The night before
last I didn’t use my CPAP machine; I did last night, and the difference in the
quality of sleep was amazing. For all that I don’t like being plumbed in at
night, I think I shall continue with it. Sleeping right through until an alarm
goes off is truly amazing.
I got up, had
brekkie and saw a new geocache had gone live near Pluckley. It had been active
for over an hour; had I been going to work today I would have chased the First
to Find. Instead I took “Furry Face TM “ round the park for a walk. We went a little
further than we have recently; he ran quite a lot of the way, trying to fight
with buses, taxis and motorbikes as we went. As we walked I did a little “whistle
practice”; I blow the whistle, pup comes running to me and gets a treat.
The idea is that he associates the whistle with a treat, and so it’s a way of
getting hold of him when I need to (as opposed to when I *want* to).
We’ve not done this for a while, and to my amazement it worked well; he
remembered how to do it.
Once home he
devoured his brekkie (he gets that after the walks so that the whistle will
work), and I did a few geo-puzzles. There is a series of puzzles in Sussex
that I’ve been meaning to try to solve for ages. I made a start on that series
today. Supposedly designed for children; I found then rather hard. There is one
word-search that has me foxed, and another puzzle in which you have to match
caterpillars to butterflies. I haven’t a clue on that one.
I sent “Furry
Face TM
“ into the garden
and I had a little sax practice; it’s amazing how quickly you get out of the
hang of playing the thing.
The morning soon
passed, and over a sandwich I watched a film. “The Sin Eater” was actually a good film. I watched it all the way through without
turning off; just lately I’ve switched off half way through a lot of films. The
film was actually based on a real superstition. I learned something today.
I checked the
Internet – that geocache in Pluckley was still unfound. So I drove out to find
it. Funnily enough I drove out at about the same time as another cacher did;
unfortunately for me she only lived a couple of minutes down the road from the
cache; she got there first, did the happy dance and was away before I arrived.
As I drove I came
past one of my own caches. A car was parked there; I got out and said hello to
the people who were caching. I was instantly recognised (for some reason I
usually am!) and it turned out that this cache was probably missing.
Several of that series seem to have gone walkabout. As many of them are
custom-made caches I shall walk out over the next week or so, retrieve the caches
that are left and archive the series. They are all puzzle caches and no one
likes puzzles. I also have a multi-series nearby that no one has been near for
months. That can go as well.
I came home and
had a mini-sax practice. I managed about ten seconds before my dog started
singing along. I wish he wouldn’t. He got sent outside for ten minutes whilst I
tootled.
And then I did a little geo-research. When I go out caching I use my
phone because I can do everything immediately on the phone through the internet
connection. For no reason that I can see pretty much everyone else uses a
hand-held GPS unit that you have to pre-program at home before you go out, and
then bring home and plug into your home PC and use more software (that costs)
before you can actually do any secret geo-rituals. Those who use GPS units are
continually finding caches they’ve done and not logged, or are hundreds of caches
behind with their secret geo-ritualling, and spend an age fiddling about doing
stuff that the phone does automatically.
I *really* can’t see why everyone wants to use a hand-held GPS unit; I’ve
been asking for two years and only ever been told that “I don’t understand”.
Well, I don’t understand. Why are these things so popular? Why won’t anyone
tell me? There clearly must be some advantage that I’m missing. The *only*
advantage of a GPS unit that I can see is that they are waterproof. On Saturday
my phone leaked a little. A month or so ago it leaked a lot. I was seriously
considering getting a hand-held unit purely because they would be waterproof.
But anything other than a wi-fi capable unit would be a seriously backward
step. I was considering spending nearly five hundred quid on something I really
don’t want when I realised I could get a waterproof cover for my phone for a
fiver. Or I could steal the one that ‘er
indoors TM isn’t using.
I shall try that cover the next time it rains and see how I get on…
No comments:
Post a Comment