29 July 2018 (Sunday) - Raining


There was so much I could have done last night; I had several offers, but I turned them all down. I was feeling rather rough so I stayed in and did the ironing.
I woke feeling marginally better that when I went to sleep last night, but still spent much of the day feeling iffy.
I got up and saw it was raining. Rain had been forecast, and we’d cancelled our plans because of the rain. On the one hand I was glad that we’d not cancelled for no reason. On the other hand I’d rather it wasn’t raining so we could have gone out. It had been dry all week; did it *really* have to be so wet today?

I sparked up my lap-top and had a look to see what I’d missed. A friend was having a birthday today. Facebook told me she was thirty-four. I’d often wondered – she could be anything from nineteen to forty, but I didn’t like to ask.
I also saw something which was a sad sign of our times. Today’s Mail on Sunday was running a feature on Andrew Beattie. The article’s headline was “Meet the man who’s aiming to earn £60k just for flying kites”. A rather sensational headline. I know Andrew Beattie – he’s on my Facebook list. He is laughing about the article because the headline was entirely made up.
Don’t believe what you read…

I then spent a while going through my finances. I like to check that what appears on my bank statements is something I’ve actually spent. Over the years I’ve not found anything that I’ve been billed for in error, but there have been a couple of things that I’ve spent money on for which I’ve never been charged (a tankful of petrol and a round of drinks).
The job of checking my accounts would be easier if the credit card receipts were produced in some sort of standard format rather than every business seeming to have made up its own design.
This month I found a little surprise waiting for me in the details of the accounts. Perhaps I’m naïve, but I didn’t realise that I would have to pay a transaction fee every time I used my credit card when we were abroad a couple of weeks ago. I used the card five time on just under a hundred and fifty quid’s worth of stuff, and got billed nearly a fiver for the privilege. Bearing in mind I wasted fifteen minutes on a *very* frustrating call to the bank before I went on this trip you think they might have warned me.

With the rain still falling I thought I might as well muck out the fish pond filter. It wasn’t *that* mucky, but it still stank. It took an hour, and with the thing back in place I saw the rain had slackened off to a medium monsoon. So with nothing else on the agenda I got out some secateurs and cut back quite a bit of the roses and clematis flowing over the fence from not-so-nice-next-door. I got two dustbin-fulls before the novelty wore off. I then tidied as best I could before the rain got too much for me.

Over lunch I looked at the geo-plan for a couple of weeks’ time. It has been suggested we go on a wander round the firehills of Hastings. I’ve solved a few puzzles in the area, but the caches there look rather spaced out and have some serious hills on the way. Still, it will be better than sitting indoors looking at the rain.

Seeing how the rain had stopped I popped the leads onto the dogs and took them out. I got as far as the co-op field before the rain started again. Within seconds I was soaked, but faced with the option of going home or carrying on I decided to carry on. Despite being soaked to the bone we had a rather good walk. Not many other people were braving the elements, but we did meet one other dog walker. It was a shame that Fudge had to pick a fight with his Alsatian.
As we walked round the park yesterday I saw that a tree had fallen and blocked the path by the dog beach. Today (less than a day later) the council were out removing the fallen tree. They were out and working on a wet Sunday; I was impressed.

With walk done I put on dry clothes and spent a little more time looking at that walk in Hastings. With a little genius and a little “non-standard-puzzle-solving” I’ve got a route of about thirty geocaches sorted. All I need now is to find a better parking spot – the suggested parking place is at the highest point on the walk. I’d rather walk down to the end, not climb up to it.

And today was something of the end of an era – the last of the current series of “Poldark”. Whilst I expect I will watch the new series when it comes out (if only for Demelza’s heaving thingies) I can’t help but wonder if the BBC are flogging a dead horse. The show’s reached a natural finishing point.
Time will tell – it always does.

Today has been rather dull…

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