Over
brekkie as I peered into the Internet I saw that the astro club had had a
meeting last night. Back in the day there would have been adverts about the
meeting on all the local community Internet forums and websites during the week
before the meeting, and Facebook would have been alive with posts and photos
after such a meeting. This doesn’t happen any more; there were just a couple of
mentions after the event on the club’s own Facebook page. Does that mean that
the club is moribund, or just that no one there bothers with social media any
more?
There
were also whinges on one of the geocaching pages. Having found a film pot under
a rock, some people haven’t been telling the world about it until months later.
This is their right, but such late logging has actually been a problem for me on
several occasions. Given a cache with a few “can’t find it – is it missing?”
reports, I then got a “Found It” log. So I’ve automatically thought that
the thing was there all along. However the “Found it” log was been dated
from nine months previously and the cache was still actually missing.
With
"er indoors TM"
off to visit "Daddy’s Little Angel TM" I loaded the
dogs into the car and set off to Clowes Wood. There is a series of geocaches
there (would you believe it!) that in order to locate you first need to
have solved a “Jigidi” on-line jigsaw puzzle. Over the last few months
several people have grumbled about the puzzles… I must admit to a degree of
frustration with the things. It wasn’t that long ago when I tried to set a
puzzle cache using one of these Jigidi thingies. The reviewer at the time (now
long gone) very rudely told me that Jigidi wasn’t allowed as it went
against the rules. Geocaching HQ confirmed this. In the meantime the specific
rule that they mentioned hasn’t changed, but loads of these Jigidi puzzles have
appeared anyway. Perhaps it’s just me who isn’t allowed to use Jigidi?
Still,
mustn’t grumble. They make for more caches to find, and with fewer and fewer
people bothering to hide them, that’s never a bad thing.
We
soon met up with Karl, Tracey and Charlotte, and had a rather good walk. We’ve
been to Clowes Wood before; being Forestry Commission land the paths are rather
good all year long so we didn’t get *that* grubby. Pogo was amazingly
well behaved, only shouting at one other dog and either ignoring or playing
nicely with the other hounds. Fudge was a little bit shouty, but he didn’t do
his usual trick of disappearing in pursuit of pheasants and being missing for
half an hour, so that was a good thing. And Treacle was quite content all the
time Karl was throwing sticks for her.
We
had a good walk hunting for our little pots; we found all of them even if at
one point we’d transposed our co-ordinates and got a six and a nine the wrong
way round.
I took a few
photos as we walked. Interestingly if you look at the photos, have a look at
the geo-tagging on the first two photos. Taken in exactly the same place, one
is recognised as being in Whitstable, and one as being in Canterbury.
From
Clowes Wood we drove into Whitstable. In February we’d called in to “The
Monument” and had dinner in the garden. We thought we might go there again for
food. It was a tad too cold for the garden today, but we had a good dinner
nonetheless.
As
we scoffed we listened to the pensioners on the next table quarrelling about
politics. Bless them.
We
said our goodbyes, and came home. It was a shame that one of the dogs had been
sick in the back of the car on the way home, but they had had quite a few
treats as we’d walked, and when in the pub I had been slipping them chips, and
some of the steak from my baguette.
It
didn’t take that long to clear up dog vom.
I
spent five minutes fighting with a broken telly; finally fixing it by putting
new batteries into the remote control, then spent a couple of hours doing the
ironing until "er indoors TM" came home.
We scoffed tea,
then "My Boy TM" and Cheryl came round. They
brought cakes…
