So far so good

Another sub-zero night, but with the air so dry I slept well and slept late. After breakfast, I found a CD in our collection of my late beloved colleague and friend Patrick Rosheuvel, with whom I used to perform on occasions when we both worked for USPG. He was a gifted singer / songwriter and with backing from the remarkable bass and tuba instrumentalist Herbie Flowers, he recorded an album of two dozen of his own love songs called 'Special Feelings'. Rachel remembered me practicing and singing them when she was a kid, and asked me about him and his children Golda and John the other day. Golda is a top notch performer in musical theatre and John is a composer of film music nowadays. Another case of creative clergy children!

She was asking about a particular song she'd been trying to remember with Jasmine, but I thought she'd like to be able to hear them again some thirty five years on from when the album came out. Originally I digitized the double disk album and made MP3s of all the tracks on my Linux laptop, but wasn't aware I'd saved them on to its hard drive, and started ripping the CD, but it got stuck and crashed half way through. I had to switch to my desktop Windows 10 PC, which also has a CD drive. Initially I couldn't find ripping software on it, then I found legacy Windows Media Player app from Windows 7 days which can rip CDs and this did the job nicely, so I uploaded the folder with all 24 songs in it to my Google Drive and sent Rachel a link to it. Far easier than burning another CD and mailing it to her.

I discovered that I didn't have Audacity on my desktop PC, but when I tried to use it for a small editing job I couldn't finish the job by installed the LAME library of file compression / decompression files. It's a fiddle job which I've done several times before, but forgotten how to do it properly, so it's not possible to use Audacity on this machine yet. So annoying, when I have it installed and working properly on my Windows and Linux laptops.

Clare cooked lunch and with our veg we had some sardines bought from the market frozen when freshly filleted and pan fried. A delicious treat on a chilly day, to remind me of the everyday delights of the Costa del Sol to come in the New Year. 

It was getting close to sunset when I went for a tentative walk without ankle or knee support, willing to turn back to home at any time if I felt uncomfortable without them, but I didn't fortunately. No adverse effects, and I covered two thirds of my usual distance quota today, first to the chemists to pick up my prescription medications, and then down to Pontcanna Fields and Blackweir, getting back at twilight as the temperature was dropping from just above to below zero. So far so good with ankle recovery, I'm grateful to say.

While I was at Blackweir, the camera announced that the 16GB SD card memory was full. Fortunately I carry a card in my wallet, so no evening light opportunities were missed. When I checked the file stats, I found that it contained 2,250 photos taken over 21 months. And that's just one of three cameras I use! It took me a while after supper to transfer the contents, along with those from the previous SD card in this camera, to a slower 32GB SD card for archive storage. This frees two faster SD cards for re-use, a total of 5,000 photos taken with the HX90 since I bought it, mid 2018. It's still working well, despite the cracked casing and missing flash pop-up mechanism.

My choice of viewing for the rest of the evening was a couple of episodes of a new series on iPlayer called 'Granite Harbour'. It's a police procedural story set in Aberdeen, featuring a trainee detective who's an ex military policeman, whose basic training was with the 'Red Stripe' Jamaica police service where he hailed from. He's unusually sharp and self confident with ten years policing behind him, and not adjusting easily to being the junior member of a team with more cautious investigative methods than he's used to. It's good to hear a cultured native Jamaican accent, clear and untainted by evolution in a British environment. By way of contrast, the Aberdonian accent of many cast members mumbled for the movies, is on times hard to decipher from time to time. A good storyline and well worth watching.