Another dull Monday morning, with house cleaning after breakfast. I had to do Clare's share as her wrist was hurting, a product of rheumatoid athritus. I contacted the family of the woman whose funeral I'll be doing this Friday, and heard from Archbishop Rowan that he'd be unable to take the Wednesday service at St Catherines, due to an urgent meeting called at short notice. I couldn't help as I'm at St Peter's for their midweek Communion and could only make a few suggestions. Then I cooked lunch.
My new Samsung Fitbit Versa 3 Smartwatch is proving more difficult to master than I anticipated. It's a mini computer on your wrist with sixteen options, very few of which I need or wanted, all of them are on by default and need checking and eliminating. A few steps in the installation routine I seem to have missed out on. If I'm resting, it switches from displaying the time to a watch screen reminder telling me to finish a process to connect to a digital wallet applet which I have no interest in using as the only financial app I have on my phone is that of the Post Office Travel Money card.
Once this notification is displayed I can't see the watch face. I wasted an hour finding out how dismiss it. The watch face isn't a normal touch screen and what I didn't know was how to control it and what it did. The instructions useless, though there is a user manual on-line. Being stubborn, I believe user friendliness means that controls are simple and self evident. User manuals tend to contain too much information in very small print written in poor English, so for me they are a last resort, as a matter of principle. Eventually, by fiddling about I found that a light queeze on the two edges of the watch face in between the straps restored the watch display. It may do other things as well, but that can wait for now.
Talk of controls being user friendly and self evident. When my sister's laptop was screeching loudly a virus warning message, my automatic reaction was to use the hardware function switch to switch it off. But, I forgot to switch it on again before leaving. In fact, it was a bit risky doing it in case the Chrome re-set process failed and the screeching resumed. Tim did the re-set the following evening and I didn't even think about the sound being switched off. No wonder my sister was disconcerted when she tried to play some music from YouTube.
I didn't know which function key on her computer keyboard served as an on/off loudspeaker switch, and told her where to look, not realising that she didn't know that the top row of keys contains an assortment of hardware controlling function keys. The layout is different on different makes of keyboard too, so I had to tell her to try all of them in turn with some music playing and find out by trial and error which one would restore the sound.
Meanwhile I googled images of Acer laptop keyboards, but they were too small to see clearly which key was which, so June took photos and emailed them to me. By the time I'd seen these, she'd found out which key switched the sound back on, and I able to confirm to her which was which from the pictures she sent. It was a rather convoluted and fraught process, but in the end we got there. It made me realise that she gets by using a computer for her purposes with very little technical vocabulary, or understanding of how it works. My knowledge and experience is rather subjective. I can get jobs done, but explaining what's what in simple language isn't something I'm good at. I might as well be speaking Esperanto to her.
After lunch I met Simon, an old friend from city centre ministry days at Cafe Castan. We sat outside and talked for an hour and a half before parting company. Then I needed to return to the house for a top coast as the cold wind still persisted, despite the sun breaking through the clouds. Then I walked around the fields for an hour, and took a few bird photos, a goosander couple and a really large male cormorant. There was a flock of about two dozen starlings foraging in the fields just above the river. It's lovely to watch them move as a group from time to time. I succeeded in getting one pleasing closeup.
After supper, we made bread again, for which I did the kneading. It's such a satisfying task to perform and the scent of baking bread throughout the house is heavenly, like coffee freshly made. Such a lovely domestic joy. Then I watched the first episode of a spy drama series about Kim Philby on ITVX called 'A Spy among Friends', an interesting Cold War period piece, exploring issues of loyalty and betrayal. And so to bed.
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