Family festive season under way

At some time over the past two days this blog had its quarter of a millionth hit. That's eight years and eight months worth of retirement writing, in nearly two thousand three hundred posts. 

I started a separate blog to record my first long locum duty in Summer 2012, and another to record the December I spent in Sicily that year. Altogether that's another 13,800 hits. With hindsight, I regret doing that. Having that set of posts all in one place would have meant passing the quarter of a millionth mark about three months ago, but never mind. I wonder how many of those page hits turned into pages read? The diagnostics of that are too complex for me, though its nice to think that it includes a proportion of hits from all over the world!

We went to St Catherine's Parish Eucharist this morning. Peter, our newest St Padarn's ordinand on placement preached thoughtfully about Mary, at the center of today's Advent theme. Getting started as a preacher is a bit of an ordeal, but I think he was enjoying himself, and will continue to do so as his ministry develops.

Clare has spent a lot of time lately carefully preparing for Christmas, cooking preparations to reduce the workload on the big day, and decorating the tree yesterday. I haven't been a great deal of help,  with my affliction dominating life at the moment, except for cooking lunch, a few trips to the shops, and taking care of the Christmas letter and greetings, both digital and snail mail. After lunch today, she set up the crib scene in its customary kitchen window space, using the figures our children made when they were in primary school. We seem to have lost a shepherd or two over the years, and the angel is chipped, but never mind it's a small domestic treasury of happy memories.

Owain arrived in time for supper, glad to relax after a high pressure month of work. He moves house just after Epiphany and is fretting about furnishing his flat. But nothing more can be done until the New Year. At last a place of his own. He's more happy than worried.

Kath, Anto and Rhiannon arrive tomorrow, then the day after they leave, Jasmine, over from Arizona with her Dad, arrives to spend New Year with us. Unfortunately the two cousins can't meet this time around, but Uncle Owain will return next weekend after a day on call at work, to spend time with her. He's fond of his nieces. He'd make a lovely Dad himself. We live in hope of this happening one day!
  

More on connectivity

Monday afternoon, I went into town, and hunted for a new office PC, in John Lewis and PC world, but didn't find what I was looking for. All in One HP desktops with touch screens are now retail flavour of the month. We don't need the touch interface for work purposes. An hour in the office re-examining the Cloud file sync problem, revealed that as long as you log in with proper MS Account details every time rather than an alias username and password, there's no problem. When Windows Update requires a system re-start, logging in with an alias won't deliver synchronisation. There's no warning. Get into the habit of accessing using an alias, your files get saved on your machine and local network, but not in the Cloud. It's obvious, but not obvious. There are so many useless bells and whistles to annoy Windows users, but a helpfully placed notification here would lower resentment and blood pressure levels.

Tuesday, I was going to extend my hunt for a new office PC, but as I was about to leave, Mary, our neighbour came over and asked if I could come and check her PC, as something was stopping her from accessing her emails, and she thought she'd done something wrong. She has an old slowish XP machine and was exercise by the thought of having inadvertently disconnected it from the router, but wasn't sure how to check this. Physically it was fine. The error messages were all of the 'network not found' type, and compounded by a confusing browser install of AVG 'Safe Search', which detracted from the simple browser set up she was used to. The problem didn't show immediately until I re-booted the router. No broadband. After Clare joined us for a cup of tea, the red light on the router had turned blue again, and all was back to normal. Back at home, I learned about an inexplicable spate of BT broadband outages across the country during the day. Not linked to any cyber attack. Is the weather, sunspots or what?

Earlier in the day I spent a couple of hours thinking about doing another daily Lenten blog. Last year's was quite demanding to sustain but worth the bible study and mental exercise it entailed. This time, I'd like to write about the venture of prayer, especially bearing in mind that I'm currently working with a newly baptized Christian convert. He is coming to Lenten activity afresh, a first time experience, both of prayer and participation in Liturgy. I have to keep Hamid in mind as I write, even if his English is far from adequate to understand what I write. On a one to one basis ideas can be communicated more simply than they can in writing.

I enjoyed my double class of Chi Gung and Tai Chi this evening, and wasn't nearly as tired at the end of it. So much so, that I set up a new blog page and wrote for an hour, in readiness for the weeks to come.
     

If it ain't broke

Rachel and Jasmine returned on Monday, and it's been delightful to wake up this week to the sound of an imaginative child playing, or to be nudged by cold feet as she climbs in for a cuddle in between Grandma and Grandpa, to continue her game, until hunger awakens the need for breakfast. Richard came around, and in between showers, put the finishing touches to the front path, which now looks splendid, and gives me pleasure.

What annoys me beyond measure is that the simple process of posting the above picture, which used to take a minute, uploading from my Desktop, has just taken me half an hour. It displayed correctly on my computer, but when uploaded, it displayed sideways, as if I had not rotated it. I tried using Picasa to upload it to this blog page, but it would only post it to a separate page. I transferred my text to this page but although upright, the photo would not centre properly, even after tinkering with the HTML code. Finally, Google + let me to acces the correctly oriented picture from the Picasa album dropbox, and to cut and paste it correctly formatted to this page of text. Simple solution, now I know for next time, but no warning that it's all a bit different. 

Google is so keen to overwhelm with new features and user interface appearance. It's always nagging you to try new things. But if you decide you're happy with what you already know and work with efficiently, you still get nagged, and slowly things that used to work stop working as well as they did. It look me long enough to get my sister June to be confident enough to use the old interfaces properly, and now she feels frustrated and helpless, because she now has to interpret what she sees (or guess), rather than just use it. Maybe this is just another old folks grumble, but if there are millions more older users (with disposable income to part with), why annoy them? If it ain't broke don't try to fix it - just make sure it runs smoother and faster. That'll do.