2015 — 26 March: Thursday — "farewell" Mother
An unlovely, unsunny rather wet morning so far. It seems appropriate weather for the day of mother's funeral, frankly. On that front, let's keep in mind that she was 98, in a ghastly physical and mental state. Furthermore, since her only clearly-expressed wish of recent years has been for it to happen, I regard her death with a relief almost as great as that I felt1 when Christa died.
Today therefore seems...
... perfect for just taking things as they come, one step at a time, and trying to remain reasonably calm and quiet. With lots of nice music. (Much like many of my days!) My 'relationship' with mother for the last five decades or so (and, in particular, how it differed from my brother's relationship with her) might well make for a fascinating case study of pathological psychology, but it's a case I will not be writing up.
I shall simply continue doing what I can to wind up her estate (most of which, at the moment, now simply involves waiting while other people take their own sweet time about doing things). But I'm looking forward2 to my two upcoming lunch dates — the first being a couple of hours after today's ceremony. I also note — without envy, or even great interest — a much larger ceremony taking place further North today. The re-burying (or some such; I wasn't really listening) doubtless with all sorts of misguided slo-mo solemn pomp and music (and blokes wearing funny hats) of what are confidently felt to be the remains of a former king. How quaint.
Only in England, I suspect.
I've just discovered...
... Xfce's first missing facility. I wanted to grab a quick screen shot of this outrageous news item...
... and couldn't find any readily accessible tool. I expected to end up back in a MATE session to sort out something. But I found and installed KSnapshot, eventually realised that it popped its result into the (system?) clipboard, fired up the GIMP, selected "Create from Clipboard" and was thus off to the Races. No need to leave Xfce, but it was a close-run thing. I shall be seeking a neater solution.
[Long Pause]
Now then, where was I? Oh yes. Screen capture tools. Turns out Xfce does have one, provided you have the patience to winkle it out of the depths of the Linux Mint Software Manager. Or just open a Terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install xfce4-screenshooter
It helps if you know what the damn' thing's called, of course. And if you've had to invoke the Software Manager to find it, you might as well install it directly while you're there. Any road up, as they say in the mucky Midlands, I've just installed it and (after a mild spat with a non-intuitive GUI) even managed to add its launcher icon to the panel at the foot of my screen so it's always, erm, underfoot. Result.
Oops
I suspect one of our would-be future kings will be spitting blood this morning, with the Supreme Court deciding that our Attorney General was wrong to block publication of a number of his "black spider" memos in 2012. I do love the "sunshine" test. I have no great affection for our over-privileged social elite. Respect can be earned, but I'm very dubious about its heritability. I have my doubts, too, about the political neutrality of some of those who are constitutionally supposed to stay above the fray. (Link.)
Not that we're burdened with a written Constitution, of course.
Just had to jump...
... through a bit of a hoop to persuade the File Manager on Xfce (yclept "Thunar" for some reason) to display thumbnails instead of icons. One method is to install the "tumbler" package, its extras, and its plug-ins. This adds "thumbnailing" capability. Then, to get Thunar to generate thumbnails, I guess you can either restart or just open a Terminal and type:
thunar -q
You can't say that Linux lacks the ability to keep you on your toes!
For my next trick...
... which will have to wait, now, until after lunch, I shall try to persuade the system to let me open an entire folder of music files directly into my preferred 'decibel' music player. At the moment, Xfce seems to want to make me select each file first. I'm not having that. This is Linux, dagnabbit!
Or maybe not?
I scanned through the list of packages installed by Xfce on Len's system when he constructed it from scratch. I compared this list with the (shorter) list of packages installed on my system yesterday by simply adding Xfce desktop "capability" on to my latest MATE system. Counted up the 17 missing packages, each of which may well (for all I know) get cleverly auto-configured to play nice with its fellows. Pondered, briefly, the pros and cons of yet another complete Linux installation (given what I've seen of all three desktops). And lazily decided3 my mate Marmite MATE is good enough for me4 to be going on with.
Funerals do tend to remind you that there are more things in Life than PC operating systems. I've sent an email to the Antipodean contingent of my miniscule family as it would have been an awfully long way to come for an awfully little ceremony. Now it's already time for my evening snack. How does that keep happening? [Pause] I figured, after eight years and one day, I could easily stand to hear Paolo Conte again. Even if I can't understand a word. I was right.
Round and round...
... it goes. Where it stops, no-one knows. Consider this blast from my (no longer quite so recent) past:
Mr ERNIE has also written to me, returning Christa's death certificate and Grant of Probate "on the assumption that you might need to present (these) to other organisations." Actually, Mr ERNIE's organisation is the last of the batch, and almost the only one that needed to see the Grant.
So I was still winding up Christa's estate nearly five months after she'd died... I don't yet know how long it's going to take to sort out mother's, of course.