I hate days like today.
There was (at most) half a centimetre of snow on the ground,
and the world has come to a halt. The macho element was loudly
deriding everyone else for being so wimpy. And was doing so from the
comfort of its warm arm chair. The macho element does that. Those who
loudly gripe about how Antarctica copes with heavy snows, and about
how they lived through the ice age when they were younger never
actually go sledging or make snowmen. The pitiful amount of snow we
did have wasn't enough to play in, but it was enough to make
everything and everywhere cold and wet and muddy. I'm all up for
sledging and making snowmen, but I can do cold, wet and muddy at any
time (and regularly do). I felt rather sorry for my cousin's
children - I saw photos of them (on Facebook) with their
sledge and nowhere near enough snow to sledge in.
We had the option to go
on an organised geocaching expedition today, but at the last minute I
saw through the ruse. Billed as a geocaching event, it was actually
an outreach event organised by a local free church. Whilst I
hesitate to use the phrase "crackpot religion", over
the years I've been caught by these sort of things so many times. In
fact (before I saw the darkness) I used to organise such
events myself (family picnic, sponsored walk, quiz nights) in
a thinly veiled attempt to convert people to my particular version of
crackpotism.
With little else planned
for the morning we took Furry Face to Pets at Home. We'd been meaning
to sign him up with their vet plan for some time. For twelve quid a
month he gets free check-ups, injections, worming and flea
treatments. This saves fifty quid over the year.
He had been biting the
skin at the bottom of his tail rather a lot lately so a trip to the
vets was on the cards anyway. The vet did unspeakable things with
his anal glands, squirted stuff up his beak and told us to brush his
teeth. The thing with biting his tail was probably to do with his
anal glands (yuk!), and we brought him home where I applied
the flea juice to the back of his neck. Fudge promptly rolled over
and tried to rub the stuff off, and then spent fifteen minutes
barking at the dogs next door.
Despite the weather we
went out in the afternoon. Lisa wanted to do some geocache
maintenance, and I wanted to do something with the day. We relocated
a cache somewhat higher up a tree, and then went on to find nine more
caches. And a swarm of sheep which came right down the road at us. We
gave up when we were so cold we could no longer feel our feet. So we
came home just as it was getting dark, and I spent an hour giving the
fish tank a serious clean-out. I totally dismantled everything, tool
all of the water and all of the gravel out, scrubbed the lot, rinsed
the gravel until the water stopped running black, and then put it all
back together. There's no denying that I've been neglecting the fish
tank recently. With only three fish left in it I need to either shut
the thing down or re-stock it. Snow permitting we'll see what Bybrook
Barn have to offer tomorrow.
For the evening we went
round the corner to a birthday party. As well as drinking too much
ale I had some green stuff, liquid cola cubes, and was introduced to
"Woo-Woo". I quite liked Woo-Woo" - I
might brew a barrel of the stuff if only I knew how..
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