Zoom failure

When I woke up this morning, I sang a modified version of 'My Funny Valentine' into WhatsApp and sent it to Clare. My vocal chords were unusually congested and it signalled a day of feeling slightly under the weather, headache and 'flu like symptoms, though it didn't worsen seriously, or prevent me from going down to Los Boliches later in the morning, but first, after breakfast, I converted each week's bible study notes into print ready pdf files for circulation, and sent them to Caroline in preparation for this afternoon's monthly chaplaincy ministry team meeting. 

It was due to take place at four. Unfortunately, Caroline who organises the Zoom conference call, was in the process of welcoming people and suffered total internet outage, affecting the whole of her area. She had to drive down the street to get full mobile phone coverage in order to phone John and get him to re-convene the meeting and take charge. Another casualty of wi-fi calls from smartphones in an area with poor mobile coverage. The demise of landlines may give us cheaper if not free calls, but has created a vulnerability nobody needs. Anyway, it was four thirty by the time we got started, unfortunately without Caroline. It was too cold for her to sit outdoors in the car for a lengthy call in a place where she had a decent 4G signal.

I didn't want to bring two computers with me, but regretted not having my Chromebook with me for video calling, It was necessary to bring my Windows laptop, but this one has placed its camera at the centre of the top line of function keys, so it's looking up at the user. This makes it hard not to look as if you're looking somewhere else when you use it, which isn't much good when you are actually paying attention to other participants. I tried propping it up on books, but it's impossible to get it to stay at a natural angle. Maybe I'll use my phone next time round instead, mounted in the little phone clamp that I brought with  me.

Then I took a late afternoon walk over to the Mijas road to check out two supermarkets side by side near to the Los Sanitarios roundabout. One is an Aldi, the other is called 'The Food Co' which carries a standard Tesco logo on the side. This I was especially curious about. As the name suggests it's a supermarket that specialises in British products, not all of which are Tesco own brand, but a variety of familiar imported products - jams, beans, tomato ketchup, breakfast cereals etc. I was interested to see that neither this store or Aldi offered alcoholic beverages as they would in UK. That may be due to the stores finding it not worth bothering to obtain a license for these. British ales and a huge variety of wines and spirits are on sale everywhere.

I spent the evening lying low with a book until bed time, hoping this lurghi won't take a turn for the worse overnight. The only task that remained was to print out hymn sheets for tomorrow's funeral and an order of service for myself.