Last night before I got into bed
I pulled the duvet two feet in my direction. Not spending the night shivering
meant I slept through till after nine o’clock.
Over brekkie I had my usual look
at the Internet. Whoever it is that runs Facebook has been fiddling with it. As
I perused I saw an advert for a sci-fi author, and a pop-up window appeared
telling me how to report inappropriate stuff like that on Facebook. It seems odd
that they suggest an author’s page might be inappropriate whilst they have
previously told me they have no issues with graphic pictures of oral sex or of
a fox being torn apart by hounds.
With no
emails of note I spent a little while poring over the geo-map making plans for
the next few weeks and months (as I do). I was rather surprised to see
that one of my plans for a couple of weeks has gone west. I’ve got some time
off work in a couple of weeks’ time and had planned to go find a particular geocache,
but the person whose cache it is has archived it with the comment “I’m
disabling my caches as I’ve become disenchanted due to the bickering, moaning,
and criticising which now seems rife amongst the community”. Whilst there
have been petty squabbles over the years, I’ve not had a geo-squabble anywhere
near as nasty as ones I’ve seen on astronomical pages, reptile-keeping pages,
real-ale pages… Bearing in mind that it only took a few seconds to see that
whoever posted that has never been to a formal meeting of geocachers and that
no one active in the local community knows them, I can’t help but wonder what
provoked that little outburst.
My mobile rang. “Louise Hold” from “Accident Solutions” phoned asking me
about the accident in which I was recently involved. When I didn’t tell her to
get knotted she transferred me to “Christopher Brian” and I successfully
wasted ten minutes of his time. I took the line that I must have been in an
accident recently as their records said so, and that it must have been serious
as I’d lost all memory of it. It took him a ridiculously long time to realise I
was taking the mickey.
We got the leads on to the dogs,
and took them over to the woods near the Repton estate where we had a
rather good (if cold) little wander. Pogo played nicely with other
dogs, and the three of them didn’t get *too* muddy.
We came home via the co-op for Belgian buns, and
once home "My
Boy TM" and Cheryl came round. Apparently he had some dumbbells
round here? We couldn’t find them.
I then spent a little while
working on C.P.D. (it’s a work thing), and I also wasted an hour playing
at being the geo-police. Over the last few months I’ve been hunting out “resuscitation
geocaches” – caches that haven’t been found in over a year. There are a
surprising amount of these on the map, and there seems to be three broad
reasons why people haven’t found them.
The ones I seem to find are what
I call” remote”; with no other caches nearby, few people go out of their
way to look for them. There are also a lot which I call “inaccessible”;
up trees or in rivers, needing ropes and canoes to get to, and most people who
climb or canoe have found them years ago. And the third category is ones which aren’t
there. Ones which have gone missing but no one has squealed to the geo-feds
about them. Over the last few months I’ve come across many of these. Hidden
ages ago by people who have long since found better ways to waste their time,
and with several “did not find” logs from experienced hunters of
Tupperware on each of them. So I spent a little while putting “Needs
Archiving” logs on them. It might prompt people to go sort the problem, or
it might clear a space on the map for a new cache to go out. Either is an
improvement.
And then the doorbell rang. The women
of Karl’s family had an invite to a girlie-night in Singleton. Being at a loose
end they dropped him with us. We had a few beers and a bottle and a half of
port, more cheese than sense, and we put the world to rights and planned for
the future. When you consider how many Saturday nights I’ve spent doing the
ironing this was a much better way to spend my time…
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