16 May 2020 (Saturday) - Hemsted Forest and a Quiz


Over some toast I was rather pleased to see that my smaragd had been captured overnight whereas "er indoors TM"’s hadn’t. Oh how I gloated.
There was a minor row kicking off on one of the work-related Facebook groups I follow. The BBC had released a little thingy on a web page “Coronavirus: How Exposed is Your Job” in which members of the public type in their profession and the BBC tell you how likely you are to die from the virus. Amazingly the questionnaire hadn’t heard of biomedical scientists; the very people who actually do the lab tests for the stuff. All the keyboard warriors were kicking off about how unrecognised blood testing is as a job. I took the novel step of sending the BBC an email on the subject. I wonder if they will reply?
I also had another email from the nice people who created the “Mammals” app. I saw a rat on 15 June 2018; they agreed it was a rat.

"er indoors TM" popped to the shop where seemingly the world and his wife was buying picnic stuff for a trip to the beach. So with the rules regarding lock-down being somewhat incomprehensibly somewhere between relaxed, ignored and abandoned we thought we’d walk the dogs. A maintenance run on my geo-series in Hemsted Forest seemed like a plan.

As we drove we listened to the local radio. The presenter who only a few short months ago was um-ing constantly seems to have stopped that, but has now developed an annoying habit of not so much breathing as desperately gasping for air into the microphone.
I wish she wouldn’t.
We got to Hemsted Forest where we were surprised to find Karl, Tracey and the girls. They thought they’d abandon their plans for marching up the North Downs, and we had a rather good socially distanced walk. Not having met up for a couple of months, it was good to catch up.

We hunted out the series of geocaches I hid in those woods last year. Over the last few months I’d had several reports of how bad the GPS co-ordinates of my caches were. Using more than one GPS and a few Smartphones I was rather pleased to see that my original GPS co-ordinates were pretty much spot-on. The problem was that the people who’d found the caches had put them back where they felt would be a better place to hide them. Some up to fifty feet from where I’d put them.
Which is rather annoying…
Mind you I did chuckle at the normal people as they came past. There were quite a few people in largish groups clearly not distancing but judging others that they passed.
And (as always) I took a few photos as we walked.

Seeing as we were half-way to Hastings we drove on and had a couple of socially distanced meet-ups with parents. It was a shame Pogo had to dump on my Dad’s petunias, but such is life.

I slept most of the way home; once home we had a rather good bit of dinner, then tuned in for the Saturday Zoom quiz… A really well thought out quiz in which I came fourth from last. Not too shabby I suppose…

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