Digital housekeeping

Cloudy with occasional light showers until late afternoon. Up at eight making breakfast. Mid-morning I walked to Lidl's in Leckwith. It's only a mile and a half, but it's an unpleasant walk alongside roads with much traffic. We needed to stock up on fruit and walnuts. In addition I bought a bottle of Spanish white wine to try. It's from Vadlepeñas, made with the Airén grape. Lunch was ready for me when I returned - a mackerel fillet with spuds and carrot. 

Afterwards, I walked to the coach station to get our tickets to Bristol airport a week today. Unfortunately for me the usual booking clerk wasn't in attendance, but there was another staff member, well versed in helping travellers in using the automatic ticket machine, which works much the same as booking from the website on line. The system is efficient and devoted to purchasing tickets, not to dealing with enquiries,  which was the reason I came in person to ask questions before booking. I found it difficult to explain to the kind man who was operating the ticket machine for me, and ended up not getting an open ended ticket for the return journey just in case our late flight was even later arriving home. 

We have an hour and ten minutes from landing to get through passport and baggage reclaim and then down many flights of steps outside, leading to the coach station. It's possible if the flight is on time, which is a gamble. A taxi to Cardiff is as expensive as a short night at the Holiday Inn nearby. The alternative is a three hour wait in the small hours, and booking another ticket, as the ones I bought with aren't changeable. This I could have done if there'd been a booking clerk on duty.

When I got back, I made a copy of the ticket for Clare and a digital version for my Google Wallet, as the driver can scan the QR code with his phone to verify the booking. This works quite well. With all the copies of documents needed for our cruise travelling in convenient paper and digital form, I remembered that I did my tax return but didn't tidy up by transferring a copy of the completed form and submission receipt to my workstation archive. I made the return on my Chromebook, downloaded files and left them to deal with later. I copied them to a flash drive for the move, rather than copying them to the Cloud, so I have a redundant copy on a handy physical device. Convenient when off-line. thanks to a useful flash drive with a USB-C interface that plugs into my phone. Although I've used free Cloud storage since the early days when it was available and don't need to pay for extra, I feel it's important not to rely on it, and keep copies of all I've created on physical devices as insurance against on-line data loss or lockout.

Once that small task was done I tidied the photo files I use for Morning Prayer videos as many of them had been duplicated inadvertently at some time in the past year for no reason I can understand. It's a fiddly job, which needed doing to facilitate file selection. When I finished doing that I joined Clare watching the Eisteddfod Dawns werin performances on S4C, all the way up to bed time.