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7 March 2022 (Monday) - Before the Late Shift

A good walk yesterday had everyone sleeping well last night. I woke at eight o’clock to see “er indoors TM” and Treacle had got up but Pogo was still snoring at the foot of the bed.

We got up and finding “er indoors TM” in the shower I skipped having a shave, made toast and peered into the Internet once the laptop’s browser finally started working. More and more I find that I click the icon and the thing does nothing but sound like a helicopter taking off. It is clearly doing all sorts of things in the background, but *not* doing the job I want it to do. This seems to be an “IT thing”; people who know IT seem to think there is some strange merit in having a computer not actually able to do the job it is intended to do.

 

I eventually got to see what was going on on-line. The photos I’d posted yesterday had been liked by quite a few people. Other friends were on holiday in Ely and in Cornwall and looked to be having a good time. Being nosey I like seeing what other people are doing.

I saw that the March Geo-Meet has been announced… on a weekend that I can’t make.

And I saw that someone had been out walking the series of caches I’d hidden in Hemsted Forest and had been less than complimentary about some of the hints that I’d given. What did the chap expect? The place is a forest; there aren’t many places to hide a film pot other than at the base of a tree. So if a film pot is hidden at the base of a tree, I can’t really say much else for a hint other than “base of tree”, can I?.

Mind you he’d replaced one of the missing caches, so I shouldn’t really grumble.

 

With “er indoors TM” out of the way I had my shave, then walked the dogs round the park where my idiot magnet was working at full power. First of all we attracted some woman with a baby in a pram and a very over-excited spaniel. This woman loudly announced to her spaniel that my dogs would like to play “ball” with him. It came as something of a shock for her to find that my dogs won’t even play “ball” with each other; let alone with some strange dog they’d never seen before. Whilst I was refereeing this set-to, some other idiot woman arrived with her two dogs on the longest extending leads you ever did see. Her dogs soon tangled her, the woman with the pram, the pram, me, and all of the dogs into the biggest knot in the history of knots.

There is a place for extending dog leads, and it is *not* wrapped around my ankles.

We came home to find a geocacher rummaging in the box in the front garden. Geocachers do that.

I harvested a bumper crop of dog poo, then sat on the sofa (with snoring dogs) and fiddled on my lap-top (which was now working) as the washing machine did it thing. I saw a friend had posted on Facebook about the stupidity of teaching schoolchildren about “fronted adverbials” (whatever they are) and how teaching the kids something useful might be a good idea.

The article was written from the arts point of view, but much the same is true in the sciences too. I was talking with a tutor at the University of Westminster a few years ago (in 2005!) who told me that the first term/semester of a particular biosciences course had been changed to being purely remedial/catchup sessions covering all the stuff that the students hadn’t been taught in “A” levels any more. 

I had a quick go at “Sweardle” and “Lewdle”, wrote up some CPD, sent out a birthday wish to someone who is two weeks younger than me (and not several years older as I always thought), and seeing both dogs were fast asleep I got ready for work…

 

And that was it for the day. The late shift was horrible (I had to do work!) and got home far too late to do anything…

Same again tomorrow…

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