Thanksgiving

Another sunny start to the day, but with a layer of high cloud coming and going throughout the morning. Clare was having trouble locating the archive of digital books on her Kindle. She failed to find the long list of books purchased and archived, only the ones downloaded into the memory of the device. The archive search option is there, but it's useless if you can't remember the name of a book or its author. She reads a great deal and has grown accustomed to recognising a book first by the visual impact of its cover. Not being able to access a display of covers in her archive, since an update a while back, is unhelpful. 

I had a look at the device and was mystified by its user interface, different from anything I'm familiar with. When plugged into her Linux laptop, the Kindle's file system was visible, but no sign of an archive list. On accessing her Amazon account in a browser, however, it was possible to see icons of all the digital book files she's purchased in the past. If she wants to search for a title in the archive at the moment, she has to check its name and author on her computer first. There must be a work-around, but where? The only useful thing I was able to do was a full update of Mint 20. It must be half a year since I last did that. Updated or not, it works perfectly, every time.

Last night, Clare baked bread and kept back enough dough for pizza making this morning. This we did while listening to the Platinum Jubilee Thanksgiving Service from St Paul's Cathedral on the radio. As ever, a majestically beautiful musical celebration, with diverse contributors doing readings, prayers and an an act of commitment to service, plus a fine Gospel sermon from Archbishop Stephen of York, standing in in for Archbishop Justin who, like Prince Andrew is self isolating with covid at the moment. 

While the country has resumed normality with vigour, almost to the point of forgetting the past two years of living with the fear of runaway contagion, the pandemic hasn't gone away. People are still getting infected with the omicron variant. Wearing masks in enclosed crowded public places is now largely ignored. While the infection rate has slowed down, infections aren't yet reduced to being a rarity. There are still people dying from covid related sickness, and the uptake of top-up vaccines has slowed down. When two known public figures are self isolating, it's a reminder the pandemic isn't over yet.

Our pizzas turned out perfectly. We ate them for lunch out in the garden with a glass of wine. It's no wonder I fell asleep in the chair for an hour afterwards. Then we walked up to Llandaff Village for tea, by the tea shop was closed, so we walked back down the Taff Trail on the East side of the river, and had a coffee from the mobile barista before heading home for supper. Another episode of 'Usedom krimi' afterwards, which was about child abduction, but also looked back to relationships made and broken at the time the DDR ended.  The island of Usedom on the Polish border was at that time in the old East Germany.