Home alone

My turn to do the week's shopping yesterday, and buy food to cater for myself, as Clare will be up in Kenilworth looking after Rhiannon. In the afternoon, I went into town and met Ashley for a planning meeting in John Lewis' over a cup of tea, for a change. We're preparing very carefully for some developments in our radio network in the coming months that are likely to stretch us and keep us busy. The business is never routine for long without some new challenge to stimulate us.

In the evening I finally got around to responding to a request from Bishop Dominic, episcopal Visitor to Ty Mawr Convent to contribute to his enquiries, addressed to friends, associates and supporters about the life of the community and its relationship to the wider church. Having to write this was a pleasure, as it caused me to look back on the part played in my life by the Sisters and the place itself over the past forty years. I go there less often these days, but it's often in my thoughts and prayers. In fact, Ty Mawr been influential on my spiritual journey, sharing its hospitality, its beauty and the silence of its peace generously, all of which are things I cherish now, wherever I live.  

After breakfast this morning, I drove Clare to the station to take the train to spend a few days of half term week looking after Rhiannon in Kenilworth. The rest of the morning I spent in the office, preparing documents requested yesterday, which I found were never digitized for inclusion in our Cloud archive. Not an onerous task, once I'd located the hard copies, but hindered by finding that the HP scanner/printer wasn't installed on the PC I'm now using. I recall finding the location of the driver download when I configured my home PC to use an identical device recently, so it was easier than last time. I just had to learn how to use a new scanning app, to get the job done. The time taken just accumulates.

Having woken early, I had a siesta in the afternoon. I'd meant to go for a walk, but the sky clouded over, so I stayed in and worked on my Lent blog. I'm finding things to write about prayer based on texts in the Psalms, not surprisingly. I work on an idea I want to develop, and then find Psalm verses and other scripture texts gather around by a process akin to association of ideas. The process works itself out in a way that doesn't seem to need much planning, so there's an element of discovery and surprise I find most enjoyable.

Another techie day

What a relief to wake up early and find that it's going to be a blue skies day! I spent much of the morning tucked away in my little office at home installing my new HP multi-function printer/scanner on both Windows and Linux Mint partitions. The HP printer Linux software installation required far less effort than previous piece of hardware. Things have improved and the equipment works quite well, though not quite as smmothly as the Windows installation - which was slower than I'd expected. Still, job done, and now I can take the old  Samsung printer/scanner and use it in the office in College, to saving having to descend two long flights of stairs to use the network printer and scanner.

I went into College to check if any of my tutor group students were back, bumped into Phil, and stopped for lunch before going in to the office. Ashley had lost his phone and was in the throes of arranging to have it blocked and ordering a new one. I took charge of the phone which the lost one replaced to see if I could extract the contact data from it, as no proper up to date back up had been done. Oh yes, it's easy to feel superior if you're good at managing these routines, but our office is so busy we don't always get the down time.

When we make time to work on these matters, the software programs are slow, and choosy about what they'll let you do, including parting with essentials. My office laptop now has Blackberry, HTC and Samsung software installed on it, and none of these packages with their respective hardware give the end user control needed. The excuse is to protect careless idiots from destroying their data, but you can't always get at the stuff you really need most, and keeping synchronisation under control is also a hassle. It can lead to data loss rather than preservation.

It was seven by the time I got home, after my fruitless efforts at data transfer. After supper I tucked into my second Inspector Montalbano novel of the week, and read until I started to nod off.

Back in harness again

It's much the same temperature here as it was in Sicily, but already I'm missing those blue skies and sudden spring like turns in the weather. My first task this morning was to take a prescription renewal request in to the GP surgery, then a visit to St Michael's to catch up on news with the staff and with the Principal over a quick sandwich lunch up in a High Street coffee shop. He returned from Newfoundland this weekend and jet-lag notwithstanding is already very busy with work. Everything gets back into full swing tomorrow.

I then went out to look for a replacement flourescent tube for one of our kitchen units. It's an odd size and specification and I anticipate having trouble finding one. I visited an expert home lighting retailer Clare has found  helpful in Cardiff, and although he didn't have the goods, he gave me a web address to search for information, also the address of a lighting wholesaler not too far away. No success, so it will mean hunting on line. 

While I was out, I called into Staples thinking I would buy an ink cartridge for my ancient Samsung lazer printer, but the model no longer seems to be supported, so it would mean having to order one via the internet at top prices for old stock. Instead of doing this, I bought a discounted HP lazer printer of the multi-functional variety, for only a tenner more than the cost of a cartridge. It's a lot faster and has more print memory, and a bit of an indulgence really.

Then it was time to pop into town and visit the CBS office to pick up from where I left off five weeks ago. Work on the new Admiral Insurance tower block in the space next to Motorpoint Area has progressed considerably over the past month. When I left there was just a large excavated hole in the ground, its sides being re-inforced. Now the central stairway and lift tower is rising at a pace.

 While I was away Ashley's computer hard drive failed, and although he was able to get it fixed and re-instate the system from the back-up I'd made a couple of years ago, he was just too busy to fiddle about with setting up email accounts all over again, a task made even more annoyingly difficult by BT's migration of their in-house email servers to Microsoft Exchange last autumn, with the consequent loss of several months of our email archive material.

I had difficulty configuring the Windows Mail client on his computer to work with the new system, as I was lacking the detail necessary. After a while, I was able to log in to the webmail and make it functional. With the necessary information to hand I configured Windows Mail to access Ashley's account on my computer for practice, and downloaded all his 187 emails from the past six weeks on to my laptop. I was furious with myself for failing to notice that the stupid default setting deleted emails from the host as they are downloaded to a pop3 account, so then it too me another hour to figure out how to send the emails back to his computer, and get the job done. The guys who design these programs simply don't think practically in a way that favours the end user.

On my way home, I called into Clas Ohlsen's hardware store in St David's Grand Arcade and saw that they have kitchen flourescent lighting tubes of the correct length for our set up, but I couldn't figure out if the socket configuraion was the same, so I couldn't buy with confidence. Meanwhile, Clare had gone on-line and found just the correct information about the flourescent tube in question. However, the phone signal in the depths of the store was insufficient for us to talk about it, or for me to access the web page on my office Blackberry. So it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

I  got home before seven and cooked us a very pleasant fish paella with prawns and Vietnamese river cobbler, with onion, leek, butternut squash, carrot, red pepper and the juice of a whole lemon. It's the first paella I've cooked for six weeks, and it wasn't quite as spicy as my usual offerings, maybe reflecting a little some things learned by practice and experiment while I was fending for myself in Taormina?