Sadly, an overcast start to the day, 22C and humid, but rising to 30C as cloud slowly dispersed late morning. Clare's been busy baking cakes for the St Catherine's summer fair. I had a digital chore to do, ensuring that new files on Google Drive are copied to OneDrive, and copied to my Linux Mint workstation and backup. It's not that I've produced much new material I want to keep in the past six months, but the little I do need to keep must be available on every device I use. The only app I regularly use on my Windows laptop is for making video slideshows. Chromebook for convenient composing, Linux desktop has the printer attached to use with Libre Office and Google Docs.
These days I print little, apart from sermons and prayers but often forget to make sure the file is copied to each system I use. Doing this reminded me how few Sunday services I've taken this year, half a dozen requiring me to write a homily. I don't miss the delivery pressure week after week, but I do miss preaching and preparing for it. Writing a weekly biblical reflection is still a labour of love. Writing a 10-15 minute address is a different discipline to writing a 4-5 minute text that often calls for more editing time to produce one point than it takes to draft. In a sermon, it's possible to tell a story, explain scripture or comment on noteworthy current events.
Keeping affairs in order occupied me until after midday, then I cooked tofu burgers with fried onion, with rice and carrots, plus leaves of a large spring cabbage, which are notoriously tough unless you cook them for twice as long as carrots to get them past chewy. Not really my favourite meal to cook or eat, but it has to be done sometimes. I did a grocery shopping trip after lunch, then went again to Thompson's Park with my Sony Alpha 68 and long lens to see if I could improve on the moorhen chick photos taken yesterday. To my surprise, in exactly the same spot I photographed five chicks together, with mum in the water just below them, picking morsels of weed and visiting them. A couple of them competed for food attention, as they did yesterday, so much so that the tiny balls of fluff merged into one. They are so fluffy, they don't have a distinct visual outline, it's a kind of camouflage, making it hard for predators to spot them when they are not moving. What a delight!
This evening we went to St John's whether there was a fund raising memorial concert in honour of Brian Robert Bale a local man who was an elder statesman of the gay community in Cardiff and London in his younger days. Canna Capella, the choir Clare sings with, performed a set of songs, a couple of classical guitarists played baroque and Latin American duets, and a short film featuring Brian speaking to camera about his experience of coming out as a gay man in the 1970s was shown.
Funds raised will go towards the installation of a wi-fi hub for the building. When St John's started streaming the Sunday Eucharist in covid times, it was achieved thanks to the goodwill of volunteers using their own 4G mobile phones. Back then I suggested it would be worth having a wi-fi installation with a few cameras for live streaming events, but this fell on deaf ears. At least nowadays the cost of such tech' is a fraction of what it was, as its usage has proliferated to the extent that it's seen as infrastructure rather than a local amenity.
Eighteen years ago BT's Wales division offered to install a wi-fi hub in the city Parish Church of St John the Baptist for free as a publicity stunt and in those days, proof of concept that having a public wi-fi link would work and be useful. It didn't work so well as the church architecture produced too many dead spots. After a year, we decided the cost of taking out an internet subscription was unjustifiable when the project ended. How far we've come since then!
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