Yesterday I mentioned I’d had a decent night’s sleep.
Sadly that would seem to have been a one-off. One of the most depressing things
has to be laying awake listening to the sounds of everyone else snoring like I
did last night.
I gave up trying to sleep, got up and made toast. As I
scoffed it I had my usual peer int the Internet. It was pretty much the same as
ever.
I activated my geocaching Adventure Lab. There’s been
a little project recently to create a series of geocaching Adventure Labs near
the M2 services in the shape of the Kent horse, all of which would go live this
morning. I set my contribution live and then sent out invites to people for
this month’s Munzee Clan War. A few days ago I mentioned about how every
month everyone regularly achieves all their goals by day fourteen except one
particular player. Every month this one eventually finishes with only hours to
spare and doesn’t communicate with anyone at all during the month and everyone
else gets twitchy and worried. She’s been told she’s going to play at a lower
level this month… and she’s not happy about it. She’s sent me a couple of
rather terse replies to the messages I’ve sent her in which she claims that she
doesn’t actually get messages. Perhaps she will get on better at a lower level?
I don’t want to be mean to her, but such a silly trivial matter has wound
several people up.
Whilst I was Munzing I deployed a Trojan Unicorn and a
Cubimal as I do.
As I fiddled about on-line so Steve was on the radio.
Perhaps I’m biased and perhaps I don’t like change, but his various stand-ins
aren’t as good.
This morning’s Guess the Lyrics competition was “Start
your journey early or maybe later (get your boots on)”. No – I had no idea
either. It was from the 1985 hit song "Love & Pride" by
the British band King. No – I’d not heard of it either… I say I’d not heard of
it. The song was very familiar; I just had no idea what it was actually called.
I scraped the ice off of the car, we got the leads and
coats onto the dogs and went round to Repton and Dog Club. It was rather cold
today, but we had over a dozen dogs along for our morning session. They all
played and scoffed treats and generally had a great time.
We did come away a tad earlier than we might have done
though, as Bailey was cold. She is small, her fur isn’t very thick, and she
simply won’t run around to keep warm, preferring to stand about in the queues
for treats.
As we drove home Steve was doing the Mystery Year
competition on the radio. The first London Marathon? 1981. Or was it 1982? My
first thought was the right one.
We had a cuppa then cracked on with the day.
Originally we’d been thinking of a walk round Rolvenden doing geocache
maintenance, but it was a tad cold today, so we used the cold day. Being cold
enough outside to keep the contents of the freezer frozen, we emptied and
defrosted the freezer. It hadn’t been done for some time and we’d got to the
point that we had been paying to keep a *lot* of ice frozen.
Typing “we defrosted the freezer” is so easy;
the reality was a bit more like hard work. It didn’t take that long to stick
the food into the shed, but shifting the permafrost took some doing. I had this
stroke of genius to use the hot air paint stripper to melt the ice. In
retrospect it was akin to Nursey’s uncle (in Blackadder) who used a
scythe to cut his toenails and was surprised to find that his foot fell off. It
wasn’t long before there was a nasty smell of burnt plastic. I don’t think that
much damage was done; just a patch of yellow plastic at the back of the
freezer.
After an hour or so we had a break for a cuppa and I
did my Wordle. Starting with “frost” was a good move. “Strip” got me closer; obviously the
answer was “shirt”. It wasn’t. I knew that from the first attempt. Dur!
It was “sitar”.
I capped the Widdlz Workshop (it’s a Munzee thing)
and went back to defrosting the freezer. The dogs had started “helping” when
they’d realised that there were chips frozen into the ice.
After an hour we stopped for another cuppa before
cracking on at the ice-face. By this time we’d excavated pretty much all of the
escaped frozen food and the dogs had lost interest.
We cooked up some frozen bread rolls we’d found for a
spot of late lunch. I used the hot tray we’d used to cook the rolls by sticking
it on a recalcitrant ice sheet. It would either melt the ice or melt the
freezer. We scoffed the bread rolls then went back to the freezer in the hope
that the tin tray had melted the last of the ice but not the freezer.
The hot tin tray did the trick. It didn’t take long to
hoik out the last of the ice, clean the freezer all round, dry it out and soon
we were ready for the moment of truth. Would the freezer work when we turned it
on again? I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best… but nil desperandum.
It worked. Well… I say “it worked”. It made noises and vibrated a bit.
We left all the food in the shed and waited to see if the freezer got cold.
Eventually it did and we loaded all the stuff back into it.
I was glad the freezer worked; it would be a shame to
have to get a new one. We fiddled about on-line and from the freezer’s serial
number it would seem that the poor thing is two weeks
short of being twenty years old. Is that good for a freezer?
As a reward for doing the freezer we had kebab for tea
which we scoffed watching the New Year episode of “Taskmaster”, and then
we spent the evening playing various versions of “Ticket to Ride” including USA, United Kingdom, India and Asia.
I quite like that game – it is very different when there’s just two of us as
opposed to several on our games night.
We had a delivery of dog food this afternoon… We’ve
seen the photograph which the delivery chap took when he put it on the doorstep
and hurried off without knocking. If he’d have done anything other than being
incredibly stealthy he would have set the dogs off. But he didn’t, and someone
else equally stealthy came along and nicked it.
With Amazon you get a message that there’s been a
delivery the second it is delivered. Yodel send the message a few hours after
the point at which the parcel has already been stolen.
I wonder if we will get a refund?
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