Keeping busy, and more Kindle stuff

It’s been one of those busy days today; we seem to be alternating, partly because the weather is doing so. Tomorrow is forecast to be pretty bad, so we wanted to get as much done as possible today.

We had a walk downtown for routine shopping – it was quite entertaining to get caught up in some inter store rivalry. A new Waitrose has recently opened, so high quality shopping has arrived in Poynton (previously the best they could manage was an ex-Somerfield Morrison’s). The Waitrose is smallish, but very pleasant to use, albeit a bit pricier than the alternatives. Coincidentally, one of the local Co-ops was ram raided, and they’ve taken the opportunity to restructure and refurbish it.

It re-opened this week, and they had staff out offering goodies ranging from free drinks of orange juice to complimentary shopping bags, as well as money off vouchers. We still shopped in the Waitrose, but it’s good to know that the choices are there.

Apart from that, we’d left a washload running whilst we were away, and Sheila hung it out on the whirligig when it was done. We’ve also been getting to grips with the Kindles, of course, experimenting with the various ways of loading books onto them. They have a neat screensaver, mostly pictures of famous authors, with odd bits and bobs like old drawings of sea creatures and the like. There's no way of customising these, so it’s just as well we don’t mind them.

{There’s some stuff on Mobile Read about ways of getting at them, but we're talking terminal-prompt hacks of the firmware here, and I’m not going near that stuff.}

Today is the last day of our £15 for 1 month and 3Gbyte O2 data purchase, so we both ran Software Update and brought the Mac systems up to date. No big deal this time, but still about 500 Mbyte of download altogether, so worth doing before we’re back on the 1 Gb/month of the 3 contract.

I bought us a copy of Terry Pratchett’s latest, I Shall Wear Midnight, for the Kindle, (£5.35)and we’ve ordered a case each for them – the unadorned Kindle is just a touch slippy to hold, and it would be a disaster to drop one.

We’ll be welcoming back the hire boat tomorrow; Peter and Susan should be here to do that, but they’ve got stuck in Spain as a result of the general strike, and may not make it back until the weekend.