Workaround

It rained quite a lot in the night and a strong wind blew. Doors not properly shut banged reacting to strong  gusts in our house and next door on both sides. Mid morning, the rain stopped the cloud broke and the sun shone through intermittently, but the cold wind persisted. Before lunch I transcribed another day from my travel journal, a day when I went on my own by minibus from Amman down to the Dead Sea. I must have forgotten to take my camera with me that day, as I have no photos to remind me of where I walked there. 

My memory of the journey is quite hazy, so I appreciated revisiting the trip with my written recollection. I took sixty eight photos on my Jordanian trip, and another thirty the week after when I visited Palestine and Jerusalem, so perhaps I ran out of film that week. They are all digitized now, but the digital quality, from scans made ten years ago isn't a patch on what's possible today. I'd love to make another trip the the Holy Land and Jordan if the pandemic passes and we are once more free to travel.

It was very cold and windy when I walked after lunch, which drove me to return home early, a couple of kilometers short of my daily goal. While I was out I had an idea about how to sort out a problem my sister June has in finding photos in her Google archive. She's using a digital camera that's so old that the CMOS battery in it no longer keeps information once the battery is drained. When it's been unused for a while and the battery is re-charged, the date needs re-setting, or else all the photos show a date in 2008. She has forgotten how to change the date, and in any case it's easy to forget that you need to keep on resetting the date every time the battery drains, which is often on a thirteen year old camera.

Photos with ancient file dates are automatically sorted and display a very long way down in the archive list. I had the idea of making a special album folder, and then searching for the 'lost' photos she needs and adding them. The album still displays inconveniently far down in the list, unless you include a photo with a current date, then the folder displays on-screed without the need to scroll. That'll save her some frustration, hopefully.

We watched most of a movie from 2008 called 'Hancock and Joan' about the melancholic comic genius Tony Hancock. Ken Stott, the actor who play the part strongly resembled him and imitated perfectly his characteristic voice and mannerisms. Then I went out again late evening for a brisk twenty minutes around the block under a sky that was clearing of clouds and revealing the stars. There wasn't a soul around, not even a night time jogger. If the pubs, restaurants, cinemas and theatres are all shut, there are few reasons left to be out and about.