I was wide awake at 7am,
and with little else to do so early on a Saturday I had a go at the
astro club's accounts. The credit crunch is obviously hitting -
refreshments takings are regularly twenty per cent down on what they
were a year ago, and the raffle is only raking in just over half of
what it once was. We still have just as many club members; it's just
that no one seems to have any spare cash.
With er indoors TM"
out of her pit we collected Lisa and set off to Worton's wood. On
Monday afternoon I spent an hour and a half working out the location
of a puzzle geocache, and then in the evening Lisa and I spent an
hour and a half working out that it wasn't there. I revisited my
calculations and with the application of graph paper I worked out a
new solution to the puzzle and we thought we'd try again. The new
solution wasn't that different too the old one, but this time we
found the cache after only ten minutes searching. We'll gloss over
the fact that it was in a place that we'd thoroughly searched on
Monday evening.
From the we moved on to
Cheeseman's Green. Still geocaching; this time hiding one. We'd
spotted the ideal bridge under which we could hide a cache. The
rubber dingy was soon inflated and ignored the faint hissing sound I
could hear. The boat was very soon in the river. I chucked myself
into the boat, and once aboard wondered about steering and
propulsion. I realise that it is standard nautical practice to take
oars, but the entire concept of oars didn't occur to me until I was
on the high seas. I managed navigation of a sort by grabbing passing
trees (there was a surprisingly fast current) and managed to
bring "ELF-1" to where Lisa was waiting to board.
She too was rather vague about steering boats, instead choosing (like
me) to trust to pot luck and idiot enthusiasm. However a
combination of pot luck and idiot enthusiasm soon found us aground
right under the bridge where we bought the drill into play and
secured the geocache.
It was at this point that
we first started to think about the vague possibility of getting out
of the river. And as we cast off so a submerged rock made its
presence known by making a hole in the boat. I would have laughed if
the river water hadn't been so cold as my bum got wetter and wetter.
Rather amazingly we
emerged from the river with with only wet bums and wet feet, and we
managed to salvage the boat. We shall need that when it's time to do
maintenance.
Home, where I showered
the river scum off of myself and the fox poo off of Fury Face, and we
had a crafty spot of lunch before going back out for an afternoon's
stroll round to Singleton. We explored places we've not been before;
found some new footpaths, and generally wore the dog out. We were
gong to go on for a bit more of a stroll round Coldblow, but time was
against us. We'll do that another time.
After a rather good bit
of scoff er indoors TM" set off to film
night and I prepped my phone for tomorrow's planned extravaganza
before settling down in front of the telly with my dog.
It can be a tough life
sometimes...
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