Timed out, taking time

This morning, Clare was ordering on-line the weekly grocery delivery from the Co-op. When it came to payment, the process stalled as the website sought secure payment confirmation from the Visa security server. Authentication wasn't given, and a notification referred her to the bank as the process timed out. Twenty minutes later after a phone call, confirmation was received that no payment had gone through and the card wasn't blocked. The conclusion was that something had gone wrong with the Co-op server side. Another phone call to a Co-op helpline confirmed that they were 'experiencing difficulties' with the payment system, and she wasn't the first person to complain. Another hour of wasted time and frustration. 

Digital payment isn't always as convenient or secure as it needs to be to replace real money, but we're now so dependent on it, in an effort to minimise covid contagion. Using contactless card payment in shops instead of cash for the most part works well enough. I always ask for receipts, but the number of receipts for small amounts is so huge that our receipt file grows thicker and so much more time consuming to refer to if anything does go wrong. 

Banking practice still aims to be as accurate as possible with the tiniest margin of error possible and heaven help you if you overdraw. Not everybody bothers with receipts, however, assuming it's safe enough, with such small amounts, if taken in error being trivial in the bigger picture. But is it really in our best interests to not pay attention to the details, 'the little things' Dewi Sant called us to be mindful of?

I had another chat with my GP about adjusting the dosage of the Doxazosin which I think has been giving me problems recently and she's agreed to trying out a reduction. I'll get a practice blood pressure check next week, before I go back into quarantine.

Every day when I walk in the park I see squirrels sometimes several at a time chasing each other around. Photographing them seems trickier than it used to. Perhaps my reactions aren't as sharp as the once were. Even so, I got two good photos of the same creature today, in a tree four metres above my head, and that was after pursuing it with the lens from the ground up without getting it in frame. A small achievement to post on Instagram, as I have done for some time with some pictures that please me out of the hundreds I take. I used to embed photos in blog postings, but as it's a fiddly business to re-size them satisfactorily, I seldom have enough time for it these days. I don' know where the time goes. Perhaps it just takes that much longer to concentrate as well as reflect on the passage of days.

This evening we watched a round of the Great British Bake-off on telly, for lack of anything else to take an interest in. While it's interesting to see how creative participants can be, I don't like the competitive time cramped framework. Sure, much in the art of cooking depends on getting the timing right, pressure can bring out the best in some people, though not everyone. Great art works generally take time.