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Showing posts with label augury. Show all posts
Showing posts with label augury. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 02, 2019

Woe! Woe! And thrice woe!


Resultado de imagen de reading the entrails

We didn’t have a turkey so there was no possibility of inspecting the entrails to use an augury for the new year, so I looked around for something more metaphorical and discovered that my smartwatch had run out of power.  So New Years Eve on the lead up to the strokes of midnight and the eating of the twelve grapes of luck were accompanied by a woefully blank watch face attached to my wrist as I had omitted to bring the charger with me to Terrassa.


Resultado de imagen de amazfit stratos

As with all electronic equipment with a visual display, there is nothing quite so dead as a blank screen.  So as everyone else checked their watches with the time displayed on the television, I merely saw the gleam of darkness on the black glass covered screen with occasional bright spots from the ambient light reflected from the useless decoration on my wrist.

My Pebble (O happy memory!) is now long gone, replaced by the Amazfit, but not quite compensating for the loss.  Pebble used to send cheerful and positive messages like, “Your Pebble is powered until this evening!” encouraging you to recharge – and a single Pebble recharge would last well over a week for me.  Then the firm sold themselves and their product and the Pebble ceased to be and for me, all the replacements have been pale reflections of the excellence of the product now gone.


Resultado de imagen de rebecca riots

Anyway, there might have been some sort of message, but it is easy to overlook that in the hectic build up to and recovery from Christmas.  What was indubitable was the blank face of timelessness that I stubbornly kept on my wrist in spite of the fact that it didn’t even look mildly attractive as a bracelet!  I found it interesting that I preferred to have the dead thing on my wrist rather than nothing.  Even though my phone tells the time, I need a watch, I feel strangely bereft and naked without one – but then I am also the person who has continued to buy CDs to play in the car even though it shows up my Luddite tendencies as far as real gadget freaks are concerned.  It is the technological equivalent of using a hand loom – the next thing I will do is dress up as a woman and start burning down toll gates!

When I did think about my powerless watch, and I did that often during the evening in the compulsive way that people have in looking at their watches in spite of not needing to know the time, I thought it was anything but a positive omen to go into the new year with my tekke credentials in tatters.


Resultado de imagen de echo spot

By way of compensation, we have started to Alexa-ify our home, starting with an Echo Spot and a selection of smart plugs.  It is now possible to turn on the television, lights (domestic and tree) and kettle with words of command.

Or at least it would be if the words of command were in English.  In a further effort to make me use what little Spanish I have, Toni has set up Alexa to respond in Spanish.  And it/she does to him, but it/she takes grave exception to my pronunciation of the language and goes into length diatribes about how she has not been programmed to respond to my outlandish version of the language that she finds perfectly easy to understand when voiced by Toni.  If nothing else it will force me to improve my pronunciation of certain key words in Spanish, or I will be forced (o misery!) to switch things on by hand!  To demonstrate that I am getting better, I have just switched the television on and off and opened a classical music radio station from where I am sitting and typing – and adjusted the volume!

When I explained to a friend in the UK on the telephone that we had just installed the first gadgets of Alexa he was astonished that I had done it earlier.  And he has a point.  As an ‘early adopter’ of any flashy gadget-type innovations it is certainly something that should have been up and running long before 2019!

Which brings me back to my dead watch.  Apart from the fact that I obviously misread the tiny power indicator on the watch face before I left and, as we were only staying overnight, I assumed that there was enough power to see me through and therefore I was fully justified in not taking the small unique charger, what did that black empty face indicate?

Perhaps I read too much into trivial, unrelated items and give them a significance that I know (really) they do not deserve.  But the dysfunctionality is suggestive of so many aspects of what is likely to occur in 2019 both domestically and also internationally that it is tempting to see the blank face of stopped time as Fate trying her best to blank out what is in the future!

For my watch, it only took a return home and the placement (with a firm click) into its charger for power to be returned.  Though, as a further illustration of how metaphor can extend into the real problems of the future, the watch did not start working without a ‘re-start’ a force loading of the app to get it going again.  After what has happened in 2018, many aspects of life that we took for granted will be forced into a ‘re-start’ in 2019.  And those ‘re-starts’ are not going to be quite as easy as the two side buttons press that was all it took to get my watch operational.


Resultado de imagen de optimism

Still, I remain absurdly optimistic, even though blatantly, outwardly pessimistic, and look forward to the year ahead.   

If nothing else, it should see a couple of my books published, and seeing those through the press (what a quaintly outmoded expression for what actually goes on) and that will keep me occupied, and more importantly, give me something else to concentrate on when the idiocies of the world around me become too much to bear!