Distraction

Another comfortably warm sunny day at 22C. After breakfast I took a leisurely shower and washed my hair. An email arrived notifying me that payment of the balance for our Duoro cruise in August is due in two weeks time, exactly three months before it happens. The time since we booked seems to have passed quickly. I sent an email to Kate our travel agent, as the email came from Co-op Travel with whom she is an independent agent for confirmation that it is as intended to be. Cyber attacks on the Co-op network are headline news today, as they have been for M&S recently. It seems all's well. In the meanwhile, we have our trip to the Costa Brava in nine days time, and maybe a trip to the Gower or Tenby in the meanwhile.

Last week I recorded a bird in Thompson's Park, edited and cleaned up the sound file and sent it to Ann, as she has the Merlin birdsong app on her phone. She responded by relating that she'd played it, presumably on her laptop phone in hand, and confirmed that it was, as I suspected, a Nuthatch. As soon as she played it, a Nuthatch swooped down out of a tree at the end of her garden to investigate! She told me previously that they visit her bird table, which was partly why I sent her the file.

I cooked a spicy veggie chick pea dish for lunch while Clare was out walking. After we'd eaten I went to the Co-op for heavy groceries. While I was loading my rucksack a woman queuing behind me approached the cashier with a query and he left the till while he went away to check something. The intrusion broke my concentration and the cashier's. I walked out of the store without paying, thinking of where I needed to go next, and had crossed the road outside before realising that he was chasing after me and shouting to get my attention. I ran back apologising as much as he was, realising that his concentration on completing the transaction had been broken at the critical moment. The woman pushing in with the quick query ended up waiting for longer than she anticipated. I hope she was embarrassed. It's never happened to me before, but it certainly illustrates how we rely on routine habits, to get stuff done, and the perils of even accidental disruption.

Then a walk through Canton down to Sophia Gardens and back home through the park. I tried my hand at recording birds with my  phone again. My legs are stiff, but not painfully so. It's taking me longer to cover my daily distance, longer to warm up while I'm walking and I need to stop, not because I'm out of breath, but to give my muscles a brief respite. Oh the trial of an ageing body! 

After supper I edited the sound files with the on-line app 'Twisted Wave'. It's more capable than I originally thought for basic functions, but you have to pay to use its more complex file handling facilities. We watched a lovely Welsh language nature programme on S4C hosted by our favourite nature guru and bird enthusiast, focusing the wildlife treasures of our highly diverse ecosystems of our native landscape. He took us through a succession on video clips of different species lost and species barely hanging on and species holding their own or recovering, with statistics reminding us of what we stand to lose through climate change and abuse of the environment.

Then I read for a while before getting ready for bed.