09:40 – Barbara is in Winston today, running errands, having lunch with a friend, and then making a small Costco run on her way back up here.
The final season of Downton Abbey is now available on Amazon streaming. I was surprised the other night when Barbara suggested that instead of just watching series 6, we go back and rewatch it from the beginning. I have no problem doing that, of course. Downton Abbey is decent television. Not as good as the original Upstairs, Downstairs, but good enough to watch again. We’re interleaving it with another series we’re rewatching, HBO’s Rome. That series is annoyingly ahistorical, but at least it’s watchable and has much better dresses than Downton Abbey. We also have a lot of decent stuff queued up on Netflix streaming, including the latest seasons of Hell on Wheels and Peaky Blinders. We won’t run short of stuff to watch in the evenings, although Barbara is usually doing crosswords and I’m usually browsing the web or reading an ebook at the same time.
Speaking of which, I just downgraded my Fire HD7 from Fire OS 5.x to 4.x. Fire OS 5.x is better in most respects, but I simply can’t tolerate the fact that they’ve moved the navigation bar in landscape mode from the right of the screen to the bottom. The Home icon is in the center, and I’m constantly pressing it accidentally, taking me out of whatever website I was looking at and returning me to the home screen. All I really use this thing for is checking my own web site and checking webmail, so the new features in Fire OS 5.x are pretty much a who cares for me.