9 January 2018 (Wednesday) - Before the Late Shift


I slept like a log – last night I made a point of claiming some more of the duvet so that restless dogs wouldn’t pull it off of me. Mind you the dogs seemed to be rather settled last night – that makes such a difference.

I made some toast and had my morning delve into the internet. Nothing at all was kicking off on Facebook (for once), but I had one or two emails. Over a hundred in fact. A new cache series had gone live fifteen miles away. A hundred new caches. They look quite impressive on the map; each is a puzzle so the icon on the map isn’t where the cache is hidden. Together the icons make up a unicorn’s head. However because each is a puzzle I’ve got to go through quite a bit of brain-ache to solve them all. I’ve made this sort of geo-art in the past. Unfortunately not that many people hunt out series of puzzle caches (compared to series without puzzles) as it is too much effort.
I’ve looked at the first puzzle and given up (for now). I shall come back to them all when I’m bored over the next few days and weeks. The plan is that I have a few months to solve them (or barter for solutions) prior to a majorly long walk in May or June.
And no perusal of the Internet is complete until my piss boils. A week ago I bought what I thought was quite a bargain on eBay. This morning I got a message that the seller was going to post it soon. Is it *that* unreasonable to expect it to have been posted when I paid for it?

With "er indoors TM" having given me my orders I drove off towards St Leonards. I had a carpet to collect from Dunelm Mill. Bearing in mind I'd been sent on a little (bloody great) diversion on the way to work I'd looked at the geo-map and had targeted four caches to look for. None have had finds logged in over a year. A little geo-resurrective road trip would be something to do before work.
As I drove the pundits on the radio were saying about how MPs are now getting death threats according to how they vote in Parliament. You would have thought that with such an outrageous bit of news they might have said more than just that a death threat had been made. Rather than following this up, they put on a half-hour load of tripe about piano sonatas. I turned the radio off.

I was soon at my first target. Having formed the impression that I was looking for a fake something-or-other by a pond I found nothing at all. I searched for fifteen minutes before giving up and going to Dunelm Mill where I was rather frightened by the assistant. He soon dished up the carpet, but I've seen less camp tents. Some men are macho, some less so. Some put on a deliberate act of being camp, and this chap was hamming it up to the limit (and beyond). I wonder why he was doing this?

I set off up the A21 to my second geo-target. Someone had logged a "did not find" on this geocache some time ago. Mind you the same chap had also logged a "did not find" on one near Westfield which I found right away, so I wasn't unduly put off.
I arrived, parked up, walked up to where my sat-nav said that I should rummage in the undergrowth, and saw what I was looking for laying on the ground. I did the secret geo-ritual, had a tiddle, and set off for South Maidstone.

At this point I thought I might try the radio again. There was some utter drivel about changing the lower age at which people become eligible to vote. Some total half-wit was trying to make the case for lowering the voting age to sixteen because "older people all vote conservative, and having younger voters makes it all fairer". I would have thought there was a case for raising the minimum IQ with which people are allowed to vote, but (as I have said many times) I don't believe in democracy.
I turned the radio off again.

My third target was one about which I wasn't hopeful. There had been a string of "found it" reports saying how easy the thing was to find up until about eighteen months ago.  Nothing had been reported since. I rummaged very suspiciously in a thicket whilst people in the nearby riding school pretended not to be watching me.
After fifteen minutes I gave up.

As it was (vaguely) on the way to work I went into Wateringbury where I claimed another geo-resurrection before heading in to work. I soon parked up, and it wasn't long before I was in the works canteen. Chicken breast in korma sauce with spotted dick and custard for pudding.
And there was custard tarts for tea time. Not too shabby at all.

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