I slept for nine hours last night and woke feeling “bleaugh” with a backache and a headache. In the past I’ve grumbled about insomnia… am I sleeping too much at the moment?
Taking care to let sleeping dogs lie I got up. I don’t know why I was so quiet around the hounds – they never shift until “er indoors TM” gets up; there is no secret as to who they see as the pack leader.
I made toast and peered into the Internet and sent out birthday wishes to two friends. I saw I had an email – I had received full marks in the most recent essay I had written for my “Coursera” course, The essay was entitled “Imagining Extra-Terrestrial Life”; finding myself presented with quite a bit of information about a hypothetical exoplanet I was asked to speculate on what might live there. Bearing in mind the thing was speculation, the object of the exercise was to justify our speculation. Earlier in the week I’d marked one of these essays written by a child with a microscope obsession and this morning I had been prompted that there were two more essays for me to grade.
Ironically I was asked to grade the essay of someone who had graded my essay and given it full marks whilst commenting “I would have liked to have had more details”. I gave their essay full marks and made a non-committal comment but felt they could have communicated the same information in less than half the words they used. And I was also asked to grade the work of “Anonymous Learner”. Anonymous on a world-wide distance-learning course? Some people take cyber-security to ridiculous extremes, don’t they? Anonymous Learner” tried to make a case for the existence of the moon “Pandora” from the film “Avatar” but didn’t really make a good job of doing so.
We got ourselves organised and into my car. And immediately “er indoors TM” had to get out and read the Riot Act to the dogs. When I take them anywhere in the car they are as good as gold. When “er indoors TM” comes too their behaviour is terrible.
We
drove down to Folkestone where we collected “Daddy’s Little Angel TM”
and her entourage, and then on to Kearsney Abbey where we met “My Boy TM”
and Cheryl. I say “met”; “watched drive by” was a closer
description of what happened, but they eventually came back.
Having
arrived first we’d seen the signs and Pogo and Treacle were on leads. Cheryl
hadn’t seen the signs and let Ro-Ro run up to us, and one of the normal people
was a tad judgemental.
We
had a rather good (if rather cold) walk round the gardens. We soon got
out of the posh bits and all the dogs were running and having a great time. And
whilst we were in the area I dragooned the kids into a little expedition to
find a geocache which I’ve been meaning to go find for some years.
Kearsney
Abbey used to be a favourite place to go on a Sunday (about fifteen years
ago) when we would picnic, play with radio-controlled toys on the lakes,
paddle in the streams, drink beer, read just published “Harry Potter”
books, and sleep in the sunshine. It was a tad cold for any of that today, but next
summer maybe…
With walk all but walked we went to the tea shop for a cuppa and a spot of lunch…
Oh dear.
“Daddy’s Little Angel TM” had got something from them as we had waited for “My Boy TM” to arrive earlier. On both occasions today the coffee and hot chocolate were stone cold by the time the food came out. Over half an hour to make a toastie? Seriously? If this is what the place is like in the third weekend in January they really aren’t going to cope as it warms up.
We said our goodbyes and made our way home. We parked up two streets away (the closest to home that I could park) and I looked at the car’s dog-proofing. Pogo had been pulling at it the entire way today (since “er indoors TM” was in the car) and he has seriously bent it out of shape. I will have to fix it when it warms up a tad. But not today.
Instead we came inside. “er indoors TM” sorted the shoe rack; the bottom shelf had broken, so she’d got a new one and attached the remains of the old one to the new one and varnished it all. I kept well out of the way and played Lego. I had a rummage in my spares and made a 1975 Lego locomotive from the original instructions. I quite like the set, but from a purely mercenary point of view it is interesting how the value of this set varies. You can get it on eBay for nearly fifty quid, of for just over a tenner on the more specialist Lego selling pages. It certainly pays to shop around.
As “er indoors TM” snored and the dogs dreamed (and Treacle had a nightmare- bless her!) I did more Coursera work, then downloaded the reference material for the last essay in the course. It has to be said that downloading the reference material was a task in itself.
I then watched the first half of an episode of “Craig Charles: UFO Conspiracies” which was utter tripe. Apparently some airline pilot had seen a strange light off the coast of Ireland, and Craig Charles then (like a stuck record) kept repeating this. After thirty-five minutes it was quite clear that the program was going nowhere so I turned it off.
No comments:
Post a Comment