Saturday 10 July

~  In memory of my sister, her family and friends in New Zealand have set up a prize for 'wearable art' as part of a festival in their local town, which has just been awarded for the first time. My brother-in-law, H, forwards a letter from the prizewinner, who he didn't know before.  She tells how she too is grieving, for a husband still living but permanently hospitalized with early Alzheimer's disease, how touched she was by the sight and courage of H and his son together at the prize-giving, how thrilled she was by the prize money and how useful it will be as things have also been financially hard for her since her husband's diagnosis.  Once again I am struck by how people go on making and doing beautiful things even in sadness and difficult times.

~  We say we'll just make a start on the Radio Times crossword after lunch, and we get it finished, as we always have to once we've started.  Tom as the scribe does all the hard work while I just shout the answers.  We complain as usual about the badly done clues: anagrams of words not included only indicated, key-words like 'out' not properly used.  I get an alternate letter one which are usually my weak spot (I'm better at 'sounds like' ones), and we find we know more about the TV-based clues than we think we will, as usual.

~  Made a slideshow video at last of our walk at the Chaos de Gouette on Monday with Gillian and Barley, aka Rosie and Porridge, the bouleversantes, brilliant and beautiful Bitches about Brittany.  With music, which I don't know will be everyone's cup of tea. 

 I've given up with Vimeo as all they do is put me in an endless queue to convert, or fail to do so telling me only that my compression rates are wrong, without telling me what that means or what I can do about it, even though they've successfully converted a video made in just the same way before, and anyway, I don't think I should have to have a degree in geekiness to upload something made using standard up-to-date Windows software to their site.  So I'm afraid it's back to Youtube, which is a shame, as I made it HD enough to view full-screen but with Youtube that goes all wibbly-wobbly.  Rant over.  Ranting is not a beautiful thing, but Gillian, Barley, Molly and the Chaos all are, so please find the time to give it a look! 

PS Just going over to check the link, I find Gillian/Rosie has posted her lovely pictures of the same outing, which are better yet and quicker to look at, so hurry on over to her place and see! (And she's spelled 'Gouët' right too.)