25 July 2021 (Sunday) - More Ranting

 

I slept well. I had rather hoped to have been woken by thunderstorms in the night – not so much because I like thunderstorms as to restore my confidence in weather forecasts. But there wasn’t a drop of rain during the supposedly torrential night.

 

I made brekkie and looked at that geo-puzzle that had stumped me yesterday. I remained stumped. Some people put out geocaches to be found, and others put them out for the perverse satisfaction of *not* having them found. Take the one in question… the puzzle might very well be solved by using the following (so-called) logic:

The only information given in the puzzle is the first three stanzas to the song “Hi Ho Silver Lining”. Silver – that is an element… Element – elementary – “elementary my dear Watson” was what Sherlock Homes used to say. Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street… Baker… There’s the answer. You find where the cache by typing “bake crusty loaf” into the “What Three Words” app.

I sent the chap who set the puzzle a cry for help yesterday. He hasn’t replied

Pausing only briefly to send out some birthday wishes I had a look at the monthly accounts. They could have been a whole lot worse. I shouldn’t complain.

We then drove down to the pet shop for fish food, then went round to “My Boy TM”’s house. They’d all gone to Chessington World of Adventure, and we collected little Rolo who was coming for an adventure with us.

We drove up to Kings Wood. As we drove so the rain started. I was glad to see the rain because that meant we hadn’t cancelled our walk for no reason… and then the rain stopped – less than a minute after it started.
(I say rain – does half a dozen drops count?)

We got to King Wood, and had a bit of a wander round. We walked for two hours during which time there was glorious sunshine, cloud, overcast skies… and not a drop of rain. Treacle and Pogo were very well behaved, but little Rolo let the side down several times. Treacle and Pogo would come to the sound of the whistle and watch as other dogs walked past… but little Rolo saw other dogs as an opportunity for a fight. Mind you, he eventually got the idea of  whistle training and two of the last three dogs we met passed by without incident.

 

With walk walked we came home and sat in the garden and had a spot of late lunch. Just as we sat down so there was a clap of thunder. Just one though. About half an hour later the rain started in earnest. It did come down hard, but didn’t really last long.

I set about some geo-puzzles that *were* intended to be solved in readiness for our upcoming holiday, and as I puzzled so Cheryl collected Rolo. They’d given up on Chessington because they’d got rained off – and got given free tickets to come back when it wasn’t raining. At least someone had rain today!

 

“er indoors TM” boiled up a very good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching a couple of episodes of “Richard Osman’s House of Games”… and in closing I will rant about the weather forecast.

Again.

I’m getting rather fed up with abandoning plans on the strength of utterly wrong weather forecasts. Look at ten of the hours from today’s BBC weather forecast. Six of them were wrong.

Compare that with your local GP who sees six patients an hour for eight hours each day. That’s (about) ten thousand patients a week. If she mis-diagnoses only one of these, she is crucified by the newspapers and faces investigation by the British Medical Council and being sacked. Why is a one in ten thousand failure rate unacceptable for a doctor, but a sixty per cent failure rate (quite frankly) what we expect from a meteorologist?

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