20 January 2022 (Thursday) - Foundation

I had a shave this morning. I *always* have a shave every morning but somehow or other I forgot yesterday, and this morning it took some scraping.

I commented to “er indoors TM” that the dogs’ flea treatment was due, and without prompting both dogs quietly tried to hide. They really do understand what we are saying, and they hate the flea treatments with a passion. I don’t know why – we just put a drop of the stuff on their necks. It doesn’t hurt. Once it is done they soon forget about it. But they *really* hate having it done.

 

As I scoffed toast I peered into the internet and Facebook presented me with a memory from this time last year. A photo of Fudge. He wasn’t doing anything special; just sleeping on my lap, but it was enough to provoke a minor melt-down. I miss that silly little dog so much.

Facebook also told me that three friends had birthdays today. I say “friends”; they are on my Facebook friends list. I sent my birthday video to all of them but found myself wondering about them. I’ve seen one (albeit on a Zoom meet) in the last year, but as for the other two… I’ve not heard from one for five years and the other for fifteen, and neither has made any effort whatsoever to keep in touch. What is the point of social media if not to use it to be sociable?

 

I had an email. The nice people at Credit Karma told me that my credit rating has gone down by eleven points. I wonder why. What with slobbing round the house sulking about feeling poorly I’ve not actually spent any money for two weeks. Perhaps Credit Karma has just caught up with my having bought a new washing machine, a new living room fire and having paid the house building and contents insurance recently? I had a little look on-line and it seems my credit rating can be adversely affected by both using the credit card to buy things, and by not using it enough.

Whatever the reason for the drop in my rating, it all seems rather silly.

 

I also had an email about the final location I was hoping to use for the bonus for the Great Chart Adventure lab series of geocaches I’m working on. The location I chose was one which was fine six years ago when it was the starting point of a series of caches in the area. Now it is too close to a school… neither the location nor the school have moved in the meantime. Oh well…

Bearing in mind I’ve got less than a month to get this sorted I abandoned the plan to go to Kings Wood again and took the dogs out to Great Chart where after a few minutes I came up with another location for my bonus (!) We then walked up the Greensand Way to the river and back again. The walk was rather hard work today. Sometimes we take tennis balls along. Treacle carries hers and Pogo plays “catch” with his. Today Treacle just wanted whichever ball it was that Pogo was playing with, and in less than a minute managed to lose one of them. With only one ball in play Treacle then carried that one and wouldn’t let me take it from her.

Fortunately on the way back from the river we found the missing ball so Pogo got to play catch for a short while.

 

Once home I went into the garden for a few minutes. It was too cold to do much, but “er indoors TM” was concerned about whether Fudge’s remains were safe inside his memorial box. When we got his ashes back from the vet I made a memorial for him which we put by the pond (his favourite place) and we put his casket, collar and lead inside the box. I opened it all up and was very pleased to see that casket, collar and lead were all bone dry inside the waterproof plastic container inside the memorial.

Once I’d put that all back together I then had a look at one of the shelves in the living room. Somehow it had got itself incredibly crooked. It was really odd. The thing seemed to be jammed in place and would not budge, but once I’d shifted all the clutter from it, it took the lightest touch to move it properly into place.

 

As not-so-nice-next-door started playing tedious scales on her piano I told the geo-feds about my new bonus location in Great Chart, then made myself comfortable in front of the telly and binge-watched episodes of “Foundation” on Apple TV. Based on the classic books by Isaac Asimov from seventy years ago, (so far) the TV show has followed the story reasonably well; far better than most TV and film adaptations of other books have done.

After five episodes I had a break and did more Coursera, then went back to the Foundation. 

“er indoors TM” came home and Treacle immediately started playing up. Having sat on the sofa with me all afternoon she then spent an hour running round with shoes and carrier bags and generally attention-seeking with things she knows she isn’t allowed to have. She does that. Pogo doesn’t…

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