A damp overcast day with bouts of drizzle. I got up early, having lost an hour's sleep by waking up at two in the morning, to find the room bathed in moonlight, as I'd forgotten to shut the curtains. The clouds had thinned out to reveal the Blue Moon I didn't get any clear shots of last night at ten. I'd brought my best two cameras down from the loft to the bedroom in case I did wake up to a clear sky. By this time the moon was fast disappearing behind the gable end of the house where the second chimney once stood, so I took several shots with each, and then returned to sleep.
I processed the pictures after breakfast. They weren't very sharp, being hand held shots. I didn't have the presence of mind to set up a tripod before going to bed, and relied on automatic settings. Serves me right. Some photos taken with my Olympus OM1-D were interesting as the white clouds around the moon were shown tinged with orange, reflecting urban light pollution I suppose.
I then moved on to drafting Sunday's sermon and finalising this week's edition of the Parish Sway and posting it the link on WhatsApp before stopping to cook lunch. All worked well at this point. After we'd eaten, I had to send out the same link in the weekly email distribution using MailChimp. I followed the instruction notes I'd written but couldn't establish how to send out this week's instead of last week, as the obvious task of finding and using the link edit page didn't work as I expected. By trial and error, and half a dozen attempts I succeeded in doing it correctly. As for the error bit, I reset this week's Sway link at some stage, which removed access to the web page I created while cloning its content to a new one. Then the proper page link had to be reissued on WhatsApp, to match what worked via Gmail and Facebook.
The ten minute task of checking and sending the MailChimp link took me two and a half hours to sort out and correct. Hopefully, I'll get my head around it all with a few practice runs this week, so it soon becomes a routine. Important that it does as the plan is for me to do it for a six weeks then hand over to someone to be recruited and train them in using Sway and MailChimp if they don't know how. Chatting with Owain after I returned from a visit to the shops and a walk in the park before supper, I discovered that he has used MailChimp for years and is acquainted with Sway, though he has a low opinion of it. When next he visits us, I'll ask him to give me an expert tutorial on MailChimp's finer points.
Clare had supper early as she went out to explore a new local choir she's thinking of joining, leaving me to my own devices, so I indulged in baked beans on toast for a change. Then I watched this week's episode of 'The Woman in the Wall' on iPlayer. Interesting, complex plot development, but rather too many visuals of the nightmare trauma of an abused woman whose baby was stolen from her in a convent that served as Magdalene Laundry while pretending to be a training school (aka 'reform school', in the language of my youth) for wayward girls.
Amazing that pious people responsible for such institutions could think they were doing anything good for young people by intimidation and cruel harsh treatment. At one time it was taken for granted, as 'normal'. Thank heavens profound changes in attitude have occurred in the past quarter of a century in how vulnerable disturbed young people are treated. Repentance of a kind, but the loss experienced by many is incalculable. Stories of this kind need to be told. Fact based dramatic fiction, as long is it is true to real life is a good means for exploring such painful issues of social injustice.
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