Home video audit

A cloudy start to St John the Baptist's day, up early and breakfasting with Jas before driving her to Cardiff Central station for the 09.15 London train. Her big brother Peter arranged to collect her from Paddington Station and taker to visit the British museum for the first time. We had a text message later in the morning to say she was looking at the dinosaurs. Next we she flies to Geneva with her Dad and stepmother for a road trip through Haute Savoie down to Turin and then on to Nice. She's looking forward to seeing places, but not the many hours of driving to be endured in between. She's been a well travelled child since her infancy in Canada, before moving to Arizona. At least we could give her a good time without having to travel far, and she loved going into town on a double decker bus!

Having had a poor night's sleep, I wasn't feeling too good so I didn't do much at all most of the day. Clare cooked a prawn stir fry for lunch, and then I went for a walk in the park, and another down to Tesco's to he her some flowers and a birthday card for Martin. He's seventy tomorrow.

After supper, I completed and printed off my Sunday sermon and started extracting files from the Google Takeout zip archive. First, the YouTube videos. Sixty six assorted one of my own, and two and a half year's of Morning Prayer weekly videos, about a hundred and thirty two. Actually I think I've backed them up systematically, but there may be lapses, errors, so having a file containing them all on a separate device is adequate data security, even if I may never need to resort to them. 

The next big job will be photos, and I know I've been systematic about saving those files independently over years, but I'm just curious to see what Google Photos has saved on my behalf. And after that there's emails, blog posts. A big job with files archived stretching back seventeen years. I have an archive of messages from the previous thirteen years pre-gmail, when I used PMail. Finding an app to open such an obscure file format, if I ever needed to, could be problematic. One day I'd like to dig out and read the messages sent from my Jerusalem sabbatical end of 2000. I can't even remember if I had notebooks as well from that stay. My photos from the time were digitized fifteen years ago and are in one of the zip files from Google Takeout. Over years, I've come to rely more on the visual record I made than what I wrote, but it's good to recall what kind of stories I told family and friends then. Such a troubled time in modern Holy Land history.

Today's news of the mutiny by Wagner Group forces, their occupation of Rostov on Don, where Russian invasion forces have their main command post, and then starting a march on Moscow to confront military commanders there has certainly drawn the world's attention to the weaknesses in Putin's regime. It seems to have been more of a high profile protest initiative than anything else, as Wagner troops stopped their advance within the day. There have been minor rebellions in other parts of Russia as well in the past but these were quickly extinguished. The world waits with interest to see what happens next and wonders how long Putin's regime may last in the light of signs of instability. Meanwhile Ukraine battles on to free its land from brutal invaders. May it happen soon.

Last task of the day, finish and print out sermon for tomorrow, St Peter's and St Luke's one after the other. Then, Martin's birthday feast.

Summer Equinox sushi

A gloriously sunny Summer Equinox day with dry heat just like in Spain. Thunderstorm warnings issued again but Cardiff hasn't had any so far. Clare took Jasmine to visit Cardiff Castle this morning. Waiting after breakfast for my ride to Thornhill for this morning's funeral, I finished and uploaded next week's prayer video just in time to be picked up. There were only six mourners, a small family circle stunned by unexpected loss. When I was standing with them outside afterwards, I noticed my friend Rufus, robed and standing outside the Wenallt chapel with a large group of mourners at the end of a service. After taking my leave of the family I went and chatted with him for a short while before returning home. 

Back to downloading Google Takeout files before lunch, this time on my laptop. Downloading is notably quicker. The laptop's wi-fi ethernet card is newer and runs at a higher speed than our wired Powerline network, which must be ten years old by now. I didn't think it would make such a difference, but it does, so I've switched devices, and getting the job done in half the time.

After lunch I took Jas to visit Llandaff Cathedral and told her some stories about the building, and my life long association with it. She's grown up in a secular environment, so I'm not sure how much anything I told her made sense to her. She'll have a different sense of history as a teenager living in a country where few built structures are over two hundred years old apart from Native American edifices and sacred sites which aren't on the same scale. I feel sad that secularity has penetrated my family to the extent it has, and that they don't value our shared faith inheritance. Even if they respect it, they distance themselves from it and disregard it as irrelevant or antique.

After the Cathedral, we walked up to Llandaff weir, hunted for foraging honey bees to take pictures of, then returned via the main entrance to Pontcanna Fields, where Jas was delighted to find raspberries and strawberries growing wild in the hedgerow next to the allotments. She made sushi for supper which tasted good, though to my mind it feels like eating a meal composed of finger buffet food, so even when you're full, you wonder what you're getting for the main course. But as she said, it's great for picnics. She and her mum go paddle boarding on Tempe Lake at home and eat sushi on the water, out on their boards! 

As the sun began to set we went out together to Thompson's Park to check on the Moorhen nest, but the gates were already locked sadly, an hour before the latest sunset of the year. We did a circuit of streets around the park, while the sky turned pink and grey in between the houses. It's such a different domestic environment to suburban Tempe for her, and she enjoys just being able to walk everywhere, in contrast to a city so spread out you have to go everywhere by car. It's lovely to have this time walking together, not saying much, noting the interesting differences in environment. Jas is still looking forward to some proper rain to use her umbrella. So far, only light drizzle, and despite the promise of thunderstorms, so far, nothing.

Takeout tasking

After breakfast this morning Jasmine and I took our cameras for a walk to Thompson's Park to check out the nesting moorhens. The nest is still there and the couple take it in turns to sit on the nest and search for leaves and twigs to add to it, nor feed each other morsels. Jasmine caught sight of a clutch of several eggs, maybe four or five. It's rare to get a glimpse of the whole clutch, only when the nesting bird shifts position or reaches out to receive food from the other. I got several photos with my Sony HX50 that I was pleased with, and Jasmine even more. Then Jas and Clare went into town and caught the river ferry down to the Bay for a visit to the Senedd, the Millennium Centre, and a posh Ice Cream shop! I wasn't feeling up to a trip, and I had a job that needed to be started. 

Google is closing its archive facility next month and has sent a notification about downloading archived content if you want to keep it with Google Takeout. This includes all photos, videos, blogs, emails etc I have been meaning to do this with my blog for ages, so that I'm not reliant on Blogger for entries reaching back as far as 2006. I have this idea of taking the best of my writing from the four years of City Centre redevelopment until I retired, to see if I could turn it into a publishable memoir using the photos I took. Google takeout tells me there's 130GB of content, and it's in 66 separate archive files of 2GB. It'll be a mammoth task sorting through them all and organising it chronologically. Downloading and saving to backup drive will take 10-12 hours of machine minding spread over days.

Sister June sent a present for Jasmine plus some photo slides of our Dad she'd not seen before, which had dropped out of a stored package. I think they are Kodak 110 Ektachrome, a size I'd not seen before. There were three of them with coloured images on them. Mounting such tiny objects for scanning was a fiddly task, using a 34mm slide holder. 

The images were visible to the naked eye, but only one scanned produced a decent image. The other two scans were so terribly dark that the images when edited were pixellated so badly their only use was to identify the location where they were taken, outside our family home in Ystrad Mynach. The third one was, I believe taken at Thornhill Crematorium, after my Grandfather's funeral, but all on the same day, as Dad was wearing his bowler hat and dark suit. So sad to think that within eighteen months of those pictures he too would die, aged just sixty seven. It seems that 110 film was of notoriously poor quality, and maybe the underexposed ones which had visible images on them couldn't be scanned like the other one because the surface didn't reflect light adequately.

I cooked supper for us, prepared for tomorrow morning's funeral and received a emailed eulogy for next week's funeral. Good to have everything ready nice and early. Then went for a walk as the sun was setting. Amazing to think that it's the longest day tomorrow.