Passport delivered

With no locum duties yesterday, I went to the Parish Eucharist at St Catherine's with Clare. After lunch, a dozy afternoon, rather missing out on the bright sunshine and clear skies. I walked late in the park, as the sun was going down. I got a few beautiful sunset pictures.

This morning my new passport arrived by courier post while I was visiting the city centre Santander Bank branch, to organise the fee payment for my necessary Spanish police check. An IBAN payment to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior for €3.78 was required for this, a little tricky for the bank clerk to execute, but I came away with a couple of official receipts to send with the application. Best of all, the £15 or £30 charge for the service, due to be abolished in April, was waived by the bank! 

It's only ten days since I applied on-line, a third of the time it took to process a paper application a decade ago. A very impressive improvement. I feel very sad however, that the passport no longer says 'European Community' across the top. But at least I have a burgundy coloured one as the proposed dark blue replacement covers aren't yet in use. It least, it'll be possible not to stand out in a Euro border queue. 

All I have to do now is fill in the application form and get it in the post. It'll have to wait until tomorrow when I'm fresh. I don't relish having to fill in a form by hand. Writing small to fill in little boxes is something I now find difficult. Even with reading glasses on it's an effort. I would prefer to fill in a form digitally but on-line wasn't an option, and the form is a .pdf. 

You need Adobe Acrobat to edit a pdf, which I don't have. It's not free software. There are lots of on-line apps for doing this, claiming to be free, but they aren't. Either they deliver a watermarked copy and you have to pay for a clean one, or you have to 'subscribe' and have your email address spammed. It's easy to make a .pdf format file, but there doesn't seem to be a genuinely free means of editing them.

More digital chores

I had a funeral to take at St Catherine's yesterday morning, followed by a burial at Thornhill. Then in the afternoon and evening I scanned another collection of my sister June's old holiday slides from 40 years ago, which I brought back with me from my London visit last Friday. It's fascinating to see how the Amalfi coast, and Ibiza looked in those days, when tourism development was in its infancy, and most people still lived poor and simple rural lives around the Mediterranean. June is delighted to see them again on her computer, not least because it awakens pleasant memories of her youthful travels.

I was back again at St Catherine's this morning to celebrate the midweek Eucharist for five of us. Over coffee after the service, I acquired a handful of fresh basil and a variety of different tomatoes, freshly picked from the church veggie garden. I cooked these as soon as I got home into a delicious pasta sauce for lunch, such a pleasurable blessing.

The rest of the day I spent on computer chores. Typos in the CBS Network News I prepared when I was in Malaga needed correction. The printers were not able to take on editing tasks. I suspect now they are simply too busy with production runs. The MS Publisher file created was not backwards compatible. It would be a matter of finding a PDF editor up to the task of doing do accurately and cleanly. I downloaded and used PDF-Xchange, a free editor recommended by Tech Radar. It was very complex and it took a certain amount of ingenuity to make the required changes, as I didn't have time to learn how to use the editing tools properly, but I succeeded in the end, and the printer reported that the edited PDF performed as expected, before going into production.

The next chore was document scanning. Clare's Will and mine to send the children copies, plus a long company document, which missed my scanning blitz six years ago. when I was setting up the CBS office data system. Both jobs took ages, as the scanning routine is so slow. It's hard not to lose concentration and remember to turn over double sided pages. The one page I did miss was number thirteen, what else. Scanning the page later after checking the whole pdf revealed the error. The challenge was to insert the missing scanned page. I had no suitable software on my Windows 10, but thankfully my old Vista desktop, still running happily and hosting reliably my slide scanner when needed, has a suite of PDF editing apps which are simple and effective.

All in all, a productive sort of day, despite the challenge of obtaining right tools to do the job with the minumum of learning necessary for the task.