18 December 2012 (Tuesday) - Luvaduck

I felt quite ill when I woke this morning - headache, runny nose and a general feeling of bleagh. Fudge didn't seem quite one hundred per cent either. His ears were cold, which seemed unusual. As the day went on I think we both perked up a bit; even if Furry Face did sleep an awful lot.

Once "er indoors TM" set off to work I took Fudge for a little walk. I had some geocache maintenance to do. One of my caches is in a fake snail shell. Or that is it was. Now that it's gone missing, been replaced and gone missing again I've replaced the snail shell with a bog standard magnetic key holder. There are those who look down their noses at magnetic key holders as geocaches. But equally only yesterday I got an email of thanks about one of my series of caches which consists of seven of these key holders. And a magnetic key holder costs fifty pence whereas a fake snail costs over a fiver.

Whilst we were out we hid another cache. When we first started this game the third cache I ever found was round the corner from my house. However "Horse Guards" has not been looked after by its owner, was marked as needing maintenance back in August, and yesterday it was archived (removed from the list of active caches). I've been trying to contact the person who owned the cache for ages, but to no avail.

With that cache now gone, the way was left clear for my latest scheme. A geocache which is blatantly obvious, but rather hard to actually get at. Caches are rated on a difficulty/terrain scheme on which the difficulty and terrain are graded from a score of one (dead simple) to five (rather tricky!). I've rated "luvaduck" as difficulty 1 / terrain 4. The cache is obvious. As the name suggests the cache is in a duck (a floating plastic decoy duck). The difficult bit is that the duck is anchored in the middle of the river.
On arrival at where I planned to place the cache I let Fudge off the lead and spent several minutes trying to carefully arrange everything. And when I finally realised that I couldn't do it in a controlled manner without getting very wet I just chucked the whole lot into the river. There was a huge splash, and in a triumph of pot luck over the odds the duck ended up just where I wanted it. And then Fudge went mad. For some reason he didn't like seeing the duck in the water, and he wouldn't stop barking at it.
We came home and did the necessary on-line activation of the duck and I wondered how long it would be before it was found. I got a text from Lisa at 1pm to say that she had done the cache and found two others had already signed the log before her.

Fudge and I then went up to the post office to collect a parcel. My Chinese puzzle box has arrived. I shall use that in another geocache. One with a very easy terrain setting (very easy to get to), but rather tricky to actually open up. A 4:1 to complement today's 1:4. It's my intention to hide that on a bridge I know in Canterbury tomorrow morning; if only I can get going early enough tomorrow.

We came home and I did some laundry and then the hoovering. Fudge seemed terrified by the hoover. And then whilst I scoffed the Chinese take-away that "Daddies Little Angel TM" had left laying around I watched a film about the life of the famous footballer George Best. A watchable film, but whilst it was on Fudge fell asleep on my lap. I really didn't have the heart to move him, so I resigned myself to watching rubbish on the telly whilst he noisily snored the afternoon away.
"My Boy TM" came to visit, and he was watching the telly with us when there was a huge crash outside. Some twit had come down the road far too fast and had swerved into the cars parked outside the shop just over the road. Fortunately no one was hurt, but it made quite a mess.

And then being Tuesday the clans gathered. Banana bread and mince pies. Very tasty...

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