Photo Book

The Gorse Fox has very little to report today. Virtually the whole day was spent glued to the computer working on the photo book for 1980s. This involves reading through the blog for the year, sifting through the photos, and working out the best layout for each page. It was very time consuming but at the end of the day the Gorse Fox was very satisfied with the many hours he had invested. His only niggling concern was that we had so few photos of our trip with the girls to Florida in 1989. He would sleep on this.

Oh yes, and we leave the EU tonight. This has brought out all the extremists from both sides of the debate. The Gorse Fox finds it rather pathetic. A decision was made democratically, now we have to make the most of the situation and get behind the drive for the future and stop insulting each other.

Gerontius

Well after a second night sleeping with Emma (so to speak), the Gorse Fox can conclude that Gerontius was probably using one when he had his dreams. Certainly it was another very comfortable night, and another night with no discomfort from the hip.

The Silver Vixen had some friends scheduled to visit this morning. The Gorse Fox made himself scarce. He spent the time working on another photo book. This one should cover the 1980s. It's quite time consuming getting a sensible chronology and managing the page layouts. A couple of years are now complete and he's about to start on the next.

The Silver Vixen and her friends took the bus into Chichester for lunch at Cote Brasserie. The Gorse Fox still hasn't ventured out of the study as there are so many little projects and distractions he has in front of him.

Working on the videos yesterday, the Gorse Fox wanted to check a date. He looked in Google calendar to confirm when a certain event happened. The calendar was bare, or at least it was bare that far back. This irked him as he was fairly certain he had been using said calendar at that time. In the end he exported the calendar and imported it into the iCalendar on the Mac. There were the missing entries. Now the problems started. The Mac Calendar sync'd with Google calendar... duplicate entries started to occur. Worse still, it reissued a load of invites to people for meetings and events stretching back to 2006! Oops.

Sweet Dreams

The Gorse Fox is always sceptical about things he sees advertised on the TV. We had got to the stage that we needed to replace our mattress. The TV is always showing advertisements for "Emma" and "Casper" and no end of other mattress brands. The Gorse Fox saw an article in "The Independent" which purported to compare the best 10 mattresses... and the winner was "Emma". Now, until the end of the month, there is 40% discount on the Emma mattress, and it has a 100-day no quibble return warranty. The Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen decided to bite. The mattress turned up on monday and we unpacked it and allowed it to air for 24 hours. Then on Tuesday we swapped our old mattress out and stuck Emma on the bed.

After one night, the Gorse Fox is sold. This is the most comfortable mattress he has every tried. It has even stopped the ache that develops in his right hip overnight. Time will tell if this is a one-off, but at the moment we are both delighted with our choice (particularly at the discounted price).

The Gorse Fox left it until this morning to decide about football. His foot was still niggling a bit so in the end he decided to cry-off. That's the last time though. He needs to get going again, even if he has to hop.

Soundtrack

It was cold overnight, but the morning was bright and sunny. The Silver Vixen was up early as she had to get into Chichester for an early dental appointment and then planned to do some shopping. The Gorse Fox had planned to go with her but there were some domestic chores involving the Karcher that needed doing. He stayed put.

Once the chores were out of the way, the Gorse Fox returned to the study and the video he had been editing yesterday. It was time to finish the manipulation of the soundtrack and to add a background music track. This took several hours but he thinks the final cut was pretty good.

The Silver Vixen got back in time to enjoy some homemade soup for lunch but wasn't feeling on top form so has gone for a lie-down. The Gorse Fox was going to start on another video but doesn't want to disturb her and has spent the afternoon reading quietly downstairs.

The weather took a bit of a turn during the afternoon. The bright morning turned into an overcast afternoon and a squally rain storm rattled through. It has stopped again now but was pretty foul for a while.

Editing and IT Support

It's been a wet and grey day. A good day to stay inside. A day to spend time with the video editor and work on some more old videos from 1991. We had a lovely holiday in Cornwall that year and took a neighbour's daughter with us. Cousteau-cub was away with the school for the first part of the week, but the Gorse Fox went and collected her halfway through. The video editing has been interesting inasmuch as the Gorse Fox had a vast amount of footage to crunch down to something watchable. He's not finished yet as he still has to add a background soundtrack. That can wait until tomorrow.

This afternoon the Gorse Fox got a message from Old Bill. He was having problems setting up his new printer on the computer we rebuilt a couple of weeks back. It turns out that it was a bit fiddly, but we did manage to get the print and scan functions working.

The Gorse Fox is waiting to hear from Cousteau-cub. She started her new role at work today and we are eager to get an update.

The Gorse Fox is delighted to report that the remedial action taken on the oil-splattered chinos lat night was entirely successful. Phew!

Chino Magnets

It was a very respectable eight o'clock before Ellie woke this morning. This meant a very leisurely start to the day. By mid-morning Urban-cub had arrived to collect her. She stayed for some breakfast and then headed off to Chichester to spend some time with Cousteau-cub.

(The Gorse Fox didn't play football today. His foot seems to be on the mend, but he's going to give it a few more days before he puts any stress on it).

Once we were on our own, the Silver Vixen spent some time tidying her shoe collection while the Gorse Fox returned to the video editing. Two more videos were cranked out from 1991 and 1992. Once they were done he went through the video filing and then triggered the backup process. (Typically they are only backed up monthly because he doesn't usually do much editing, but he's not willing to leave so much work for another week without backup).

The Gorse Fox has started on supper. He has a problem. It doesn't matter if he wears an apron. If he does, the apron remains spotless. If he takes it off, then he can guarantee that his chinos will act as a magnet and suck oil from the cooking onto his legs. It happened again just now. Pale grey chinos splattered by the oil he was using to prepare the roast potatoes. Cooing stops. Various soaps and chemical treatments are applied to the trousers and they are now slopping around in a bubble-activated wash. Heavens knows if it will work, but he hopes so as they are new trousers! Wanders across the kitchen and puts on the apron.

Playing

Ellie has been with us since first thing. As a result, the day has been filled, primarily, with toys, shuffling around on the floor, paint, stickers, play-dough, and hide 'n'seek. The Gorse Fox should explain that Ellie hasn't quite got the idea of hide 'n' seek yet. She hides, then as you start to look for her "I wonder if she's behind the sofa?", she responds "No" and so it continues until you "find" her. It's very funny.

She had a nap during the afternoon, and we took the opportunity for some down-time. Then it was back to the games, to dinner, some more games and then bed. It took her a long time to settle and in the end the Gorse Fox went and sat, silently, with her until she dropped off.

A bit of a mix

The Gorse Fox was up early. He had set the alarm, but like in the olden days when he was still working, he woke before it went off. He had arranged to go across to Urban-Cub and collect Ellie before Urban-Cub had to leave for work.

Back home, with Ellie, we sorted out breakfast and the the Silver Vixen took her up to get washed and dressed. After that it was a fairly relaxed morning. Ellie was quite happy to play with her toys, some bubbles, and some play-dough. While this was going on the Gorse Fox played the video of our Cornwall trip in 1990 to show Ellie what Cousteau-Cub and Urban-Cub looked like 30 years ago. The Gorse Fox isn't sure whether Ellie was excited or traumatised.

Pistol Pete arrived at lunchtime too collect Ellie and the Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen quickly cleared away the toys and grabbed some lunch. The afternoon has been very relaxed. The Silver Vixen is watching a recorded episode of Holby City whilst the Gorse Fox is editing some more videos. (This he suspects could be a full-time job for several months if he kept at it, but he plans to dip in and out as the mood takes him).

Deirdre in Cornwall

A title like that may not make a lot of sense to many of you. The Gorse Fox suspects, however, that Cousteau-Cub, Urban-Cub, and the Silver Vixen know what is in store.

Back in the 80's and 90's we would regularly take our Spring vacation in Cornwall, or occasionally, Devon. The Gorse Fox has spent today processing the video that was taken on one such trip in 1990. We had stayed in a rental cottage called Tor Side, in a place called Port, near Polruan. We had a lovely week visiting Polruan, Fowey, Looe, St Michael's Mount, and Polperro. The video shows that we had a good week, weather-wise (which wasn't always the case).

The editing skills are coming back (the Gorse Fox used to do a lot of video editing ten or fifteen years back). He has now managed to edit the video, provide multi-track video and audio overlays, and manage the sound balance. He has even managed to add zoom and pan to several small clips. Very satisfying. Yesterday's video was 15 minutes long and took 5.5 house to render. Today's video is 40 minutes but only took 30 minutes to render. This is probably because the Gorse Fox changed the out to an 'MP4' file, instead of the '.MOV' file he used yesterday.

Podiatrically speaking, the left foot isn't quite as tender, but is still very stiff. Hopefully, it'll be better soon.

Resolved

The Gorse Fox woke up with an acute attack of foot pain. He couldn't put any weight through his left foot. This is a problem he has had before and it seems to strike randomly, lasts for a few days, and then disappears completely. It is frustrating as well as painful, and he had to cancel today's football.

The Silver Vixen went off to Pilates so the Gorse Fox hobbled upstairs to the study. He settled down with some YouTube videos that explained the basic techniques for video editing with DaVinci Resolve. It seems immensely powerful, and he's fairly sure that he'll only ever use a small subset of the tools available. He picked a fairly simple, short video to begin with. Bit by bit it came together and eventually he got to the final stage, which is to render the edited video. That's where things seemed to grind to a halt. He knows from experience that rendering video can be slow, but so far it has been running for three and half hours with and hour and twenty-four minutes to go! Hopefully, the final result will be worth it. The lesson to learn from this is to get everything ready and then let it render overnight.

Shorn

The Gorse Fox loves these cold, crisp, blue skies. There was a hard frost on the Orangery roof again overnight.

Not much planned for the day and plans like that tend to go off perfectly. The Gorse Fox started with the usual accounting tasks then treated himself to a walk around to the barber's shop. Apparently, cornrows are not deemed appropriate for a gentleman of his advancing years and receding hairline. Oh well, we are not due in Jamaica for a couple of months.

Back home, he returned to the study and spent much of the rest of the day finishing the filing of the transcoded videos, looking for services that will do transcoding for him, and generally fiddling about with old tapes.

Old Bill popped in for a chat this afternoon. It's always nice to see him and to catch up on all the latest bargains, holidays, cars, and so forth.

Kondo

Another lovely crisp, cold day. The Gorse Fox loves days such as these.

The agenda wasn't particularly full for the day, though the Silver Vixen had a hair appointment late in the morning and another mid-afternoon. The Gorse Fox had to face reality. With the new clothes he purchased last week, he was running out of wardrobe space. It was time for a bit of Kondo. He was ruthless. Any shirts, sweaters, trousers, football kit, socks, and underwear that he hadn't worn for a while or had deemed too big, was put in a pile. Slowly the pile grew. Eventually, he was done and there was plenty of space in the wardrobe. There little, however, on the floor. He loaded the car with 10 bags of clothes for the recycling centre and tootled off to dispose of them.

The Gorse Fox's car has seemed a little heavy recently. He stopped at Kwik-Fit and asked them to take a look. He was concerned that he had damaged something when dragging the bags of cat litter under the car a few weeks ago. They put the car up on the ramps and checked it over (or is it under?). They called me across to have a look. A clean bill of health. That was a relief.

Once home, Urban-cub dropped in for a few hours, which is always nice. Ellie was at the child-minder, so we had a chance to chat.

The rest of the afternoon was spent back in the study transcoding the rest of the errant video files. The Gorse Fox thinks they are all done no. He just needs to sort out their creation dates and then re-file them in the correct folders. He suspects the next little project will be to edit some more family videos into individual movies covering specific events, trips, or just the passage of time. The question for the Gorse Fox to ponder first, however, is whether to use the inbuilt "iMovies" or the sophisticated "DaVinci Resolve". Either way, there will be a learning curve as it is so long since he has done any concerted video editing.

Frost

There was a hard frost overnight. When the Gorse Fox had to leave for football, he was glad that a) the car had heated windows, b) the car had heated seats, and c) he was playing indoors! It might have been cold but the sky was gin clear, and the sun was quite blinding.

Football was a comfortable 6-v-6. That is really the perfect number for the indoor pitch. Despite his best efforts, we lost today... which seems to be a theme so far this year. He didn't manage to score any goals and we conceded 7 goals with only 4 in reply.

Back home, there was a trip to Sainsbury's and to M&S; the latter to collect the two sweaters ordered yesterday. Most of the rest of the afternoon has been spent transcode more old video files in "mp4" format and munging their dates to match the dates on which they were taken. (It did highlight how poorly the Gorse Fox kept his diary for the years in question - not helped by the fact he had obviously switched off the timestamp on the video recorder, so that was no help).

Wrong size

Ellie was, as usual, very good and slept through until after seven. She was a bundle of fun as she demolished her breakfast and tried to decide what she would play with next. Slowly the floor became covered with toys and blankets, dolls, bricks and who knows what else. Urban-Cub arrived mid-morning to spend an hour or so with us before taking Ellie home.

The Gorse Fox explained that we had had a bit of a shopping spree on Thursday. Among the items purchased were three nice sweaters. The Gorse Fox had carefully selected size ”M”. Trying them on this morning, he realised that “M” was a bit snug. He hopped on the bus and returned to M&S. All three were returned, and one was immediately replaced. The other two weren’t in stock so have been ordered and should be available tomorrow.

During the afternoon the Gorse Fox had realised that there were considerable numbers of family videos that he had never processed. Among these were many “.avi” files. The video editor that he uses on the MAC doesn’t seem to handle these properly. He spent the rest of the afternoon using “Handbrake” to convert them to “mp4” files. The problem is then that they have today’s date, rather than the date they were taken. As there are so many of them and they were sensibly named with the date and date in the file names, they Gorse Fox has written a program to extract the dates and change the time stamps on the files. Overall he’s made a good start but there are many files still to transcode and re-date.

On Duty

G-Force have been on duty all day today, and Ellie will be staying with us overnight. Urban-Cub dropped her off first thing, and will be collecting her in the morning.

There's not too much to report as we have spent the day playing with Ellie. The kitchen was turned into a train at one point, with all the chairs lined up in a row, as if on a train. Then she decided she was going on holiday by train and would need to take various items with her. These slowly got loaded onto the Gorse Fox's lap until stuff started to drop off the top of the pile. It reminded him of the old Crackerjack game where they kept loading the contestants with cauliflowers or the like.

We have also done a jigsaw, played with play-dough, done some drawing and some painting. It's been a busy day!

Binge shopping

The Silver Vixen and Gorse Fox had decided that once Ocado had been we would head into Chichester for some retail therapy. We also had a package to hand over to Cousteau-Cub. We tootled off to get the bas and, conveniently, it arrived just as we got to the bus stop.

There were a few items on our mental shopping lists, but a lot would depend on what we found. We split up. The Gorse Fox started at the show shop to look for some smart black shoes. He doesn't need them often, but he should have a pair (his current black shoes are a bit clunky and could not, under any interpretation of the word, be considered smart). A browse through the shelves revealed some potential candidates, but he wanted to compare them with offerings at M&S (where he had a 20% discount). He wandered across to M&S. The shoes were a non-starter. Some were smart, but most looked too flat for his liking. While there, however, he did manage to pick up two nice sweaters for £20 the pair. That was a bit of a result.

He met up with Cousteau-Cub and handed over her parcel, then headed back to the shoe shop. This time he tried on several pairs, some of which were in the sale. In the end, he selected a pair that were part of new range and thus, full price. He had them put to one side for collection later. He then went and met up with the Silver Vixen. Her shopping had been successful so far, and a couple of quick stops completed her list.

We returned to M&S. The Gorse Fox looked at some slacks and tried on a couple of pairs. He likes the slim fit, but it was clear that his calves are just too big to wear them comfortably (though they are just fine everywhere else). In then three different pairs of "regular fit" found their way into his shopping bag, as did some underwear. He also took a shine to a nice pale green sweater, but they didn't have his size in stock. They put one on order and he can collect it tomorrow.

We returned to the shoe shop. The Gorse Fox bought some replacement slippers as well as the shoes, put to one side earlier. The Silver Vixen also managed to find a nice pair of dress shoes to go with her black evening dress.

Laden like pack animals, we headed back down East Street and decided to eat at Crispin's, as we have so often in the past. It's hardly fine dining, but it is good freshly prepared fare, and the staff are lovely.

It had been an expense expedition, but we got everything we had set out to get.

Updates

It had rained steadily and heavily throughout the night. It was clear that the Gorse Fox was going to get wet playing football this morning. We had, clearly, timed the game to perfection as the rain continued throughout the game, only stopping at the final whistle. The game itself was pretty good, and very even. The Gorse Fox managed a single goal in our 4-3 defeat.

Back home documentation has started to arrive for the cruise we have planned for 2021. Somehow, that always seems to make the booking seem more real.

Today is a mega-Tuesday for Microsoft fixes (or so we are told in the tech press). The Gorse Fox decided that he would bring the revitalised laptop right up to date by applying all the latest fixes while he writes this blog. It's humming away in the corner, but it's unclear how long it will take.

Bookings and Reservations

It was forecast to be a foul day. The forecast did not disappoint. The Silver Vixen was due to be out for much of the day so the Gorse Fox got on with a few domestic chores to fill the morning.

After lunch, he buried himself in the study. There were items from his various holiday checklists that needed attention. For some things, you cannot book too early; for others, it is just the satisfaction of knowing it's done. So we now have our taxis booked for the airport in May. That is the UK end of the trip underway. He still has a hotel room to book at Gatwick; that can wait a bit.

On the Jamaican side of things, he requested and received quotes for the VIP Meet and Greet Service at the airport; that's now booked (this whisks you along past all the queues and through an express line for immigration and customs). He also requested and received quotes for the private luxury transfer to the hotel. This too is now booked. This holiday is under control.

That brings him to the cruise. He has had no end of problems accessing the website to complete the registration. It turns out (after several phone calls) that the agent had misspelt his first name when entering the data. The consequence of this was that it could never find him to allow login. Now sorted, the Gorse Fox logged in. The website is dreadful. Data he entered was dropped. Data he entered about the Silver Vixen was re-assigned to him. This could be one of the slickest looking, but most amateur websites he has accessed in years. It is clear that he will have to go back and check it and make corrections in the next few days.

Lots of admin today, but given the weather, it was a good use of time.

Little bytes

A new working week starts. Oh no it doesn't, the Gorse Fox is retired! (Sorry to keep rubbing it in, but he still can't believe his luck).

Talking of work, Cousteau-Cub was due to start in her new position at work today. The new trainee they had been preparing to take over her current role was clearly incompetent and in the end just failed to even turn up for work. As a result, Cousteau-Cub is having to continue in her old role for a couple more weeks (though on her new salary). It's a shame as she had been looking forward to the new challenge.

The Gorse Fox had been talking with Old Bill at the weekend. He wanted to have another go at the rebuilt desktop PC that the Gorse Fox had upgraded from Windows to Ubuntu. The trouble was that he had forgotten the passwords and had been struggling to get to grips with the system. The Gorse Fox went across and installed Linux Mint for him. He's no a very happy little bunny as the system is so fast (compared to his old Windows system) and Mint behaves very much like Windows 7, so he found it quite confident immediately. The Gorse Fox helped him set up some defaults and some browse bookmarks, then left him to it.

The Silver Vixen had an appointment this afternoon, so the Gorse Fox took the opportunity to return to her old laptop. He logged in to the Windows 10 partition and made sure all the latest updates had been applied, then took the opportunity to log in to the Linux Mint partition and check that it too was up to date. It is interesting to compare the two systems on the same hardware. The speed of Mint is quite noticeably greater than that of Windows, and the amount of memory available is at least 1GB more than Windows. It really is a good way of breathing new life into an old laptop.

Live and learn

It was Sunday morning so time for some football. The Gorse Fox lined up with the yellow-bibs today. It was a nice 6-v-6 game with a non-playing referee. It was also a very high-scoring game, ending 10-9 to the Orange bibs. There was another clampdown on running during the game, but it was very inconsistent and, consequently, irritating.

The Gorse Fox has found a new trick this afternoon. If he writes something in Notes or another app on the iPad and wants to copy it to this blog without extraneous fonts or formatting he can select the text, press copy, then use Shift-Option-Cmd+V to insert it. That is something he has wanted to do for ages so that he can write the blog offline when necessary.

Now, if only there was a command to let the Gorse Fox automatically time stamp a post before submitting it... then he could submit batches of posts, (This is all relevant because of the cruise we have booked for next year, and the assumption that there’ll be plenty of times when we have no internet access).

Just cruising

Yesterday's late night meant a fairly lazy start to the day. Once we had finally got our collective acts together, the Gorse Fox returned to the subset of cruise selection. We are looking for a possible cruise in the summer of 2021 and would like to get it nailed down so that we are not tempted to return to Sandals again during our forthcoming trip.

We debated and decided to try the Norwegian Fjords. The Gorse Fox's sister was contacted... did they fancy joining us? Would that cruise be suitable? Should we get going? They did. It was. We did.

The Gorse Fox called the cruise lady. We debated a few items and then committed to a lovely suite with a wrap around balcony. We are in the aft, port corner of the ship. J&T have booked the aft starboard corner of the ship on the same deck. The bookings have been linked and in so doing we achieved a further discount. Result. We are now booked on a cruise in the summer of 2021.

This afternoon the Gorse Fox has started to look at other holiday options, but more about that once we have something in focus (if not actually arranged).

Shen Yun

This afternoon we got dressed up in our finery. We had tickets for "Shen Yun" in Woking and the tickets clearly stated that evening dress and business suits were required. We set up the Robo-feeder for Jasper and hopped in the car to potter up to Surrey. For some bizarre reason,  the journey to Woking is one of those trips that the Gorse Fox dislikes. It's fine as far as Guildford, but the last bit from Guildford to Woking winds him up for some reason. Despite this, we arrived without incident, parked and made our way down into the Shopping Centre. We had deliberately arrived with plenty of time to spare so that we could have a leisurely dinner before the show.

We made our way to Cote Brasserie, where the Gorse Fox had pre-booked a table. Settling down, we checked the various menus and bothe selected their ribeye steak. We then spent a very pleasant couple of hours enjoying dinner and chatting to a charming young mum and her daughter at the next table. They too were going to the show.

We paid the bill and headed to the theatre where we found a place in the foyer to sit while waiting for the auditorium to open. As we sat down, the Gorse Fox caught the eye of the chap next to us and realised it was Big Mike from Starfleet. We both spluttered and stood back up to introduce wives and loved ones (though the Gorse Fox only had one wife with him tonight). It was nice to see him and the Gorse Fox was amazed to find he was still working at Starfleet. He thought that he would have retired by now.

We made our way into the auditorium. The Gorse Fox had selected well. Our seats were right in the middle, about eight rows from the stage. The view was perfect. The show began with comperes providing explanations and background in both English and Chinese. Shen Yun is a progression of traditional Chinese dances of different ethnic backgrounds telling different traditional stories. The costumes were stunning silks of vibrant colours, and the dances incorporated grace and elegance with flips, jumps, and acrobatics that would thrill any Olympic Games. The Gorse Fox is not really enthused by dance, as a rule. This, however, was different. This was something that he could really appreciate. The athleticism of the dancers was astounding. The other thing worthy of comment was the set. There was a vast screen covering the whole back of the stage. On this, they mixed both scenes from China's countryside and towns, with live action. It was immensely clever as it appeared that dancers dropped into the screen and floated off, seamlessly, into the scenery beyond.

The show finished at about ten but it took quite a while to get out of the car park. Once on the road, however, the Gorse Fox decided to stick with the A3 instead of heading cross country. It adds about 15 miles to the journey, but it takes about the same time. At this time of night, however, the roads are quiet and he feels the main dual-carriageways are safer than the twisty country roads.

It was a wonderful evening.

Sorted

Well a concerted bit of early morning research has sorted the problem on the Silver Vixen’s laptop power on menu. Apparently it gets switched off by the Windows fast start process. Switching off “fast start” revealed everything and now the Gorse Fox has managed to install a Linux Mint image on a second partition of the laptop. Both Windows and Mint are working perfectly. Great result.

Clones

It has been an interesting day. Urban-cub brought Ellie to us first thing, then went on to work. Ellie was with us for the day. Meanwhile, Cousteau-cub, who had spent the night with us, had various appointments at the doctor's and at the hospital. The Gorse Fox decided that, with the weather being so damp, he would act as her taxi driver for the morning.

After lunch, Ellie played quietly then with the Silver Vixen baked some cupcakes. Meanwhile, the Gorse Fox took the Silver Vixen's laptop apart and installed the cloned SSD. It fired up the first time. The Gorse Fox then spent some time testing it. Everything seemed to be working fine, however, he decided to look at the spare partition he had created and installed Linux on that. The problem was that he could not get the power-up menu to work. This is the menu that allows you to select a different boot device. Well try as he did, he could not trigger it. The question is now whether or not he is going to worry about that, of whether he goes back to the drawing board and tries to fix it. After all, it is not as if we use this laptop very often.

Pistol Pete came along to collect Ellie late in the afternoon, and we had some supper then a quiet evening.

Look through any window

The nice man from Amazon delivered the new power adapter and ssd drive for the Silver Vixen's laptop. The Gorse Fox fired it up in order to bring it up to date and check everything was working before swapping the hard drive. AN update was pending and failed. It then went into an update cycle which ran for six hours. The Gorse Fox now remembers why he likes Macs and Linux so much.

This morning saw the first outdoor football game of the new decade. It was a comfortable 7-v-7 game. It started with a lecture on walking not running, and the warning that offenders would be sin-binned. This was tightly refereed and there were several offenders. The Gorse Fox survived without censure, but concluded at the end that it was the least enjoyable game of football he had played in a year. It took all the "buzz" out of the game and just became a procession of old blokes wandering around aimlessly. Let's hope they relax again soon.

This afternoon, the Gorse Fox is again working on the Silver Vixen's laptop. Yet another update has been downloaded and is being applied. Hopefully, once that is complete, he can clone the hard drive onto the SSD and get that running. The question that he is asking himself is whether there is any software or data on the laptop that is worth keeping. It has been untouched for a year or more, so it seems unlikely. Maybe, once everything is up and running, he'll strip everything off except the operating system and device specific drivers.

Diagnostics

The Gorse Fox has run some diagnostics on his errant hard drive. Even the diagnostics wouldn't complete but did reveal an error (which was undocumented). As a temporary workaround the Gorse Fox has renamed the failed folder and rebuilt it elsewhere on the drive. Hopefully this will give him sufficient time to find a replacement.

Talking of a replacement, it seems that manufacturers no longer sell standalone NAS drives. (Those that are available - for example, from Curries - are several years old and the reviews are dreadful). This means that the Gorse Fox will have to come up with a new, robust solution. The current idea (though not fully formed, as yet) is to build a NAS server on a new Raspberry Pi. This can then host one or more drives (HDD or SSD) which can be connected via USB 3. The underlying software to control this configuration would be OpenMediaVault. It all seems quite feasible but would cost more than a straight replacement drive would have; though significantly less than a dedicated NAS box.

While talking IT, Amazon should be here any minute with the new parts for the Silver Vixen's Windows laptop, "Osprey".

Paranoia can be healthy

The Gorse Fox is concerned that one of his backup NAS drives is failing. Overnight a backup of the photo library failed after 7500 photos were expected but not found on the backup device. The Gorse Fox re-ran the backup and it worked without problems (indeed there was nothing to backup as he hadn't added any new photos in the last day). Later during the day, he had two further backup jobs that failed. The Gorse Fox's healthy paranoia means that he still has a second backup NAS with copies of everything, and even a third device with key folders and files backed up at weekends. These are just the onsite backups; he also has most of his stuff also backed up in the cloud. Despite this, he needs to start looking for a replacement. It's no use waiting for the drive to fail completely.

While talking of drives. The Silver Vixen dug out her laptop. This is the only remaining Windows device we have. We couldn't find the power adapter so the Gorse Fox ordered a new one. He has also ordered an SSD to replace the hard drive. If we are going to keep it about, we may as well make it fast enough to make it usable.

Much of the day was interspersed with research into possible cruises for 2021. We seem to have narrowed it down to three candidate sailings. We just need to see whether we'll go alone or with J&T, then decide on which cruise.

Back in the swing

Many people will be fretting that tomorrow means "back to work" after the Christmas holidays. Not the Gorse Fox. The beauty of retirement is that tomorrow is just another holiday for us. Having said that, he was back in the swing of things today.

There was football to play. He made his way to the Sports Arena only to find the place was already packed and he had to use his local knowledge to find somewhere to park the car. We started the year with a nice 6-v-6 game. The teams seemed fairly evenly balanced, but the Gorse Fox was worried that two weeks without any exercise would show. Well, it did. At least it did at first. Passes were going astray. Shots were bringing down space debris. He was, however, defending resolutely. One of the payers on the other team (who hadn't warmed up) tore a calf muscle and had to drop out at half-time. By then we were 4-1 ahead, so we sacrificed one of our players, leaving us a man down for the second half. We carried on as we had finished the first half. The Gorse Fox got off the mark with his first two goals of the year and we rolled off the pitch with a 9-3 win. Very satisfying.

It's been a quiet afternoon.

Decs

It is not yet the twelfth night, but it seemed an appropriate time to remove the Christmas decorations. So it was that the Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen have spent the day removing trinkets, lights, batteries from lights, baubles, bangles (ok, maybe not bangles, and beads. Slowly they have found their way back into the appropriate storage boxes and these have been returned to the garage where they live for most of the year. The tree is back in loft... and we haven't yet found the one item that we alway miss. It is something different every year, but there is always something.

Home

We met up with Cousteau-Cub, Urban-Cub, and Ellie over breakfast at the hotel. There was a good spread, certainly better than many of the breakfasts the Gorse Fox had when he was travelling on business. There was no particular hurry so we took our time before retuning to our rooms to finish packing.

We set off just before 10 and headed back to the M4, across the bridge and back towards the east. Again, we stopped at Membury (which seems to be about the half-way point), where we caught up with the girls once more. A brief comfort break and a "coffee-to-go" only took a few minutes and we were soon back on the road. The journey was pretty unremarkable except, perhaps, for the fact that the traffic was so light.

We got home around one-ish. Other than unpacking, the first order of the afternoon was to clean the carpet where Jasper had been sick. Lady Penelope had kindly cleared the immediate debris, but the carpet itself needed some TLC. Out came the Bex-Bissell and bit by bit the carpet stains disappeared. Not completely, but with luck another treatment should see it sorted.

The rest of the day was fairly quiet and the Gorse Fox couldn't be bothered to cook so ordered some fish and chips. Now, he understands the theory of ordering in advance is that, on your arrival the food should be ready. Well, that's not quite how it worked. He received an email response to the order saying that it had been accepted and would be 20 minutes. Twenty minutes later he arrived at the fish and chip emporium, "Can I help you fine sir?" squeaked the adolescent behind the counter. "Yes, my good man. An order was submitted across the inter web. I am the Gorse Fox and have come to collect it" replied the Gorse Fox. The adolescent squeaked across the cooking apparatus to the fryer. The fryer said "oops" or some variation thereof. He hadn't even started on it. So the Gorse Fox waited. At least he knows that the portions were hot and fresh.

Farewell Eleanor

We were up and about quite early. We had to go down to Cardiff. Today is the day when we say a final farewell to DIane’s young cousin who succumbed to the ravages of cancer last month.

We headed off just before nine and had a trouble-free run across country. We arrived at our hotel about noon, and that was after a comfort break at Membury. Urban-Cub, Cousteau-Cub, and Ellie had arrived before us and made their way to a local Frankie & Benny’s for lunch. We caught up with them there. Ellie had a ballon on a stick and the static from the balloon was making her hair stand on end. This seemed to give us all endless fun.

We returned to the hotel where we got ready for the service, then drove across to the Crematorium, poignantly passing the church in which the young Eleanor and Kevin got married four years ago. It was “family only” but despite that, the chapel was full. It was a very gentle service with some heartbreaking memories; a very fitting send off. Halfway through the proceeding young Ellie, who was being very good, could be heard to ask “Can I do dancing now?”; Eleanor would have liked that.

We gathered outside for a few minutes but were told that we should all make our way to the school where she had been Head of English. A family room had been set aside for us, and there was a Celebration of her life planned for and hour later. We reconvened at the school (which was very impressive). Some refreshments had been prepared so that we could have some tea or juice before the next service. The school hall started to fill up as we chatted. People who had been touched by Eleanor arrived from all over.  The large hall was packed.

At four, the second service kicked off. This included various readings, songs (she had been a very accomplished musician), photos, and reminiscences from her parents, her colleagues, and even some of the school children. She was clearly a very much loved, very devoted, and very inspiring person. When the service finished we moved through to the school canteen where dozens of tables had been laid out with sandwiches, cakes, wraps, sausage rolls, and various nibbles. Along the back wall was a run of tables providing tea, coffee, juice, wine, and various other drinks. The throng descended on the goodies, but despite several hours of grazing made very little impact on the food. As people started to disperse a plea went out for people to take the remaining food rather than see it wasted.

We returned to the hotel. Urban-Cub, Cousteau-Cub, and Ellie had left about an hour earlier and were clearly holed up for the night in their room. We knocked gently, but there was no answer. We retired to the bar where the few remaining members of the family had gathered. We had a quiet drink with them before they set off home to Brighton (yes, at 10 o'clock at night they were just setting off!). We returned to our room and settled down for a good nights sleep. We'll drive home tomorrow.

New Decade New Year

The New Decade snuck in at midnight. But for the worldwide firework displays, celebrations, and concerts you would hardly have noticed its arrival. We saw the arrival with the Sonning Crew but left for home just before one. Unfortunately, Jasper was not aware of the etiquette following a late night of celebrations. So it was that he hauled the Gorse Fox from bed soon after seven this morning.

It has been a gentle day. There was nothing scheduled but various domestic tasks to complete. For the Gorse Fox, the most important of these was to complete the preparation of the 2020 accounts spreadsheet and launch it. Over the next week, the 2019 spreadsheet will be closed off and archived as the final transaction trickle in. The new folder for 2020 photo in the digital library has been created and the first entries filed for the new year.