As two weeks of sick leave gave way to a week of holiday there was a minor disaster this morning at brekkie when I couldn’t find any jam or marmalade in the cupboard. As I munched on dry toast so “er indoors TM” pulled jars of the stuff out from where I’d just looked.
As I crunched dry toast I peered into the Internet. There were several posts about small businesses shutting, and the people commenting were doing so in a way that was clearly intended to make others feel guilty about the closures. Should I feel guilty? I have no interest in custom-made metal fairies for the garden, so why should I buy that which I don’t want? Or take the local family-run shoe shop that started up over a hundred years ago… Do I *really* have to shop there? Going well out of my way to an obscure part of town (and try to find somewhere to park) to pay over the odds for that which I can get from any of the dozen shoe shops in the town centre or have delivered to my door by Amazon? It’s a bit like the “family-run” petrol station on the way to work which charges way over the odds because it is “family-run”.
What particularly boiled my piss was that it didn’t take two minutes to see that the shoe shop was closing because the owner was retiring, and not being forced out of business at all.
I was up in time to get notifications about two new geocaches as they came out this morning, but I thought better of chasing after the First to Find. Both involved getting numbers from a telegraph pole or memorial stone and performing rather laborious calculations. However these calculations are rather hard work. Given that A+B*C=D, is that (A+B)*C=D or A+(B*C)=D. Anyone who knows anything about maths will realise that should be A+(B*C)=D, but many people setting these puzzles insist that you are supposed to start at the beginning of the sum and work your way through, and simply refuse to listen when they are told that this is not how it is supposed to be done. It is a trivial point, but one which can be the difference between being where you are supposed to be, or half a mile away.
I did a little more Coursera then took the dogs out.
We drove up to Kings Wood where we had a surprisingly good walk. Pogo’s behaviour was frankly terrible yesterday, but today he was a different dog. As I remarked to another dog walker I would love to know what goes on inside his head to provoke him. Kings Wood was busy today – we met loads of people as we walked. One elderly couple made me chuckle; we met them about as far from the car park as it was possible to get on today’s walk and they commented on how good it was to see dogs in the woods not on a short lead. They too have met countless dogs over a mile from the nearest road on the shortest of leads.
We came home and found that more geocaches had gone live while we were in the woods, but with poor signal up there we didn’t find out until it was too late. I suppose I should take consolation in having got a bumper crop of dog turds out of the back garden. I then spent a few minutes repairing the dog proofing barrier between the boot area and the back seat of my car. When it is just me and the dogs (like today) the dogs do “boot dogs” and are as good as gold. When we have passengers (like on last Saturday) they try to pull the barrier down. The poor thing was at forty-five degrees after Saturday’s episode, but with a little rearranging I got it back into place hopefully better than it was.
With a dog asleep on either side of me I watched a film. “Z for Zachariah” passed an hour, but it was rather crap. I only stuck with it as I was underneath sleeping dogs and the rules say you can’t disturb a sleeping dog (let alone two).
I then wrote my last essay for my Coursera course with a sense of having totally misunderstood what it was all about. I was presented with information about seven exoplanets All were different and I had to make a judgement which one “would likely present the most hospitable environment to human astronauts upon arrival”. Well… only one of the planets was a possibility. Only one was close enough to reach in a human lifespan. Was it a trick question, or had I missed the point entirely?
I then had a look at the monthly accounts. They were far better than I had any right to expect them to be, I’m far from rolling in money, but bearing in mind that over the last few weeks we had to pay to get the old gas fire removed, we had a new washing machine, we had to get a dripping radiator fixed… we could be a whole lot worse off.
And as something of a bonus we’ve only got two more mortgage payments to make.
Having said that, “er indoors TM” wants to pay someone to strip out the entire kitchen and put in a new one… or to be precise “er indoors TM” wants *me* to pay someone to strip out the entire kitchen and put in a new one, And the bathroom too. I can’t say I’m keen on the idea, but when has that ever counted for anything?
“er indoors TM” came home, sorted dinner, and went off bowling. I activated Netflix and watched an episode of “Norsemen”. The show was billed as “Monty Python meets Game of Thrones”… presumably by someone who has never seen any of these shows. It was utter crap, just like “Z For Zachariah”.
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