Apr 20 - quite an experience

I opted to go to Mass on the beach for Easter.  Our church has a sunrise service every year.  I'd planned to go last year as well but Jeffrey had both sets of car keys and was asleep ... but that's another story !

There must have been 500 people out there, many with folding chairs, a lot properly dressed for the 25-30 mph wind and cool, others wrapped in towels and/or huddled together.  I was in the properly dressed category but was thankful that I was standing downwind from others and got some protection. 

I was tempted to take a panoramic picture, others were taking pictures, but I didn't.  Perhaps next year.

A folding table was setup as the alter and the priest, our pastor, was using a microphone and small amplifier and speaker -- even so I could hardly hear anything since the wind took the sound away long before it got to me. Numbers continued to drop as the service went on due to the cold and wind but most were there through Communion.

Dolly spotted me and I went over and talked to her and Riley (they are the prior owners of our house).  I told Riley to come over sometime this week to take some banana plant ... they're going to try and grow some where they live.  I'm not sure if that will work in the heavy salt environment on the beach, but it's worth a try.

The rest of the day was mostly an inside day although the girls went into Daytona at one point and did some shopping.  Megan bought a dress.   David worked at his computer; I worked at mine.  I'm trying to solve that I/O error and managed to get a system snapshot through W7.  I don't know if it's a Linux or disk issue but I want to be able to take a backup that actually works.  Using Tar and then expanding the file onto the backup boot drive left a W7 environment that was unusable on that disk, so I'm working on other approaches BEFORE something goes wrong (good idea, eh ?).  Everything critical is backed up a hundred times over so I could always revert to XP if my primary drive failed, or go through the painful rebuild process, but I want an approach that's cleaner.

We had Sandy's lamb ribs for dinner; they were great.  I applaud the cook (me) ... ha.  It's all in the prep though; mine is the easy part.

Today ... biking with David, hopefully, although it will be windy.  Given enough time he should be able to do 100k.  Sandy has gym first thing.  I've got a "discussion appointment" with my hearing aid lady.  I really don't know how it's possible to get these things to be useful.

Onward !