iPad down and up

A day of respite from intermittent rain hail and cold wind, sunny and warm enough to go out with no top coat, proper spring weather. There were eight of us at the St Catherine's Eucharist. It was Emma's last service at St Catherine's before she goes on three month's secondment to Fairwater Parish. She will be missed, and it generates a certain level of uncertainty about how projects she initiated or catalysed will be able to continue.

I collected our organic veggy bag on the way home, and cooked what I call my Inspector Montalbano tribute lunch. Pasta with pesto mixed with spinach and carrots, and boil in the bag mussels in a white wine sauce, plus a bottle of a organic Sicilian white wine to accompany it. In all thirty of the movies based on Camillieri's novels I have never seen Salvo drink anything other than local white wine. It's not something seen here often but Lidl's had one when we visited yesterday. 

After lunch I collected our weekly grocery order from Beanfreaks, and then took my Sony Alpha 68 with me for a walk around the periphery of Llandaff Fields, equipped with a 11-18mm wide angle lens to take a succession of landscape photos of the trees whose leaf canopy is now almost fully developed. On three of the marked pitches, preparations were under way for evening cricket matches - at a guess, teams of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi players, each group speaking a mixture of English and their national language. If there's a Caribbean team or league hereabouts, I'm not aware of it. It's just great that so much cricket is played. Most afternoons there are players practicing at the mobile nets array in a corner of the park. We're just a mile away from the SWALEC stadium, home of Glamorgan County Cricket, where there are even more practice nets, so it's understandable.

Yesterday, Clare's iPad froze on her. The touch screen stopped working, although it seemed that behind the inaccessible login screen, everything else was still working, but inaccessible. She took it to Turotech on her way into town, only to discover the shop is closed on a Wednesday. When she returned, she left the device on the kitchen worktop. I was pondering on why Apple would fail to provide the equivalent of a kill-switch and means to reboot iPad OS, as happens with all other electronic devices. 

The older iPad has a top edge button that works like a power switch to bring it out of hibernation, but no amount of prolonged pressing would shut the thing down properly. It also has a physical button below the touch screen that can take you back to the home screen whenever it's pressed. I tried pressing the two together. The screen went completely black, then after a few seconds, the Apple logo appeared and reboot started. We were both delighted to find the touch screen worked again and found out something neither of us knew before. But, why it froze when it froze is a complete mystery.

This evening, just for fun, and for practice, I made a three minute video slideshow using the photos I took this afternoon, and accompanied it with the first movement of Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons'. I was quite pleased the result, and uploaded it to YouTube for the family to see.

Michaelmass Memories

The sound of torrential rain during the night woke me from sleep. I was amazed at how long it went on for. Thunder and lightening was also moving around the area between the Sierra de Mijas and the sea, so I got up and unplugged all the electrical equipment I could find, for peace of mind, before trying to get back to sleep. It has cleared up, and the roads were starting to dry out by the time I was on my way to the first Eucharist of the day in Calahonda. My access road to the N340 was however blocked by a Guardia Civil car. Sections of the highway nearby were still being cleared of debris and mud. Mostly the roads through the town were clear, but road crews were still sweeping away mud with water hoses at the junction where I made a second attempt to access the N340, but I was able to pass by and make my way to the church of San Miguel in good time.

As today is Michaelmass Eve, the church's statue of their patron saint was mounted on a flower decked trona beside the main altar, ready for a fiesta procession and parish picnic later in the day. It reminded me of Michaelmass ten years ago when Anto and I did a flamenco guitar course in Granada. We stayed in the Albaicin barrio, where their parish church patron saint was also San Miguel. The church had an image of the Archangel a good two metres tall. It was taken on procession from the bottom to the top of the barrio by a cofradia team of two dozen white shirted men. San Miguel's Calahonda image could be easily carried by one person, but its trona was for four persons to carry, perhaps even children.

Despite the stormy night, very few regulars were missing, and there was a congregation of thirty. As I neared the end of my sermon, an elderly lady in the congregation fainted and fell off her seat, bringing proceedings to a halt while first aid was ministered. When it was clear that her condition was not life threatening we continued with prayers of intercession, and I laid hands on her while the Peace was being exchanged. One person took her home and another drove her car home for her. People are very good here at gently supporting each other, and no doubt somebody will make sure she gets to the doctor for a check up very soon.

Attendance at Los Boliches was not as big as I'd expected. The influx of autumnal residents in any number has yet to pick up. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the British Isles has been enjoying one of the driest and warmest Septembers on record?

Today is Clare's birthday, and she texted me to say that she'd opened her iPad present and was setting it up for first use. In the evening we spoke of Skype, but she admitted she was still talking to me on Kath's iPad, because she'd not yet managed to install the Skype app from Apple store, as it was demanding she supplied it with credit card details, even to download free apps, and she didn't have hers to hand when she set out to do it. 

What does Apple do with this information, which remains unused if you don't ever download any non-free apps? Android's Google Play store doesn't make that demand, and if it did, I'd stop using it. These operating systems take too much information from us for no reason that is really so beneficial to us. Apple products are great, well designed, functional, as well as expensive, and very determined to make it easier for the user to spend more, such that it's possible to do so unwittingly if you don't understand fully the processes you're engaging with. Not happy with that at all. I'll pass on the Apple temptation.