24 February 2020 (Monday) - Back to Work



I slept well, but soon found myself getting back into old habits. Making toast, watching Netflix, checking out the Internet.
Fudge slept and snored as I ate toast.
I watched another episode of “Titans”; after a rather lame start, the second season has improved quite a bit.
And absolutely nothing had happened on the Internet overnight.

As I drove up the motorway it was raining. A very dismal morning. The pundits on the radio were talking about how the Austrian authorities are considering closing the Italian border because of the worries of corona virus. If the Austrians can close their border (and they have a land border), how is it so difficult for the UK to keep all the illegal immigrants from sailing twenty miles of sea?
There was also a lot of talk about the Home Secretary Priti Patel who would seem to have lost the confidence of her senior civil servants and the intelligence services. It was hinted that the bigwigs in MI6 didn't feel she was up to the job of Home Secretary. There's an admission...
And as the rain continued to fall there was a lot of talk about the floods currently blighting the nation, and the radical idea of not building hundreds of thousands of houses on flood plains was even suggested.

I got to work and parked up, then (with the rain having slackened off to a slight drizzle) I went for a little wander and stuck a bar code onto a lamp post. I'm creating quite a little forest of Munzees on the streets around where I work. It's a shame that the bar codes are starting to fade on some of the older ones, but there it is. Perhaps I might see what other Munzers do; I might be using the wrong colour ink or something like that. First world problems, eh?

And so back to work after a week off. I can’t pretend I was raring to get back in the harness, but I didn’t feel physically sick at the thought of going back there. I’ve not felt that way for the last three years; it is *so* good to work somewhere where the managers *don’t* rule by bullying and intimidation.
Before I made a start I checked my work emails. There was a notification of a vacancy somewhere where the managers certainly used to rule by bullying and intimidation. I messaged the chap whose job would seem to have become vacant; from the job description it could only have been one of two people. Someone I’ve known for thirty-five years told me that he was retiring; he’d had enough and wanted to escape.
This made me think… I’m looking forward to retirement. Or semi-retirement at any rate. But I certainly don’t feel like I “want to escape” any more.

I did my bit; an early start made for an early finish. As I walked out to my car my phone beeped. A new series of geocaches had gone live near Doddington. That was doubly good… another weekend walk is now sorted, and the pub at Doddington is dog-friendly and does good ale too.
I looked again at my phone. Those geocaches had gone live only seven minutes before I’d seen the notification. They weren’t *that* far out of my way on the journey home. Could I get a first to find?
I did… fifty-eight minutes after they went live, and fifty-one minutes after I’d seen them, and just as the sun was setting.
I only went for one of the First to Finds. I’m rather peculiar in that I realise that a lot of people want to do a streak of one FTF per month, and bearing in mind just how few caches go out these days, I thought that I only needed one, and would save the walk for another time. And also considering how slippery and thick the mud is at the moment, piddling about in the countryside after dark is just plain dangerous.
Mind you, there was one who did go out piddling about in the countryside after dark. For some, the lure of having all the FTFs is too strong to resist.

Having found what I was looking for (and done the happy dance in a swamp up a country lane) I came home and walked the dogs round the block.

Once "er indoors TM" had boiled up some dinner she went bowling. I sat in front of the telly and fell asleep. What a waste of an evening…

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