{"id":2103,"date":"2021-04-03T22:32:27","date_gmt":"2021-04-03T22:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2103"},"modified":"2021-04-03T22:32:27","modified_gmt":"2021-04-03T22:32:27","slug":"saturday-3rd-april-2021-day-383","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/04\/03\/saturday-3rd-april-2021-day-383\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday, 3rd April, 2021 [Day 383]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, today has been a most interesting day. We keep on expecting the weather to drift colder and, although it was a little cooler, the skies were clear and the spring sun was shining. \u00a0So Meg and I had a very\u00a0pleasant walk down into town. Having picked up our newspapers, we knew that we were going to make a flying\u00a0visit into Waitrose<\/em>,\u00a0primarily to buy Easter eggs for the kiddywinks (son and daughter-in-law) before tomorrow. Then the bottom dropped out of our worlds when we were told that not only had\u00a0Waitrose<\/em> sold out of\u00a0Easter eggs but so had every other store in Bromsgrove. Some of the assistants who know us well guided us towards a\u00a0<\/span>substitute telling us\u00a0knowingly\u00a0that we would get a lot more chocolate if we followed their suggestions. \u00a0So we\u00a0bought some miniaturised boxes of Cadbury Creme Eggs but complemented\u00a0this with a good\u00a0thick bars of some exotic dark\u00a0chocolate. This will have to suffice under the\u00a0circumstances but I never confess that in a month of Sundays I never thought actually that the stores would run out – \u00a0normally they are\u00a0teeming with stock at this time of year. We met with several of our groups of friends and as the spring sunshine was so pleasant, we spent longer than perhaps we should in\u00a0conversations with each one of them.After all of this chattering it was pretty late when we actually did get back home.\u00a0Fortunately, I had taken the foresight to buy a\u00a0Chicken and Leek pie from Waitrose<\/em> and all that this needed was to be popped into the oven and complemented with some\u00a0green vegetables.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

We knew that later on in the evening, we were booked in to attend an extended church service (an especial liturgy for Easter\u00a0<\/span>Saturday) so we had a fairly lazy afternoon and a put-me-on tea knowing that we were going to attend church at 8.0pm and we needed to leave the house at 7.30 to secure a parking place. Bu this\u00a0afternoon, after an\u00a0early BBC\u00a0News, there was a special rendition of Handel’s Messiah<\/em> (one of our\u00a0favourites) and this was staged in an most interesting way. Instead of being in a church or the Royal Albert Hall, the performance took place in the London Coliseum. All of the orchestra was ‘socially distanced’ upon the stage and the\u00a0conductor who was also playing some\u00a0harpsichord continuo was conducting from the harpsichord standing up (so he could be seen by\u00a0all of the members of the choir) The choir, meanwhile, were\u00a0socially distanced across the whole of the normal audience space whilst many of the\u00a0soloists\u00a0performed their pieces from within one of the boxes. The way it was filmed made each\u00a0soloist appear as though they were performing in their own miniaturised theatre and the whole effect was stunning. The choir was the chorus of the English National Opera who also provided the orchestra. I noticed that many of the instruments used were either originals or copies of originals e.g. some of the trumpets were side valve and looked remarkably different from their modern counterparts. The\u00a0quality of the\u00a0imported\u00a0soloists as well as the\u00a0choirs was superb and whilst it must have taken a certain amount of planning, I did wonder whether the experiment might be repeated (although, of course, they generally need a paying audience to finance the whole lot)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When we got to church, we anticipated rather a long and perhaps drawn-out service. In the event, the\u00a0service lasted 1\u00bc\u00a0hours which was a little shorter than we had been led to expect and there were several special liturgical\u00a0insertions as well\u00a0<\/span>as music to make the whole\u00a0service seem different. Before the\u00a0service started, I\u00a0merged to\u00a0sneak into the\u00a0presbytery and have\u00a0quick chat with the priest as the first bottle of damson gin seemed to\u00a0have gone missing.Anyway, I had brought along another one but apparently he had taken possession of the first so now he has two bottles to make a merry\u00a0clergyman of him.The service was conducted briskly but with all of the\u00a0necessary decorum so we think that the\u00a0congregation and priest should get along fine together.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Yesterday, the new battery arrived for the IBM ThinkPad and it seems to be working OK. The little instruction sheet indicated that on first use, you shouldn’t charge it up from its\u00a0semi-charged state but\u00a0rather run it down to about 2% (but not lower) and then immediately attempt a recharge up to 100%. I wonder if this indicates its is an ‘older’ generation of battery (nickel-based ? and not a\u00a0modern lithium-ion that should have this kind of memory effect) Last night, getting fed up of the Chrome browser telling me it could not be updated, I\u00a0went on the web and found a browser\u00a0<\/span>specially dedicated to older computers\u00a0particularly XP which first saw the light of day about 19 years ago. I installed a blindly fast browser called K-Meleon (which I only to use for internal file browsing purposes anyway). Their own blurb maintains:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

‘K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser based on the Gecko layout engine developed by Mozilla which is also used by Firefox. K-Meleon is Free, Open Source software released under the GNU General Public License and is designed specifically for Microsoft Windows (Win32) operating systems<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This sounds ideal for my purposes as it is small, fast and functional (for what I want to do)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, today has been a most interesting day. We keep on expecting the weather to drift colder and, although it was a little cooler, the skies were clear and the spring sun was shining. \u00a0So Meg and I had a very\u00a0pleasant walk down into town. Having picked up our newspapers, we knew that we were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2103"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2106,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions\/2106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}