New shoes, new brolly

I had a disturbed night's sleep due to aching injured thigh muscles. It didn't occur to me that I might take an analgesic, but after breakfast I took a 400mg ibuprofen and it calmed down. Clare went to her study group, and I started work on next week's reflection before cooking fresh sardines and veggies for lunch when she returned. Annoyingly the pair of cheap reading specs I bought yesterday have broken already.

I needed an hour's siesta in the chair afterwards, and then went into town to bank a cheque, and look for a new pair of shoes, always a daunting task to my mind. I ended up buying a pair in the Ecco shop, and was given a promotional Ecco pocket umbrella for free!

By the time I reached home it was approaching six o'clock and an early supper was waiting on the table for me as we had a Fountain Choir practice in St Catherine's at six thirty. Two hours hard work! Having attempted a repair on the specs I took them with me to the rehearsal unintentionally in place of a much better pair of prescription reading specs. Somehow they held together throughout the rehearsal.

As we left the church grounds afterwards, Mother Frances who now sings with us, was heading out on her bike. I offered to lock the gate for her, as I also had church keys with me. Unfortunately, they were my keys to St John's, and she'd disappeared into the dark by the time I realised this. I had to walk home and get the right keys, then return to lock the gate properly. What an idiot!

I walked further today than I did in the week before yesterday's injury, but my leg didn't hurt nearly as much as I feared it would. It still feels bruised, like a sprain, but is much less painful than expected. I'm thankful for small mercies.

I got back in time to watch the ten o'clock news, with worrying news of the US mid term elections threatening a shift in the balance of power away from the Democrats to the Republicans, and further threat of Trump running for a second term as President. God forbid, at this critical time in global politics with financial and ecological crisis plus the Ukraine-Russia conflict already promising to destabilise further international relations. Unhappy times.

Investment in comfort

I worked on Sunday's sermon this morning before driving to Thornhill crem for the second of the week's funerals. As it was the funeral of a retired dock gate keeper, the majority of those attending may have been retired dock workers themselves. The deceased's brother and niece both gave fond, but lengthy tributes which made us over-run by five minutes, but it didn't seem to cause a problem for the service following.

I got back at one, and Clare was still absorbed in writing, so I cooked the same lentil and veggie dish that I invented last Friday, and was pleased with the result. After lunch I walked into town and bought myself a stout pair of walking shoes from the Ecco store, as the heels on the pair I bought six years ago are badly worn. I also bought three pairs of the excellent insoles of the Ecco brand. I bought a pair last year and found they make a noticeable difference in comfort, and seem to be more durable than other kinds. I want to use some with each of my pairs of shoes from now on.

After supper a watched the remainder of the Norwegian crimmie 'Outlier', an interesting psychological slow-burn drama, maintaining suspense throughout, but just a bit too long drawn out for me, far too many lengthy face shots principal actors feeling emotions without showing much of it at all. Anyway the scenery was stunning.

New sandals, new iron

Although the cloud base has lifted and it's a bit lighter this morning, breaks in the cloud come and go. It looks like it may rain. I'm longing for a cheerful blue summer skies to return. While I was walking back from collecting my prescription I received a mobile phone call from my GP. I was relieved to hear that the blood tests had revealed nothing of concern apart from a kidney function low sodium count anomaly. She explained it can be a consequence of long term use of Losartan, but she's ordered another blood test for Friday to double check. The new batch of higher dosage Doxazosin tablets are time release capsules. It's a relief, as the impact of a double dosage, taken together is a swimmy head for hours after taking. At least my blood pressure is returning to normal now, which is a relief.

I went into town after lunch and bought a new pair of Ecco sandals as the ones I bought back in February are worn down at the heels and this is giving me walking discomfort. N.o wonder after covering around two thousand kilometres in the time since then. I was lucky enough to find an identical copy at a thirty percent discount. I also bought a new clothes iron, as the current one has developed an electrical fault since it was dropped. Now the question is how to dispose of the broken one correctly?

We watched three episodes of NCIS this evening. Two were from series one, the third from series fifteen. Interesting to see how the main characters have aged in the fifteen years since it began.

Super sandals

I went to St John's for the Eucharist yesterday morning. I haven't been there for several weeks, so it was good to see people and wish them a Happy New Year.

The weather was mild enough in the afternoon for me to walk in my Ecco sandals, for the first time in a month or so. After walking into town and back, I had covered just over eight miles, and my feet gave me no trouble whatsoever, and enjoyed pushing back my distance boundaries.  Recently the last two miles have been painful and energy draining, no matter what other shoes I wore. The others all fit well, but after a while feel as if they are thin soled compared to my sandals, even when using cushion insoles. This is a puzzle.

This afternoon, I walked even further in sandals, right down to the Bay Wetland Nature Reserve, and then caught the bus back from the city centre. As I was walking down Neville Street, a women of West Indian origin approached me, and asked if I knew where a certain street was. I googled it and found out that it was close by. She'd taken a wrong turning on her way to Madhav one of Cardiff's excellent Asian supermarkets to buy vegetables not so easy to obtain at a decent price in one of the big supermarkets. We chatted as we walked down the street together. Bright eyed and sprightly, she looked about sixty and proudly told me that she was in fact ninety. She told me how proud she was of her children and grandchildren, most of who were in Britain, though some of her extended family are in the Caribbean. She hailed from Nevis. It was one of those delightful rare conversations that happened by chance, and brought extra cheer to my day.

Again today, my feet were fine. I'll have to cycle through the other pairs of shoes in the next few days to see if the problem recurs. If it doesn't, it would suggest I had a foot problem which cleared up. If it does, then I will have to track down some more resilient shoe insoles which are equal to the quality of the sandals. Clare has found out that there's a specialist shoe shop at the other end of the Parish. The answer may lie there. We'll see.

I've put in a couple of hours work each day on my novel, editing and adding to the story. I think I'm in the last quarter of the tale that's telling itself. I can see where it's going and how it will end. It's just a matter of bringing the ideas out of my head and into a text file.

I had a worried email from sister June this morning, forwarding the text of a message she received regarding the renewal of her subscription to Piriform's excellent CCleaner software. The free version is on her PC. I first put it there, and another tech guy who did some trouble shooting updated the free version and used it. Did she accidentally subscribe without realising she didn't need the Pro Version? Not so. The small print in the email she received revealed the response was directed to Cleverbridge Software, an American company which sells rubbish security and cleanup apps, associated with cold calling scammers.

She was duped into giving them access to her computer six years ago this month, due to a telephone scammer calling up and pretending to be from Microsoft warning her of a dangerous virus on her computer (switched off at the time) but then she smelled a rat, and contacted her bank to cancel the transaction, as soon as we'd spoken about it. I went up to London and did a security clean-up of her laptop a few days later, and no harm was done. It was an unpleasant lesson but valuable in terms of encouraging computer security caution. Once these crooks have an email address, sooner or later they will have another go at tricking a user into engaging with them. Thankfully Gmail has an effective spam filter and once the dodgy email has been flagged, its successors shouldn't reappear. It find it surprising that Cleverbridge Software's bad reputation doesn't lead it to be on a spam blacklist.

However, it's no offence to market poor software, especially if the owners can afford to hire lawyers to defend their interests. And there's nothing to stop a group of scamming con-men pushing unwary users towards a legit company, and using it as a shield for their nefarious activities.

Dis-Appointment and Shopping disoerientation

The cleaners came early Monday, and Clare went off to the gym. After they departed, I went out, and did the week's grocery shopping, then cooked lunch.

A letter arrived in the post from the NHS, advising me of a pre-surgical assessment appointment on the 23rd January, two months from now. Mrs Cornish did warn me that it would be a three month wait before surgery when we last met, but I was slow to react, as it seems I inevitably am. Now facts are taking shape the sense of disappointment surfaces, couple with the worry the next three months are going to be a time of growing discomfort and pain, much as I had before op number three, due to over-granulation of the wound, during the long delay between appointments. The signs are it's going to happen again with another three month wait, with the prospect that a second Christmas is ruined for me. November-January, the same period of anxious waiting misery as last year. It's a scandal when I'm as fit and well and ready for the op right now. It I were prepared to pay, I could get it done. The family say I should. Perhaps for their sake I should.

I keep on thinking of snippets of information which didn't get recorded in my Sarajevo travel diary, so as well as writing a preface today, I had to return to the text and insert a few significant memories in the right place. Eventually, I thought it was fit enough to send off to Daniel, hoping that he finds this of use to give him an outsider's perspective on the aftermath of the Bosnian war.

Another twilight walk, then an evening in front of the telly to relax. but my attention is now veering back towards my long story, I'm trying to sketch out mentally the rest of his main character's journey before he goes home to die. I need to make some notes and check the timeline. It's a story which spans thirty years, plus or minus. That's the problem. I didn't start with any plan. It's just evolved that way, and that's been a fun surprise.

Yesterday, Clare told me she'd seen knee length rain-wear at a bargain price in Mountain Warehouse opposite the Castle. Just what I need. So I went into town to check this out. No, not really that long, but long enough to cover a longish jacket, and that's what matters. So now I have an olive green mack with a hood, just as my 20 year old 'standard' length one is getting leaky at the seams.

I also bought myself a pair of Ecco winter shoes. I had forgotten that the shop is now relocated for the third time in several years in the new St David's shopping centre, and searched for it on my phone. Google maps gave me the address but the mapped location was so vague as to be confusing and useless. The St David's centre store finding display panels were useless, having not been updated even though the store has been in its present locations for six months. One of the security staff was able to tell me easily enough, but didn't know the store finder device was unable to deliver the goods. The tech' is great, but only as good as those who keep the data up to date.

We joined the Fountain choir for supper at Calabrisella. I was very tired from walking around town and shopping, somewhat in pain, having sat for a long time writing earlier constructing time line annotations for my long story. After eating a big dish of penne amatriciana, I made an excuse and left to got to bed early. Enough is enough, and today I did did and a half miles worth of walking.

  

Good offer

Before lunch today I went to the wound clinic for my second appointment of the week. The nurse remarked on the progress made since she last saw me two weeks ago, and we agreed it would be OK to go without a dressing, just a light protective covering to ensure it gets an airing, as long as this is convenient and manageable. This is good news although there won't be any major change until the remaining Seton's suture is removed, to make complete closure possible. 

It's now four weeks since the MRI scan, which was promised to be 'available' three weeks after processing. I have no idea when I will be summoned for my next meeting with the surgeon, and the hospital appointments system has not improved since the utter chaos of the last round. However, it was a lot more distressing when I was getting worse last autumn and not getting better, like now.

Clare and I went into town together shopping for shoes in the late afternoon. She got she wanted in one store, then we went looking for the Ecco shoe shop, relocated recently in the St David's Grand Arcade. It was only when I took my sandals off to try on a new pair that I discovered a huge crack in the left heel, and a piece threatening to break off. Just in time! It's three years and two weeks since I last bought sandals, and I have worn that pair fairly continuously for eight months each year, without becoming uncomfortable. This is indeed impressive durability in consumer footware. The shop had a special offer on two pairs for forty percent off, so Clare took advantage of this, and we both returned home pleased after our little expedition.
   

Syncing and sandals

This morning, I took Clare to catch a train to take her to Coventry and a weekend looking after Rhiannon, while Kath and Anto travel north and east into Lincolnshire for the last of their back to back Rural Touring gigs with Sonrisa. She's now added Instagram to the band's Twitter account, and posts photos from the towns the visit, and when they're setting up. Good publicity, naturally, but also a pleasure for the family to see where they are working away. 

I stayed at home for much of the day, as there was nothing much I could contribute to the radio distribution now in full swing, until there's a pile of equipment receipts to supply more information to key into the new database. The efforts of the last few days intense concentration left me feeling quite drained and in need of respite. And there was still the OneDrive sync problem to puzzle over. It was late afternoon when the penny finally dropped, and I was running the same routine on my home computer. As ever it was was something trivial and quite misleading. The file being worked on, ostensibly within a web browser, was downloading and being opened from the hard drive and saved to 'Downloads'. Thanks to the speediness of the particular machine in use, this routine could be done without noticing where exactly the file was opening and saving from. On a slower machine this was visible.

I went down to the office and found no fewer than eight copies of the data file in 'Downloads', the result of repeated attempts by both Julie and I to ascertain how the update was not taking place as expected. Just one of them was slightly larger than the others, the first downloaded version worked on fully up to date. What a relief! Restoring this to its proper place on 'OneDrive' was trivial, as was texting Julie a brief explanation of what neither of us had noticed or understood. So we learn the hard way that while some files can easily open and close and be worked on in a browser, others cannot. The expectation isn't transferable, and the necessary cautious alertness easily forgotten if you're distracted or in a hurry.

While I was out in town, I bought a pair of Ecco sandals, having had such a comfortable experience with their walking shoes, bought a a couple of months ago. They fitted like a glove. When I went to Nerja on locum duty this time last year, I forgot to pack sandals and bought a chunky comfortable pair for a decent price in a town shoe shop. I started wearing them again a few weeks ago, once the weather warmed up enough, but discovered very soon that the hollow interior of both heels had caved in, and I was traipsing dirt in the house that had been caught in the cavities. They weren't yet uncomfortable to notice the failure for any other reason, but they had to be consigned to the bin, along with another older pair whose heel bases had collapsed rendering them unwearable, which had until now not been thrown out. A third pair also emerged that was unbroken, but they weren't comfortable enough for distance walking, only for popping down the beach. So I was pleased to be pushed into making the effort to acquire a really durable sturdy pair, which could last me several years, for a change.

In the evening, I watched with special interest the programme on Vienna in Rick Stein's 'Long Weekends' series. As a fan of Mediterranean cuisine, I find it all a bit too much 'mean & two veg' for my liking. Nor do the cake and chocolate side of things appeal that much. The white wine is much praised however, Weiner Gemischter Satz, grown on 700 hectares of land within the city's boundaries, made with several grape varieties planted and grown in a mixture in the same field rather than separately and then blended. This relies on the terroir as the French call it, the soil and the setting of vineyard, rather than the character of the grapes. No doubt centuries of experience in choosing the right varietals to take advantage of soil qualities makes for a praiseworthy product. It's something to look forward to.
  

Advent arrives

The only thing of note about my Saturday was that I finally screwed up my courage to go into town and buy a new pair of winter shoes. I live in sandals eight months of the year, but don't much like the misery of a wet winter. With so much rain and wind this last week, I thought I'd better stop complaining and make the effort. On Clare's recommendation, I visited the the Ecco shop, and within minutes found just what would serve me well. A robust supportive waterproof shoe with a sturdy sole, which, given my odd sized feet, offered a perfect and extremely comfortable fit from the moment I put them on. Hardly a question of getting used to then or 'breaking them in'. They 'just worked'. I can't remember if I ever had this experience with a pair of shoes before. Perhaps I always purchased too cheap. Even so, I got a 'Black Friday' weekend bargain, and look forward to enjoying my winter wear - what an odd idea!

I celebrated the Solemn Mass at St German's again on Sunday, with a turnout of three dozen for Advent Sunday, against a background of driving wind and rain. The mood was cheerfully up-beat. There is, in spite of the solemn and serious nature of the pre-Christmas season, an element of renewed pleasure in the start of a new Christian year. It's true for me too. The first ever retreat I made as an eighteen year old student was over the Advent weekend, and it brought home the reality of the mystery of faith to me in a way that steered me into the path I still follow. Poetry, awe and wonder, longing and hopefulness, all part of a creative chemistry feeding the notion that Christmas contains more than meets the eye. I think I need Advent just as much as I need Lent, to keep me focussed on Christ.