8 January 2023 (Sunday) - My Uncle Stan (!)

I slept like a log last night. I woke to the sound of heavy rain about six o’clock. There’s nothing more depressing than the sound of rain, is there?

I went back to sleep finally emerging from my pit at half past eight.

I had a little look at the Internet and was presented with a brand new Ivor Biggun song. I say “brand new”; the description says it was an old one, but I’d not heard it before. I hear Ivor sometimes plays live in Suffolk… I really most go see him before it is too late.

 

With the dogs settled “er indoors ^TM” and I popped into town for a bit of brekkie with some friends we’d not met up with since before lock-down. It was good to catch up and put the world to rights… it was a shame I struggled to squeeze myself between the chair and the table.

We need to meet up more often. What with lock-down I got out of the habit of being sociable. I need to do something about that.

 

We then drove through the rain down to Ham Street where “er indoors ^TM” ‘s mate was running a stall at the craft fair. Or so we thought. The craft fair isn’t until next weekend… Woops.

Whilst we were in the area I solved a geo-field puzzle and logged the geocache whilst “er indoors ^TM” did some maintenance on her geocaches. I say “maintenance”; I mean “did that which no one else could be bothered to do”. If the thing is clearly missing does it cause physical pain to replace it? And although just going ahead and replacing it is technically against the rules, why don’t people do their homework, read the logs and see what ones look to be missing before they leave home? They might then send a message to ask if they might be helpful and replace the missing one. Mightn’t they?

Very few do, though. It’s a rant which has been done to death. The death being the death of geocaching locally which was dying in its arse a year ago and is now terminal.

Such a shame

We came home via Stanhope where we drove a loop capping Chinese Zodiacs for Munzee purposes. As a hobby Munzee is going from strength to strength.

 

Once home I chivvied the dogs into the garden. With the rain they took some chivvying. And then as “er indoors ^TM” carried on with her jigsaw I made a start on my Lego pirate ship. A little while ago a colleague asked me if I’d like a Lego set she’d acquired. She’d warned me that some of the bits were missing. I’m not sure the instructions were the original ones either… I wasted quite a bit of time before I realised that the bricks that were green in the instructions were actually the black ones.

My colleague was right – quite a few bits were missing. I managed to scare up replacements for the missing bits from my spares. But running up and down the stairs to get odd bits of Lego got a tad gutty after a while.

I stopped after about four hours. I’m probably over half-way with it. I’ll finish it later.

 

And then my phone pinged with geo-news. The future of geocaching is Adventure Labs. Rather than rummaging for film pots under rocks, you go somewhere, answer questions, and score points for getting the answers right.

If you’ve got the Adventure Lab app on your phone, move the map to the general vicinity of Big Ben and call up the lab cache "Happy New Year".

Lab caches are set up so that you can answer the questions a short distance from the location of the question to allow for dodgy phone signals. These ones are based in Westminster and I answered them from fifty miles away. The questions are somewhat simple… along the lines of “Which is a Chinese Zodiac animal: Horse, Armadillo, Bacteria, Sheffield Wednesday“. I suspect that geo-HQ will lay an egg when they find out about it. Log it while you can.

 

“er indoors ^TM” boiled up a very good bit of dinner. As she boiled so she slipped the odd scrap to the dogs. So much so that Morgan was sick. Three times.

We scoffed dinner whilst watching the first episode of the third season of “The Crown”. Very entertaining… but the most entertaining bits were entirely made up. It bothers me that so many people think (so-called) historical drama on the telly is any substitute to a history lesson.