5 April 2022 (Tuesday) - Painting Gnomes, Munzee Gardening

I slept rather well, but woke feeling as thought I had a cold. Which (I suppose) isn’t that far from the truth. I made some toast and had a little look at the Internet as I do most morning. A friend was ranting about the closure of some bus services near where he lived… Like most people he seemed to have overlooked the sad fact that buses aren’t public services any more. They all got sold off and nowadays are run by companies looking to make a profit. (Little bit of politics – we get what we vote for…)

Much the same happened locally. People were up in arms on Facebook about some particular bus services going… and then one of the bus drivers (someone on my list of Facebook friends!) piped up that he drove for one of the lines under threat and more often than not he was driving an empty bus. After a massive public outcry the bus route was saved (the G-line) but still very few people use it.

I also saw that there was a new Munzee garden being created just down the road. A Munzee garden is a load of virtual Munzees deployed on the map in such a way to make a pretty picture. They do make a pretty picture *if* they are put out in the right place. However if they are put out on top of a whole load of pre-existing stuff it just looks a mess.

 

I then spent a little while (two hours!) looking to design a Munzee garden of my own. I eventually got to grips with the software, but eventually didn’t so much “give up” as “put on hold” since although I’d got a suitable location, I didn’t know what picture I wanted to draw.

I went outside, fetched in some (three) garden gnomes and the paints, and spent an hour or so touching them up. The paint has peeled a bit in the two years since I last painted them (in August 2020). As I painted I watched more episodes of “Orange Is The New Black”. I’d forgotten just how graphic that show can be.

 

Feeling a tad peckish I use the “Just Eat” app to order up some McLunch. It was surprisingly easy and using the app I got to track my dinner as it crossed the town and came through the gate supposedly only to be used for buses, taxis and the emergency services.

Flushed with success I then tried to organise a delivery of odds and ends of shopping that I need. Tesco couldn’t do any home deliveries at all for a week. Sainsburys could deliver tomorrow morning… but wanted seven quid for doing so.

I shall just make do with what I can forage from the cupboards.

 

I painted four more gnomes, played a little more “Star Trek: Elite Force II”, then had anther look at the Munzee garden creator. As a first attempt I thought I might go for something geometrical rather than artistic, and actually managed to complete the project in a fraction of the time I’d wasted this morning. Having decided what I actually wanted to do, I got it all done in about forty minutes, and now it is down to fellow Munz-ers to join in. Effectively what happens is that rather than sticking a bar code on a dog poo bin, people go to an excel spreadsheet in my Google drive. This gives the latitude and longitude of the point where I would like people to deploy a Munzee, and also what sort I’d like deployed. I’ve stuck a piccie of what it should look like when it is finished above.

Within half an hour of my setting the thing live, half a dozen people had contributed to it, so as a “proof of concept” the thing isn’t the abject failure I thought it might have been. 

I thought today would drag; it didn’t… Still wish I was away on holiday though. Mind you I got a message from the bosses saying that they’ve cancelled this week’s leave and put me down as being off sick. A minor victory, I suppose.

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