I've been using the CofE Daily Prayer app on my phone for the last ten years. Late last night, when I went to use it, the app crashed. I uninstalled and re-installed it but it still crashed, so I gave up and prayed from memory instead. When I woke up this morning, a repeat performance. I had no difficulty using the app on my old Blackberry phone, which meant there was something wrong with my new phone. The one thing I didn't do was switch the phone off and on again. Once I did, the app worked perfectly again. Silly not to have thought of that earlier.
Recently, I've not switched the phone off at night as I did before. If it stays on for many days at a time, the very occasional tiny glitch in an app, or in the Android operating system can cause a crash. There was a time when the technology was young that it occurred more frequently than it does nowadays. The helpline advisor always started by asking "Have you tried switching it off and on again?" Funny that I'd forgotten this essential basic procedure. It reflects just how reliable smartphones now are. Note to self - remember to switch it off at night.
Another cold, bright sunny day, good for the spirit. I went to St Catherine's for the Eucharist, there were eight of us with Fr. Rowan presiding. After coffee and chat, I picked up the veggie bag from Chapter, then returned and cooked rice veg and lentils for lunch. I had a call from my sister in a panic as her laptop had frozen. I was prompted to guess that the reason was a big Windows update, as I noticed the restart icon had appeared in my laptop's toolbar. It's possible an update had been imminent the last time she switched off, or it had been in sleep mode instead of powered down. I persuaded her to do a hard reset, and when it re-booted, the update proceeded as intended and sanity was restored.
I wish I'd persuaded June to get a Chromebook when they first came out, as there are no hassles of this kind with it, and fewer notifications to bewilder a non technical user, yet it would still be possible to do the same range of tasks as she now uses a laptop for, while doing battle with the distractions caused by notifications barely understood. Admittedly there's a learning curve involved in making the switch, but it's not huge - a different keyboard, a different file system layout, and writing documents using Google Docs, which definitely isn't in the same league as Libre Office. It's possible to use a version of Linux which looks and feels much like a Windows PC, and doesn't have any of the distractions. But, it's harder to make such a change the older you get.
After we talked, I edited and recorded the reflection I wrote yesterday, then at four I went out and walked for an hour and a half. Then I started work on a suitable slide show to accompany the audio. It took me longer than usual to find suitable visuals to use and had to complete and upload it to YouTube after a break for supper.
We watched 'The Repair Shop' together, then an episode of 'Storyville' about an archaeological survey of a proposed housing estate in Cambridgeshire, which uncovered a village site with a late Roman era villa and several cemeteries around its periphery. One of the skeletons uncovered was that of a man in his thirties with an iron nail driven through one of his heel bones - evidence that he had been crucified. This is only the second skeleton ever to be found of a crucifixion victim. The other was found in an ancient ossuary in Jerusalem. Osteo-archaeology is one of the forensic science disciplines used in crime scene investigations and identifying war victims buried in mass graves, which can tell a lot about the person's life, especially if it's coupled with the analysis of DNA recovered from bones, and isotope analysis of material in teeth, that indicates diet and living environment. Unique, fascinating scientific detective work.
It's a triple coincidence that I watched Almodovar's movie 'Parallel Mothers' last weekend in which one of the characters is an osteo-archaeologist investigating a Spanish civil war massacres, and working my way through episodes of 'Bones' on Walter Presents, whose protagonist is also an osteo-archaeologist.
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