Ireland day 0686. Tuesday 15 August 2023- Photos and Stroll *

Ireland day 0686. Tuesday 15 August 2023- Photos and Stroll

Today’s summary	Went to the gym in the morning then Val and I both sorted out some electronic photos related to the wedding a couple of weeks ago. Strolled round the demesne and Hanlon’s Lane in the evening
Today’s weather	Dry and bright with plenty of sun. Very light southerly wind. Appx 21C

Today’s overview location (The grey mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Demesne and Hanlons evening stroll

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

I’m feeling I’m not really getting full value from my €10 per week gym membership at the moment, so I planned to start remedying that by heading off there first thing this morning.

But Val had a work-related video call this morning too, and I said I’d set up the Teams app on my laptop for her to use (as it has a bigger screen). Of course, come 1 minute until the call was due to start, Teams stopped working and try as I might I couldn’t sort it out. Teams really is an extraordinarily user-unfriendly app. I almost always have problems with it and avoid it whenever I can.

Fortunately, Val had a back-up Teams account on her own (smaller) laptop and was able to login using that. So once she was up and running, I pottered off to the gym and thrashed away on the torture machines for a couple of hours, followed by a swim and a sauna.

Once I got back and we’d had a simple lunch, Val decided that she wanted to create her own photo album of the wedding a couple of weeks ago, using some photos stored on a shared Google Drive. Simple, I thought – I will download them on my computer, then Val can select which ones she wants, transfer them to her own PC, and make the album. Except of course that Google Drive wouldn’t let me download the photos in bulk, so I had to go through a tedious process of downloading them one by one. It took ages and I concluded that there is probably only one piece of software that is harder to use than Teams, and that is Google Drive. Quite why these tech megacorps don’t get some normal people to test these apps to find out if they work in real life before they launch them, is beyond me.

Eventually, though, everything got sorted out and Val managed to make a start on her album. By early evening, we both felt that we had spent long enough frustratingly looking at computers, so logged off for the day, and headed out into a very pleasant evening for a stroll round the demesne, with a twiddly bit of Hanlon’s Lane, which we accessed via Texas Lane (I’d love to know how it got its name) added on at the end. Now it’s time for toad-in-the hole for dinner, and so, after a nice tasty meal and a good walk, all’s well in the world.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


In the outer estuary, on the way back from the gym	Northbound commuter train approaching the station, taken from the Dublin Road bridge

Up on our walk round the demesne perimeter – looking a bit square-eyed after an afternoon on the computer	The inner lagoon this evening. The tide was pretty low

Evening roses in Hanlons Lane	Unusual yellowy-orange rowanberries at the top of Hanlon’s

The wild flower meadows are looking distinctly end-of-summery up in the castle demesne