A cloudy start to St John the Baptist's day, up early and breakfasting with Jas before driving her to Cardiff Central station for the 09.15 London train. Her big brother Peter arranged to collect her from Paddington Station and taker to visit the British museum for the first time. We had a text message later in the morning to say she was looking at the dinosaurs. Next we she flies to Geneva with her Dad and stepmother for a road trip through Haute Savoie down to Turin and then on to Nice. She's looking forward to seeing places, but not the many hours of driving to be endured in between. She's been a well travelled child since her infancy in Canada, before moving to Arizona. At least we could give her a good time without having to travel far, and she loved going into town on a double decker bus!
Having had a poor night's sleep, I wasn't feeling too good so I didn't do much at all most of the day. Clare cooked a prawn stir fry for lunch, and then I went for a walk in the park, and another down to Tesco's to he her some flowers and a birthday card for Martin. He's seventy tomorrow.
After supper, I completed and printed off my Sunday sermon and started extracting files from the Google Takeout zip archive. First, the YouTube videos. Sixty six assorted one of my own, and two and a half year's of Morning Prayer weekly videos, about a hundred and thirty two. Actually I think I've backed them up systematically, but there may be lapses, errors, so having a file containing them all on a separate device is adequate data security, even if I may never need to resort to them.
The next big job will be photos, and I know I've been systematic about saving those files independently over years, but I'm just curious to see what Google Photos has saved on my behalf. And after that there's emails, blog posts. A big job with files archived stretching back seventeen years. I have an archive of messages from the previous thirteen years pre-gmail, when I used PMail. Finding an app to open such an obscure file format, if I ever needed to, could be problematic. One day I'd like to dig out and read the messages sent from my Jerusalem sabbatical end of 2000. I can't even remember if I had notebooks as well from that stay. My photos from the time were digitized fifteen years ago and are in one of the zip files from Google Takeout. Over years, I've come to rely more on the visual record I made than what I wrote, but it's good to recall what kind of stories I told family and friends then. Such a troubled time in modern Holy Land history.
Today's news of the mutiny by Wagner Group forces, their occupation of Rostov on Don, where Russian invasion forces have their main command post, and then starting a march on Moscow to confront military commanders there has certainly drawn the world's attention to the weaknesses in Putin's regime. It seems to have been more of a high profile protest initiative than anything else, as Wagner troops stopped their advance within the day. There have been minor rebellions in other parts of Russia as well in the past but these were quickly extinguished. The world waits with interest to see what happens next and wonders how long Putin's regime may last in the light of signs of instability. Meanwhile Ukraine battles on to free its land from brutal invaders. May it happen soon.
Last task of the day, finish and print out sermon for tomorrow, St Peter's and St Luke's one after the other. Then, Martin's birthday feast.
No comments:
Post a Comment