I was sleeping like a log when the shouty dog woke me
just after half past six. Someone locally walks a small dog round our roads
from time to time. The dog barks constantly without ever stopping. I wish it
wouldn’t. I dozed for a bit, finally getting up just before eight o’clock when
I made toast and had a look at the internet. I do that every day.
Social media could be such a boon to humanity…
There were two rather spectacular arguments on
Facebook this morning… The chap who I mentioned the other day when he felt he
was being victimised on one of the geocaching Facebook groups has now set up
his own group. But rather than posting sensible comments and questions to his
group, he’s been just dashing out the first thing that comes into his head and
pressing send (rather than re-reading and spell-checking) and not only
is he posting incomprehensible gibberish, he’s also taking offence when no one
understands what he’s going on about.
And there was a rather bitter squabble on one of the
fish tank related groups when someone asked a genuine question. Admittedly a
bit of a rather basic question, but why can’t people just either answer or
ignore. Why do people have to make such supercilious comments?
I Munzed, and Wordled from “scale” through “merry”
and “feted” before coming up with “befit”.
I got dressed and took the dogs out. We went up to the
woods where we had a rather eventful time. Our walk started well, but Morgan
will growl at the people he sees that he doesn’t know. He seriously resents
anyone being in what he sees as his personal woods. We walked our usual route;
at about the furthest point form the car I saw something move in the distance.
It was a stag with (at least) four does with him. I stood for a good
five minutes trying to get a decent photo. The camera on my phone does its
best, but only has a maximum of times ten zoom.
The dogs didn’t see the deer at all.
I saw a few more bluebells then we had a little
episode. I heard screaming. Bailey was chasing a small rabbit. Chasing it right
at Treacle who caught it and shook it hard. In the time it took me to get to
Treacle (about five seconds) she and Bailey were pulling the rabbit
about like an old sock. I got it off of them and got them on their leads. I
hoped the rabbit would hop off… it tried to crawl away. They’d broken its back.
I did the decent thing for the poor rabbit and dragged
the dogs away. Or the two that needed dragging. Morgan had shown no interest in
the whole debacle.
After about four hundred yards the girls stopped
trying to pull back to the dead rabbit. I walked another hundred yards and let
them off of their leads. Bailey went off to see what Morgan was sniffing at;
Treacle was like a bullet from a gun. She totally ignored my calls and ran
right back to where we’d left the dead rabbit. Once she’d got it she came back.
Sort of. She carried the dead rabbit back but wouldn’t get within a yard of me.
She simply wouldn’t let me take it from her. So I let her carry it. The thing
was dead and carrying it wouldn’t hurt anyone.
And then I saw something that made me smile. As a
youngster in the Boys Brigade we would load all of our tents and sleeping bags
and kit into our backpacks and go for expeditions. We met a gaggle of young
girls who (oh so politely) asked if I could show them where they were on
their map. I had the same map on my phone (on my geo-app) so we were
able to pinpoint where they were… about half a mile from the car park where
they had started about an hour previously. But they didn’t seem disheartened at
their lack of progress. They were happy to know where they were, and openly
admitted they had no idea where they were supposed to be going anyway.
I posted some photos of our walk to the internet, and
when we got back to the car I got the dogs onto their leads and told Treacle to
drop the rabbit. She’s funny like that; if she’s carrying something she insists
on carrying it, but knows to drop it at the end of the walk. We did “boot
dogs” and I went to stop the “Map My Walk” app, but the screen on my
phone wasn’t working. It’s all very well having a device that works by touching
the screen all the time that the screen responds to being touched. Pressing the
side button, and various combinations of buttons did nothing.
We came home where it was as well we didn’t need
baths. With my phone still poggered I walked up to the town. I didn’t drive as
with no working phone I had no RingGo app ro pay for parking.
Back in the day there used to be loads of little phone
repair shops. Nowadays most of them have been replaced with nail bars. As I
searched for a shop I’d all but decided that I would be coming home with a new
phone which would cost a fortune and need no end of setting up. But what choice
did I have? Without a phone I couldn’t pay for a car park. I use the phone as a
camera and to play various silly games. Its Kindle app means I can read books
without having to carry a library about. It tells me which birds are singing
when I hear birdsong. I can’t pay bills without it, and if I couldn’t post
bollox to Facebook I’d go stir-crazy.
And I use it to communicate with people too.
I eventually found that the phone shop I’d used before
was one of only two that are still in business. The nice man asked if I’d tried
restarting it. I said I’d tried everything… it turned out that I’d not tried
pressing the side button and the volume down button together. That re-started
the phone and all was well. Pulling the plug and plugging it back in always works
– all the time you know where the plug is.
What a sense of relief… But as the nice man in the
shop said, the phone is old. I got it
in March 2021; is it time to get a new one? I
suspect I shall ponder the idea for a day or so, and as soon as I stop getting
adverts for new phones in my Facebook feed I will forget all about it until it
packs up again.
I came home past the corner shop where I got us
celebratory almond croissants for lunch.
I made myself a cuppa and had that croissant whilst
cracking on with one or two little jobs that needed doing… whilst feeling
rather relived that I wasn’t having to set up a new phone.
I told the admin people at work that I’ve just done
two days overtime.
I struggled with the FTP uploader for
mankybadger.co.uk – Apparently now
I’ve upgraded I need to upload to a new IP address… I would if I could. In the
end I messaged the nice lady to ask for help. Eventually we got it sorted.
I had a little fight with my NHS app. I’ve now
installed a passkey (whatever that means)
I updated my ever-growing list of passwords – it is as
well to have that somewhere safe *before* my phone dies again.
And
I cartoon-ised the photos I’d posted
from the woods earlier. Personally I thought that people would be getting fed
up with my obsession with Microsoft CoPilot, but yesterday at work several
people said that they really liked the happy cartoon pictures I’ve been posting
up recently.
After three hours of sitting on my arse I thought I’d
better get up. I’d originally planned to do a tip run today, but what with
Ashford’s tip still being closed that wasn’t an option. I announced that I was
going to “FEED THE FISH”. I had hoped to make the dogs jump up with a
start, but they knew that we feed the pond fish in the late afternoon every
day, and they’d all been watching and waiting.
Whilst I was at it I harvested dog dung.
We had pie and chips for dinner, then sparked up the
Infinity Table and played Chris across the internet… or so we thought. After a
while it seemed to us that Chris had picked up the French version of “Ticket
to Ride” really quickly and was very fast at doing his moves. However it
seemed to Chris that we were taking forever to make a move. The connection had
dropped and the Table was doing Chris’s moves for him. But the connection held
up for other games.
Odd…
I’ve had a good day off… it’s back to work again
tomorrow.
