Scamp was off in the morning to meet Shona and June for coffee and a blether. I stayed at home.
Well, I’d things to do and the first one was trying to locate Katy. I’ve photographed her before a few years ago before she changed her name to Katy. It took a bit of searching to locate her, but I finally found her back in 2017, skating on a frozen pond. That was my intention for today too. I though I could get a few shots of her skating on a slightly smaller pond, a frozen bird bath to be precise, but first I had to find her. Like most of my ‘weemen’. Which for the sake of political correctness can be pronounced ’wee men’ or the Glaswegian ’weemen’ which translates as ’women’ in English. I was sure she lived on the window ledge in the bedroom, but she was nowhere to the seen there. Some weemen live in various stages of disassembly in a big cereal box and a smaller subset of ‘favourites’ can be found in a smaller Lock & Lock box, but Katy was not in any of those places. After Scamp had left, I finally tracked her down to a turned square wooden dish I’d made many, many moons ago, when I had skills.
After dusting her down and ensuring she still had her skates with her I set up a tripod in the back garden next to the ‘skating rink’ cum bird bath. I just couldn’t get the shot I wanted despite using two cameras and umpteen lenses. I finally settle for a hand-held A7m3 camera with 50mm macro lens and got a few shots with of her standing on the ice, looking like the star she is.
It was a cold day, but the temperature must have been just above zero, because by the end of the photo session, pools or water were appearing on the ice. Poor wee soul looked frozen out there on the ice. Back inside in the warm, she got a place on the bookcase while I checked the quality of the photos and they passed muster.
By then Scamp had returned from the coffee and blether group and it was lunch time. Yesterday’s rolls warmed up to hold some slices of bacon for me and an egg for Scamp.
The next task I had set myself was to try to mail-merge a spreadsheet of photo info using Microsoft 365 on the Mac. I had cancelled my subscription a few days ago, but had a few days grace left on it. I tried everything I could think of to get MS Word to work with MS Excel, but they kept finding errors. Eventually I borrowed Scamp’s HP PC and using the same apps and the same data set, at the first attempt got exactly what I wanted. Just to be awkward, I tried to do the same thing on my old slow Toshiba PC laptop and after a lot of huffing and puffing (from the laptop, this time!), it too came up with the goods. I went online to find a solution to the problem. I didn’t find it, but I did find a lot of people with exactly the same problem. All of them trying to get Word and Excel to work together on a Mac. In one case, 695 folk had the same problem as me and Microsoft were no help to them at all. And they wanted me to pay £80 a year for their faulty software? The sheets are printed out now, so if I need a “Where was it took in 2024”, I’ll know to use my old Windoze 7 Tosh laptop with MS Office 2017.
That was today’s two tasks completed so I de-stressed over Fish Fingers, Egg and Chips for dinner, followed by the last piece of Scamp’s Apple Pie.
Tomorrow we may need more shopping to cook for visitors on Friday.