29 March 2021 (Monday) - Sausages

My phone’s clock has several alarms. I’ve given them all a name so I know which is for Fudge’s tablet, which is for when it is time to get up… I had no idea that my new phone reads out the alarm name when it goes off. What with the clocks having gone forward yesterday I was still asleep when the alarm went off this morning. As well as a beautiful tuneful melody playing, a sexy woman’s voice announced: “Get your arse out of your pit”.

I got my arse out of my pit, made toast (by running it through the toaster twice) and scoffed it whilst watching an episode of “Superstore”. As I watched I also did another COVID test. Again negative, which was probably for the best.

With a couple of moments to spare I popped on-line. I sent out a couple of birthday wishes, and got ready for work.

 

As I drove up the motorway the pundits on the radio were saying that the huge container ship blocking the Suez canal has nearly been moved out of the way, and soon the canal will be open to shipping again.

In the meantime a lot of ships are going the long way round Africa because that will probably be quicker than waiting for all the queues at the canal to disperse.  However a lot of shipping companies are worried about piracy which is rife around the African coast. Piracy - in this day and age !! Personally I can't help but feel that the container ships should be equipped with torpedoes, and when the pirates tell the ship to be prepared to be boarded, then the container ships’ crews might tell the pirates to prepare to be torpedoed. Or when the pirates are climbing the ladders to board the container ships, those being boarded might shoot the pirates. After all a pirate climbing a ladder is a rather easy target.

The entire episode could be live-streamed to the law enforcement agencies to make it all above board, and would it *really* cost that much extra for these container ships to carry one armed police officer? Pirates only go pirating because they get away with it. How many pirates would we have to blow away before the rest got the message? It's a bit like when I was at school; the headmaster had a cane. There were never wholesale thrashings. Instead one boy had a sore arse for a day, and a thousand boys behaved themselves for a year.

 

I got to work. After I'd been there a while my phone beeped. The geo-feds have allowed new geocaches to be published as of today, and quite a few had been published this morning half an hour after I’d got to work. Several were within a very short distance of home. If I'd been at home I would probably have chased out to try to be the first to find one of them.

Comment was made on the local geocaching Facebook page about hypothetical "Found it" logs from the first people who might find these new caches. So often these reports start off with the phrase "I just happened to be in the area…" I quite like a cheeky FTF, but I rarely "just happened to be in the area" whenever I got one. Usually I saw the thing being published as I scoffed brekkie, and flew out of the house, desperately hoping no one else would beat me to it.

Why does hardly anyone else admit to this? For quite a few people, being first is an obsession, and a true log would read “I just happened to be pressing the "refresh" button on my in box like a thing possessed when I saw this cache go live so I drove at breakneck speeds down several miles of narrow lanes in absolute terror that someone else might beat me to it”.

In all honesty this has been true of me on occasion.

 

At the stroke of nine o'clock I phoned the pet insurance people who said they still hadn't received the paperwork for Fudge's illness. When I quibbled they put me on hold for an age, and was eventually told that a manager had just checked the in-box and they had received the vet's email last Thursday after all. I suppose that is one step forward.

 

I did my bit; I came home. As I drove home I tried out my new charging cable in my car. I won’t be doing that again; the thing got red hot. Are you not supposed to use fast charging cables in cars?

I popped to B&Q to get a plank of wood for tomorrow, then came home and walked the dogs round the co-op field. As we walked we met two young ladies having a picnic. Before I realised what was going on, Pogo and Treacle had gone over to say hello. The girls fussed the dogs, and before I could stop them, they offered the dogs a sausage. The sausage got yummed up immediately, then (being a lump) Pogo barged the ladies out of the way so he could scoff the rest.

I’m hoping that those girls have learned from this, but I doubt it…

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