9 October 2024 (Wednesday) - Bit Dull

Again I found myself wide awake far too early in the morning so I got up, made toast and watched more telly. You can't beat a bit of "Brideshead Revisited”.  I do like that show. What with this and my love for Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey I suspect I have nostalgia for an era that never actually happened.

As I watched telly so “er indoors ^TM” came downstairs and went to the loo. And as always when she gets up in the night she was accompanied by the entire pack of dogs. When I get up in the night they just roll over into the warm space that I've left.

 

With telly watched I set off tough another dark morning to work. As I drove the pundits on the radio were talking about how eBay is banning sales of e-bikes and their batteries. Apparently there are several brands on the market which are just as likely to explode as to do what you might expect of them, and so sensibly sales are being halted until assurances can be given that people won't be paying good money just to get an explosion.

And today Twitter returns to Brazil. Apparently Twitter (or "X" as it is now known) has been banned there for the last month since it turned out that the social media there was a hotbed of fake news and misinformation. It would seem the Brazilian authorities are allowing tweeting to return now that the lies have stopped.

Heaven forbid social media should be held accountable for the nonsense it spews, eh?

 

I got to work, and had a surprisingly busy morning and a dull afternoon. But starting early meant that I finished early. Leaving me with a pizza, “er indoors ^TM” went off out with her mates. I watched more "Brideshead Revisited” from underneath a pile of dogs.

I’ve done two days at work and I’m worn out. With no alarm set for tomorrow I wonder if I’ll get a better night’s sleep tonight?

8 October 2024 (Tuesday) - Back to Work

I had another restless night. I gave up trying to sleep, got up and watched more "Brideshead Revisited". Yesterday I mentioned that the actor who had been Marvin in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had played cousin Jasper. This morning I was reminded that the actor who'd played Lord Brideshead had also been in The Guide - he'd played Arthur Dent. I watched every actor like a hawk in the hope of spotting more crossovers.

 

As “er indoors ^TM” and the dogs staged a rather impressive snoring contest I got ready for work and set off through a rather dark morning. It was over three weeks since I'd last shown my face there, and in the meantime the mornings have got noticeably darker. As I drove the pundits on the radio were spouting what they spout. Wars still raged, politicians still pontificated... all paled into insignificance given the revelation that some poor chap had had a tug with such ferocity that he'd ripped his aorta open.

It strikes me that you'd have to have quite a serious joddrell to give yourself an aortic dissection.  I suppose that, if nothing else, here's another reason for having a cold shower.

 

Being rather unimpressed with the sweetie selection we'd had in Uzbekistan I thought I'd take some sweeties into work from Sainsbury's. So I went to the Aylesford branch where yet again there wasn't a single manned checkout. Instead members of staff stood glaring at the people struggling with the self-service tills, and occasionally making pointed comments. One of my fellow shoppers was challenged by the supermarket staff; they wanted to check the contents of his shopping bag against his receipt. He told them to get knotted; if they didn't trust him then they shouldn't have forced him to use a self-service checkout.

I thought about applauding.

 

I got to work. Apparently yesterday we'd had a visitor. One of my trainees from twenty years ago had come for an interview for a senior position. Fortunately he didn't get it.

I spent much of the day thinking about the chap. I can always remember him going from argument to argument. His grandfather died and left him a legacy which at the time he was squandering by moving house at least once every year seemingly constantly falling out with neighbours. There was one episode where he had a fist fight with a neighbour over who was allowed to park where on the local streets.

I can remember being his manager and having my manager wanting to know what the problem at work was; this chap had approached my manager in tears because everyone hated him and everyone was picking on him. Neither I nor any of my staff knew anything about what the issue was, nor did we ever find out. When he left he organised his own leaving party to which he made a point of inviting secretaries and people from adjoining departments, but none of the people with whom he actually worked.

He came off Facebook years ago - I'd often wondered what happened to him. Apparently he's spent the last few years moving across the country... still going from squabble to squabble.

 

When I got home I spent a few minutes looking at my LinkedIn account.  I don’t know why really. Of all the various social media, LinkedIn is far and away the most lame. Social media is supposed to be fun… LinkedIn is for people who really don’t have anything in their lives but work. Sadly there’s a lot of people like that.

It speaks volumes that I’ve formally verified my LinkedIn account for free, but Facebook wants a tenner a month…

7 October 2024 (Monday) - On the Mend (?)

I slept well, which was a result. I made toast and had a look at the Internet. Facebook wondered if I might like to subscribe to the “Thunderbirds” page. From what I could see, clicking the “subscribe” button wouldn’t get me anything that clicking the “like” button would achieve other than that I’d have to pay money.

I decided against it.

There wasn’t much else happening on social media so I had a look at my emails. Several new geocaches had gone live near work; all needing a canoe to get at them. And I had a load of “DNF” logs on my geocaches. “DNF” means “did not find” and obviously this is what you log if you can’t find a specific film pot under a log. However more and more people are using this sort of log because they couldn’t solve the puzzle, or because they ran out of time, or because their mum had phoned and said their tea was ready.  Sadly “DNF” logs trigger the geo-feds who then disable my caches for my attention (and sometimes even archive them) when there’s not actually anything wrong with the caches.

And I had one or two (quite a few) whinging emails about soggy log sheets and full log sheets on some of my caches as well.

 

I popped down the road to the dentist as I had an appointment with the hygienist today. As I sat and waited so half a dozen people all swarmed in together. Mum, dad and several assorted teenagers. They went to the counter, signed in, and sat down. The receptionist then called and asked them who was next. This request was greeted with blank stares. The receptionist asked again. Again blank stares. The receptionist then told it like it was. Six had walked in; only one had registered for their appointment. It turned out that only one had an appointment, but the entire tribe had to come along. Even though the one that was having the appointment was nineteen years old. It transpired that in their world no one ever did anything on their own.

I got called in. The hygienist rummaged round inside my gob. There was a lot of hosing and vibrating. I have no idea whether my cake hole was good or bad. I’m presuming good as the only thing she said to me was to make another appointment for next March.

 

I came home, collected the dogs and took them to the woods. As we walked down the field from the car park so there was a woman standing by a hedge. With make-up trowelled on, she was clearly dressed more for the catwalk than the woods. Morgan and Bailey ran past her into the hedge and started barking. Another immaculately dressed woman came running out of the hedge… well, to be precise she came waddling out of the hedge in some disarray, but was immaculately dressed once she’d pulled up the skin-tight designer jeans. It has to be said that the undercrackers she was sporting were far more suited to nudey-sauce-romps than they were to a walk round the woods. But I suppose that when you consider that the only other pair of undercrackers we’ve ever seen in the woods had been shitted, everything is relative. The two glamour-pusses then minced off in the direction of the car park. We went the other way.

We walked perhaps further than we might have done today. Having had emails whinging about my geocaches having full logs and wet logs I checked up on a few only to find that the supposedly wet logs weren’t wet, and the supposedly full logs weren’t full. And to add insult to injury, the supposedly missing ones were exactly where they were supposed to be.

 

We came home. My plan had been to crack on in the garden. But whilst we’d been walking round the woods with blue skies and glorious sunshine, “er indoors ^TM” told me that we’d had torrential rain at home. Massively different weather in places only five miles apart.

Determined to do something in the garden I cleaned out the pond filter. Back in the days of the gravity-fed green box, cleaning the pond filter was a messy smelly back-breaking job that took over an hour. These days with the pressure filter it is all done in less than quarter of an hour.

 

The drizzle then started, so like I do far too often I settled in front of the telly and watched episodes of “Four in a Bed” in which the people running a B&B for tradesmen in the Midlands paid what they considered to be their going rate to upmarket hotels in prime tourist areas. And in doing so brought out the worst in an already rather vindictive harridan.

I do like that show when they all get nasty with each other.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up dinner then went bowling. Finding myself home alone with a working DVD player I put on the first episode of the box set of “Brideshead Revisited”, and having seen this so many times over the last forty years, tonight for the first time I realized that the chap who played the part of cousin Jasper was the same chap who played Marvin the Paranoid Android in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

A day when you learn nothing is a day wasted…

 

I think I might finally be on the mend… I hope so. I’m off to work tomorrow.

6 October 2024 (Sunday) - Basil (?)

I had a good nine hours asleep last night. That was something of a result. I set the washing machine going, made toast and had my usual look at the Internet. It was much the same as ever. Today’s petty squabble was about the efficiency of home-made pond filters. On the one side were people with rather good home-made pond filters who were being rather smug. On the other were people who’d (like me) spent a lot of money buying far less efficient filters, and were rather jealous. I left them to it – it has to be said that you can’t beat a garden pond if you want something to argue about.

There was an interesting post on the Facebook page of an author I follow. I follow her as I like what she writes, but she does have rather strong opinions which alienate quite a lot of her potential readership. She’s been rather vocal in her postings about American politics recently, and it would seem that those with whom she has disagreed have taken to writing their messages on golf balls which are being flung into her garden together with broken glass.

 

I had a little Munz from the sofa. And got Wordle on the third attempt. I was rather pleased about that.

I hung out the washing, pruned the pond plants, and “er indoors ^TM” and I took the dogs out.

We drove down to the Romney Marsh to find the finals of the puzzle geocaches I’d been struggling with in the week, and we also picked up one or two other caches that were on our way. One of them looked to be rather old skool. The designated parking spot was half a mile from the actual cache location, and the cache itself hadn’t been found for over a year.

If nothing else it would be a good walk for the dogs.

We walked out and searched high and low. Eventually “er indoors ^TM” found it in the very first place that I had looked.

 

We came home. I had hoped to crack on in the garden, but the drizzle which was mentioned in yesterday’s weather forecast had started. Interestingly there was no mention of drizzle in today’s weather forecast before it actually started…

As the afternoon wore on so the drizzle got heavier.

 

I got the washing in and hung it on the clothes horse. “er indoors ^TM” boiled up bacon sarnies and then we had another look at the DVD player. Yesterday the thing had totally failed to work. But in the meantime we’d got a new HDMI cable from Amazon so we plugged it all in and the thing worked fine. To test it we’d stuck in the first DVD that came to hand, and seeing it worked we’d left it playing. I can remember “An Audience with Victoria Wood” being hilarious when it first came out. But that was in 1988, and it hasn’t really stood the test of time. Some of it was still funny, but much of it referred to a time which has long since passed.

This then gave way to a Lee Mack DVD. And a Jason Manford DVD.

I wonder if this is the way forward – now we’ve plumbed in the DVD player will we be watching endless DVDs? Dare I suggest that with hundreds of DVDs in the house (probably not quite a thousand) I doubt if I could watch all of them before I croak. And so consequently downgrading our Sky package might be a good idea?

 

As we DVD-ed I wrote up a little CPD. While I quite like the arrangement of working part-time, having to still carry on doing continuing professional development is something of a pain in the glass (to coin a phrase).

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up gammon with basil. Have you ever scoffed anything with basil? At the risk of appearing ungrateful I can’t say I’m keen to do so again.

5 October 2024 (Saturday) - More Sick Leave

I had a whole lot less coughing last night. It was a shame that Treacle had to have a snarling fit in the small hours because the little ones wanted to be on the bed as well as her. Treacle is odd; when we are out and about and meet other dogs she is invariably terrified and hides and clearly looks to Morgan and Bailey to protect her (not that there’s ever any protecting to be done). But when at home she can be quite mean to the littluns.

I wish she wouldn’t.

I made toast and had a look at the Internet. This morning I was presented with adverts for Crumb pet tags. These are being marketed quite forcefully at the moment. The idea is that you attach the tag to the dog’s collar. If the dog goes walkabout, anyone finding them scans the bar code on the collar with an app on their phone and the dog owner’s contact details pop up. Whilst the tags are free, there’s a monthly subscription. And the whole thing hinges on whoever finds the missing dogs having the proper app on their phone, and having internet connectivity where they are. Which I rarely have when in the woods. I don’t see any advantage of this over having my mobile phone number on the dogs’ tags, which is what I’ve already go in place.

Having said that, I can imagine that many people would spend out on a monthly subscription on this purely because they can.

 

Being Saturday we went to Dog Club. Part of me felt a tad guilty about going having phoned in sick to work, but as “er indoors ^TM” said to one of our friends, there’s a world of difference between standing in a paddock for half an hour whilst feeling grim, and being expected to crack on with a full day’s work whilst feeling grim. Sadly again Morgan was a bit of an idiot. He gets on fine with most of the other dogs, but there are two there which he doesn’t like. He spent the session on his lead.

 

Dog club went rather well. We came home and I nipped to the corner shop for an almond croissant and a pecan plat which we had with a cuppa. As I sat down to the cuppa I realized I was sweating and breathless. I was right to have pulled another sickie.

I sat on the sofa and as I scoffed coffee and croissant I carried on with the geo-puzzles that I started looking at yesterday. Given some photos taken on the Romney Marsh all I had to do was to take a virtual drive round the area until I found the places where the photos were taken. Simple enough?

I started virtually driving round… and woke up two hours later.

 

Bearing in mind what an idiot Morgan had been at Dog Club and also bearing in mind the utter failure of the muzzle we’d tried on him in the past we went on a little shopping mission to get him a firmer muzzle. We got one from Bybrook Barn which seems to fit him quite well.

As we drove I was amazed at how busy the local roads were. I suppose you’d expect Saturday afternoon to be a peak time… I rarely drive about then.

We came home and Morgan had a trial run on his muzzle. He went to sleep wearing it, so that’s got to be a good sign. I must admit I’m not at all happy about him needing a muzzle, but if he will be an idiot and nip at other dogs then he has no choice. To be fair to him there’s only a couple of dogs that rile him, and watching the other dogs playing this morning at Dog Club he’s not *that* much worse than the others. There’s a lot of rough-and-tumble going on, but Morgan just goes that little bit too far with certain other dogs.

 

As idiot-chops dozed in his muzzle I set about the dishwasher. Things haven’t been coming out of the dishie quite as clean as they might have done lately. So I took the washer arm things as apart as they would go and blasted them through with water from the shower hose. Water seemed to be flowing a bit better than it had been… So as a trial run I stuck in a load of all the stuff it had failed on overnight.

Whist the dishie cracked on we plumbed in the new DVD player. I say “new”; the thing has been sitting on the table in its box for several months. We plugged it all in, sparked it all up, and after a *lot* of farting about the thing went back in the box. Once plugged in it displayed all the menus it should, but it simply wouldn’t play any DVDs. Clearly it was talking to the telly because we can see the menus, but when we pressed “play”, everything stopped happening. I have a vague recollection that the HDMI cable we have gave us grief in the past so we’ve got a new one on order.

By the time we’d finished farting about the dishie had done its thing. It was better than it had been, but still not perfect. I shall try topping up the salt and the rinse-aid before lugging it to the tip.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a very good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching more “Bake Off: The Professionals”.

 

I think I was right to have taken today off… I might just be beginning to feel if not better, certainly on the mend.

4 October 2024 (Friday) - Wedding Anniversary

When I’m on the early shift at Pembury (like I was supposed to be today) I like to set off about six o’clock so as to give myself time to get through the sets of temporary traffic lights that plague that journey. Having already phoned in sick I eventually woke up this morning about an hour after I would have started working.

I did another COVID test; I’ve got an appointment with the dental hygienist on Monday. They say that if I’m feeling OK and testing negative then I can go ahead with the appointment. I’m testing negative, and I think I’m on the mend. I’ve still got a little way to go, but I’m certainly better than I was.

 

I made toast and had a look at the Internet just in case I’d missed anything. There was a bit of a squabble about electric cars taking place on one of the Facebook pages I follow. It would seem the price of them is coming down, and having bought one, very few people them go back to a petrol or diesel car. I must admit I’d love an electric car. But… The things have a range of about two hundred miles (about!). Which is about (!) three trips to work. Bearing in mind that in the works car park there are spaces for two thousand cars and chargers for two cars. And also bearing in mind that I rarely get to park outside the house, an electric car remains impractical.

 

Despite feeling rather iffy I still took the dogs to the woods. They get fractious if not given a walk. We went to Longbeech where again a huge foreign camper van was taking up most of the car park. I’ve been told that this car park features on an on-line list of places where you can park a camper van for free, and that’s why there’s so often huge camper vans taking the piss.

Apart from Bailey rolling in fox poo the walk passed off rather well. For all that I was a gasping sweating mess when we got to the end of the walk, I was nowhere near as bad as I had been yesterday.

 

We came home, washed off the fox poo, hung out the washing, and I cracked on with geo-puzzling. After some herculean brain straining I eventually got the thumbs-up from the geo-checker on the puzzle with which I’ve been fighting for the last three days. If I’m feeling better that might make for a little mission over the weekend. Or it might not.

I then started on some more geo-puzzles in the Romney Marsh area. These ones are dead simple… in theory. The puzzle gives you a photo of a location on the Romney Marsh. All you have to do is find where that location is. Then once you’ve found where it is the puzzle tells you how far from that spot the actual geocache is, and in what direction. You can use a website (geocaching toolbox) to work out the final location given the photographed location, distance and direction. All you have to do is work out where the photograph was taken. And that’s easy enough. Google Street View will show you that.

There’s eight puzzles of this sort. I took screen shots of all eight final locations, and after an hour driving my lap-top round the Romney Marsh using Google Street View I hadn’t found any.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a rather good bit of dinner this evening which we washed down with a bottle of plonk as we watched more “Bake Off: The Professionals”. Sometimes I wonder if I’d paid more attention to “Boss” from my days at the Harbour Restaurant might I have ended up as a professional chef?

 

And in closing, today is my thirty-eighth wedding anniversary.

3 October 2024 (Thursday) - And Still Feeling Grim

 

I slept rather well. I made toast and peered into the Internet, As I did I suddenly had a coughing fit, my temperature went through the roof and I came over incredibly sweaty. The first time I had COVID I can remember thinking the thing was something of a disappointment; I only knew I was ill as at the time work insisted we did tests twice a week. Such a shame I couldn’t have had that variety of COVID this time.

 

Facebook was rather quiet this morning. I had a munz from the comfort of the sofa. Today marked the start of this month’s Clan War. And then I got Worldle. Eventually.

Bearing in mind I wasn’t well I should have stayed home. But it was a bright sunny morning so I took the dogs out. Bearing in mind I was supposed to be back at work tomorrow I should have been up for a dog walk? Shouldn’t I?

We drove to Longbeech Woods for a change. We walked a rather short walk and at the end I was cold, clammy, breathless and dripping sweat. I phoned work and the boss agreed I should take tomorrow and Saturday off sick. Whilst this is obviously the sensible thing to do, part of me isn’t happy about this. Admittedly it isn’t that long since I had two weeks off sick following my nasal re-bore. But apart from that I can’t remember the last time I took sick leave. But it is because I don’t remember things like this that I write this diary. I had a week off sick last November when I had COVID last time, and then a week in April 2022 when I had a week off with COVID for the first time. And a week in January 2022 when I had my nose done last time.

I don’t think that’s a bad sick record really. I can remember back in the day when I was a manager having to have words with quite a few people who had taken at least one day off sick every week for more than a year.

But I still feel bad about it.

 

“er indoors ^TM” said goodbye and went off to see “Daddies’ Little Angel ^TM”. They were doing birthday things for grandson. I would have loved to have gone along, but it wouldn’t be fair for me to be breathing disease over everyone so I stayed home.

I had another look at the geo-puzzle with which I was fighting yesterday. And after ten minutes gave up. Instead I slobbed on the sofa with the dogs and watched a film on You-Tube. Just recently all the Star Trek related Facebook pages have been raving about the release of “Farragut Forward”; the latest fan-made Star Trek thing on You-Tube. Like all fan-made Star Trek things it was something of a disappointment. Filled with endless references to all the Star Trek series and films it didn’t actually feature anything new or original.

 

After this was the seemingly obligatory episodes of “Four in a Bed” in which everyone tries to justify that whatever it is with which they are finding fault is a serious misdemeanor when done by someone else, but actually perfectly acceptable when they do it themselves.

As I watched so my new digital thermometer arrived. The thing claims my temperature is fine. It probably is, and if it is (which it probably is) can only be a step in the right direction.

 

I made some toast for tea, and as I scoffed it I watched a film on Netflix. “Uglies” was rather good. In some ways it featured ideas which were already old fifty years ago when they formed the premise of “Logan’s Run”, but with a twist.

Apparently it was based on a book… wonder if I can get that on the Kindle?