App Annoyance

Cooler and cloudy today, a return to colder weather predicted for the weekend. I went to St Catherine's and celebrated the Eucharist with six others and collected this week's veg bag from Chapter on the way home.  For lunch instead of a veggie burger Clare cooked me a lamb chop with brown onion gravy complemented with butternut squash, an excellent combination of sweet and savoury, one to remember for another time.

While Clare had a flute lesson after lunch I went to the Coop for groceries. When I returned, Clare took a turn with the shopping trolley to go to Beanfreaks. While she was out and I had the house to myself, I took advantage of the quiet to record Easter Thursday Morning Prayer and Reflection, and edited it. Having received a notification about checking in for my outgoing flight to Malaga, I went to the EasyJet website and got my boarding pass, using my Chromebook, and transferred the barcoded ticket to my phone. I also installed the EasyJet app on my phone for convenience but not without difficulty as installation forced me to reset my memorised password. It seems the criteria for setting one have changed again, to make it that much harder to hack. Fair enough I suppose, but annoying when I had to repeat the performance on my Chromebook, despite Chrome OS efficiently replicating the password change on a different device. 

Another annoyance was clicking the notification email's web-link saying 'Manage Bookings', and finding that it took me to the EasyJet home page with the last flight booking I'd made displayed in a box, as if I was about to book it. There was a secondary 'Manage Bookings' box which popped up and then vanished, so had to hunt for that page, on top of the login hassles. Too much information, too complex to work as it should to and give you what you want first go, and yet such a site has so much information about me and my current flight bookings, you'd think this would be easy. Will AI be able to improve this? I doubt it. Last night I similar issues with the Post Office Travel Money card app on my phone, which will not allow me to enter my password, as the keyboard pops up and the vanishes in an instant. It's been like this for months. I can access the account easily through Chrome browser, but the print is a bit smaller. What a waste of an app!

I remembered a couple of items I needed but forgot to buy for myself and went back to the shops on Cowbridge Road East. On the way back I discovered that R J Berry butcher's shop has closed after 32 years of trading, probably because the man himself is retiring. His shop is where we've bought the festive turkey, sausage stuffing and pigs in blankets in those years we have hosted family Christmas in Meadow Street. Although I only bought meat and sausages there occasionally, he always remembered my name. An old fashioned food retailer with a long memory and personal touch. Next time round, it'll be one of the traditional butchers in Cardiff Market we go to for the best meat. Meat for the boys too - it's only Anto, Owain and myself who are the family omnivores.

After supper, I continued watching 'Top Dog' for the rest of the evening, and made an effort to go to bed earlier, so it won't be a shock when the clocks go forward.