On track again

I woke up late in sunshine after going to bed early, and reading for an hour, then losing sleep due to coughing when eventually I lay down. The sore throat has gone, replaced by disgusting heavy catarrh which will probably last for days, I was slow getting started for church and arrived a couple of minutes late for the St Catherine's Eucharist. There were eleven of us. I stayed for coffee and chatted with Clive and David until it was time to return for lunch. Fortunately, Clare was in the last stage of cooking lunch, happy not to rely on me, now her back is improving except for when heavy shopping bags from the Coop were delivered and needed bringing in. Sensible precaution.

After eating I started work on next week's Thursday prayer video upload with the texts Ruth provided for the purpose. It's Corpus Christin next week, sparking an idea about a reflection, which I wrote, recorded and edited in an hour. Then I went looking for a replacement fit-bit in shops I didn't visit yesterday. Sadly, no luck, but I did find a Huawei Band 4 activity tracker which does all the same things in W H Smith's of all places. It costs half the amount of a replacement fit-bit and as I had £1.50 left on a gift card to make use of, I got it for even less.

It's slightly larger with a different user interface, and more flexible in that it can be worn on the writ band provided, or in a clamp which can be attached to a laced up shoe, or an ankle strap. A useful addition. Setting it up wasn't  straightforward. A user guide which needed a powerful magnifying glass to read, was equipped with a set of QR codes sending you to app installations on Huawei's own cloud service. 

The Blackberry wasn't happy about the security of this and refused to install anything with dire 'be it on your own head' threats. Fortunately Google Play Store provides the necessary apps for phone and tracker cleared by its own Play Protect software, so after much trial and error I got the thing running with one minor annoyance. App update notifications, directing me to the Huawei cloud service which the Blackberry doesn't like, with no updates available on Play Store. As the device user interface is different, it will take some getting used to. It remains to be seen whether or not its strap is as durable as the Samsung one I had to replace.

After supper, another edition of 'Springwatch', all about nesting birds and badgers under surveillance by webcam, This was followed by a nature documentary on More Four about the river Clyde. Another tale of a river which for more than a century couldn't sustain a fish population returning to life with the demise of polluting industries, just like the Taff. There were some remarkable pictures of a century old hydro-electric power station under a sixty metre waterfall, still going strong, house in a white painted industrial building with huge windows letting in natural light, and a big panel of dials monitoring the generator output, a classic design. All for show nowadays, as the plant is now watched over by digital devices from a laptop. Worthwhile watching.