no interference from ads and other distractions.

A satisfying day in all sorts of ways.