In the morning picked up one of my grandchildren from the railway station in Modi’in (one of two such drives today, because in the evening I had to pick up son). I had a meeting with the accounts department people at the office, then spent the morning doing some cleaning and laundry (but then, forgot to hang the machine till about midnight, discovering it only on my room and lights out check.)

When D came home, she arrived with the negatives scanner I had ordered from China a couple of months ago. I was sure it was lost in the mail, and couldn’t do much about it because I had accidentally indicated that I’d received it. So that was a big surprise. With these orders from China, you never know whether it will arrive in a matter of weeks, or of months, or who will deliver it, or to where. The scanner is mainly for the archival work on old film at the office, but it can be useful for scanning personal film as well. I already tried it, and am quite happy with the results: the challenge is to keep dust away from the negatives, because the slightest speck of dust creates a white spot on the negative.

In the afternoon we visited our neighbours, where we said bye to R who is going back to the UK, where she and her husband are spending a year. In our neighbours’ yard, I found a good specimen of Lantana, a flower I’ve been wanting to photograph (above).

I was telling our neighbour about the interesting novel, “A Life of Holes”, which was narrated to Paul Bowles by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, a poor and illiterate Moroccan, if Bowles can be believed. I think B would like it.

Travel plans?

I talked with D today about the possibility of continuing the Chemin Le Puy in France, from the point that I had left off in 2021, in Moissac. If I want to do that, it’s either now or in September-October. But we might want to go somewhere else at that time, such as India. I discovered that there are cheap flights to Barcelona, from where it is possible to take a train or a bus.

So it’s a possibility. I’m not sure I actually want to get away just now, because I’m enjoying being at home, but it could be nice. D might join me for part of the way.

Search

My default #search engine is SearX. But what’s the story with DuckDuckGo and Firefox? It used to be there as one of the options. When it disappeared, I installed the DDG extension; however this didn’t actually do anything. It did not include DDG as a search option and (fortunately) did not succeed to make DDG the default engine. Next I tried to include DDG in what should be the standard way: using FF’s OpenSearch option, but it seems that DDG does not play nicely with OpenSearch either. Further, its API no longer works with SearX, so it is not possible to receive DDG’s results in SearX. I no longer trust DDG – I also just read about the deal they made (though last year rescinded) with Microsoft.