Our Sunday morning routines took over this morning but with a slight hitch. We had been informed that the two carers would arrive an hour earlier today so we set our alarm accordingly. Although the alarm worked perfectly, we immediately fell asleep again so had a bit of a rush before the carer arrived. She was on her own this morning, her companion not having turned up but the two of us got stuck in together and this made the job easier for two of us. I was delighted to learn that having expressed our satisfaction with this particular carer to her manager who called around the other day, this good news had been conveyed back to her and this always makes for a cemented relationship for the future. After we had breakfasted, it was time for the Eucharistic minister to arrive and as she is such a good musician that any questions that I have of a musical nature, I save up until she comes so that I can ask her. After she had departed, we received a phone call from our University of Birmingham friend and we agreed to meet in Waitrose at 11.00am this morning. We got ourselves down to the store, picking up our copy of the ‘Sunday Times‘ when we got inside the store. Shortly afterwards, our friend turned up together with his newly acquired lady-friend so we had an interesting coffee together. We got onto the subject of ‘North v. South’ differences and there was quite a meeting of minds between the four of us how the present government was so disconnected form the lives of ‘ordinary’ people. We concurred that the Prime Minister and individual members of the Cabinet were so individually wealthy, that they had no real appreciation of the struggles of much of the population enduring the ‘cost of living’ crisis. Just before we left Waitrose, one of the staff presented Meg with a bunch of red roses left over from Valentines Day and which they would otherwise have thrown away. For dinner, we had the other half of some beef we cooked some time ago but with one half frozen up for future use, such as today. We had this with a baked potato and some broccoli, the only real preparation that I needed to do being to make a rich onion gravy in which the slices of meat were immersed to heat them up.
In the early afternoon, Meg had a quiet period on our little two-seater settee recently acquired for our Music Lounge and whilst Meg had a doze, I had a chance to read some of the Sunday newspapers. Then we treated ourselves to the second episode of the ‘Pilgrim’ series (in which a group of modern day pilgrims journey from the Swiss Alps to Rome via an ancient, mediaeval pilgrim route) The second half of this episode we had stumbled into before by accident but we are now enjoying watching the whole of the series of three in its entirety. This we really enjoyed and we are looking forward to seeing the last in the series next Sunday (documenting what happens when the pilgrims finally reach Rome) En route, the pilgrims stay in a variety of hostels specifically catering for pilgrims and I find it interesting that when the pilgrims are addressed in a slow but clear Italian, I can manage to understand nearly all of it. Given the congruence of the Spanish and Italian languages, this is perhaps to be expected. Meg and I have discovered in the past that if we were to run into Italians with no grasp of English, we agree to each other that if we speak slowly to them in Spanish and they reply to us, slowly and simply in Italian, we can manage to understand each other.
Yesterday, it occurred to me that rather than backing up these blog entries manually, there ought to be a way of making simple i.e. incremental backups in which only the changed files get copied to their backup destination. In my pre-Apple days, I knew that I used to use a program which was incredibly simple to use with your existing folders in a left hand pane, the backup destination in the right hand pane and then a simple click to perform an incremental backup. The trouble is that I had forgotten what it was called and suspected that it might be called ‘FileSync’ or similar. So I did some internet searches and then discovered that the program which I had enjoyed using as called ‘Allway Sync’ Moreover, I managed to locate my original order for it and and the credentials for an indefinite licence that I had bought at least a decade or so ago. To cut a long story short, although the program had been re-titled and taken over by another company, I managed to download and install a brand new and up-to-date copy and it is said that they will honour past licences. From my playing about it, it seem to work well and incredibly quickly. As a bonus, they throw in 10GB of cloud based storage so I have actually got this for nothing. So I have two little ‘jobs’ already set up in the system, one of which makes a backup from my SD card to a Western Digital USB drive (more reliable in the long run?) and the second of which zings my stuff straight into the cloud based backup space. By my calculations, I have enough space given to me which will accommodate my blogs for the next 800 years so I suspect this will be sufficient.
© Mike Hart [2024]