#LivingInLockdown
Day 16 – Tuesday 31st March
I should currently be on holiday in Rome. Had life carried on as normal without this virus I would be visiting the Vatican Museums and St Peters Tomb today. Instead I’m sat at home watching it snow outside. Fortunately most of the tourist attractions in Rome have uploaded free virtual tours on YouTube, so my new activity of the day was to watch the tour of The Colosseum. I’ll work my way through the rest over the next couple of weeks.
It turns out to be a good thing that my holiday was delayed and these virtual tours provided, because I now know exactly what to look out for when I do visit. I hate guided tours! Being stuck in a crowd listening to someone drone on is my idea of hell. I much prefer to wander these places by myself at my own pace and soak in the atmosphere. With the Rome sites I was in two minds about whether I should grit my teeth and do a guided tour, because otherwise I would miss much of the history and I do like knowing the history. Decision now made. There is no need for me to do a guided tour as these virtual tours give me all the info I need. They also let me know exactly how long it takes to walk round the sites at a reasonable pace. Perfect!
My second new activity was to watch the Cirque du Soleil online compilation of their shows. I love Cirque du Soleil! It’s incredible what the human body is capable of doing. Well, some people’s bodies, not mine of course. One of the shows was a trampoline act. They were jumping so high and then being caught by someone on a trapeze. It’s a miracle their arms weren’t pulled out the sockets. I recently went trampolining with my Great Nephews and Nieces and managed to pull my back muscles just trying to jump higher, and let me tell you my height was pathetic in comparison to the kids never mind the professionals at Cirque du Soleil.The show is available on YouTube and if you’ve never been to Cirque du Soleil or are a fan of the genre then it’s well worth checking out. It’s not the same as seeing them live, but given their shows are incredibly expensive an online freebie is not to be sniffed at.
On the quest to clear up my To Do list I started to organise my digital photos. Now I’m sure you all have a similar problem. You take hundreds of photos with your phone and upload them to your hard drive or cloud account, and at some point you need to sort them into folders or albums before they become this huge amorphous mess of photos with no clue when or where they were taken. In an ideal world we would all sort our photos immediately, label each one and put them into pretty albums with comments. I know people who do this, it’s highly irritating that they should be so organised. In my case I try to do it every 3 to 6 months and it is an enormous task. Turns out the last time I sorted my photos was July last year…… gulp, this could take some time!
I managed to do all the photos from 2020 and felt pretty damn pleased with myself. It was really nice going through so many memories especially the photos from my hikes and seeing the mountains and the countryside. I need to work out how to have these photos rotating on my TV screen saver so I can have my nature fix. It would be good to have three albums one for nature, one for holidays and one for family gatherings. I can switch between them according to mood. This has now been added to my to do list, but first I must finish sorting the photos from 2019. There are 1582 of them, which is a little daunting. Given the high number it will also be difficult to decide which photos to put on the screensaver because using them all might be a little excessive. Decisions, decisions!