Birthday weekend

I had a very pleasant weekend.  On Saturday B and I went to see an exhibition of paintings by Sally Moore.  B used to teach her brother the guitar many years ago and got very friendly with the family.  He has a painting by Sally's father Leslie which was given to him by the artist, and stayed in touch with Sally's mother until she died recently.  Simon is still playing the guitar too, so the teaching seems to have stuck.  It was a really interesting exhibition and you can see some of the pictures on the gallery website.  They are self portraits, some reworkings on her favourite classical paintings, but although hyper realistic they are also surreal. I really like them.  Out of our price range though.

We had lunch out, and later on dined in very  pleasantly. 

Sunday we had a visit from an ex student from AC who we have kept in touch with.  Beverly was back for her 20 year reunion (!).  She has some exciting news because is changing career completely and going to go back to college to train as a vicar - in Cambridge as it happens.  We will have to make sure to see more of them while they are there over the next two years, because they could go anywhere after that.

I am having less luck with creating dvds.  The bug I put into my computer when I downloaded something intended to clean it up has  mostly gone because I have reloaded the operating system and lots of the software, but the one that is still behaving very oddly is the one I am trying to use at the moment, which is the dvd burning software.   It is really annoying.  I shall continue to struggle with it this week, and if I can't sort it out I shall have to make an appointment with the Genius bar at the Apple shop and go and see one of the nice geeky young people to find out how to fix it. 

Our ebooks website for the libraries is now live, though not advertised yet.  We have training scheduled for the staff this week and next week, though as it is something people will do at home the library staff don't actually have to do anything, but they will get asked questions so need to know the answers.  Not least of those questions is - what can I download onto?  We knew from the start that Kindles don't work, but there are actually quite a few other things that don't because they can't read the Digital Rights Management software eg Blackberries and Nokia devices.  Lots of emails flying back and forward as we try to sort this out. 

We are also hoping to demonstrate this and two other online sites the library pays for at the Vale of Glamorgan Show next Wednesday, though getting dongles to run laptops is proving rather more complicated than I had forseen.  We have fingers and toes crossed at the moment.  Work is being busy.