As I scoffed toast this morning I saw that two of my
Facebook friends had birthdays today… I say “friends” I used to work
with both of them over twelve years ago. I’ve seen one of them a couple of
times when I randomly bumped into them in a pub, and I’ve not seen the other
ever since we stopped working together.
There wasn’t much else happening on-line so we got ready
for the day.
As we drove round to Dog Club so Steve was doing the “Lyrics
Quiz” on the radio. He read out a couple of lines from a song… they sounded
familiar. They were from Kate Bush’s “Babooshka”. Go me!
Dog Club was fun; the dogs charged about and had a great
time. But as we arrived there was a minor commotion kicking off. A new dog was
having words with another dog, and the same pup had another squabble later. The
poor new dog has only been with her current family for a few weeks; previously
she was never allowed near any other dogs, and so socializing is a must. There
was never any actual contact between the quarrelling dogs; there rarely is. It
is usually loads of shouting and shoving which just looks and sounds horrible.
We (hopefully) encouraged the chap with her to persevere. Pretty much everyone there was very
understanding; especially those whose dogs had been squabbled at.
From Dog Club we drove up the motorway listening to Steve
doing the Mystery Year competition on the radio. I had it narrowed down to
within five years of 1990… then decided it was 1996. It was 1994.
We drove to Ditton Community Centre where we met up with
Karl, Tracey, Jess and Charlotte. What with the vagaries of my shift
allocations we’ve not got out for a decent walk for ages. But, as always, the
geocaching map came up with a walk for us. A circular walk of four miles (or
so) starting from Ditton with a little branch out to East Malling. We walked
the route in reverse order to get the road part out of the way first. Sadly
that meant we weren’t able to pick up the final of the second geocache (a
field puzzle), but I’ve made a note of the location for another time…
something to occupy me before a late shift perhaps?
As we walked we saw quite a few normal people coming past.
We’d walked past the entrance to the East Malling beer festival. We pondered
going in… if it was a pub’s beer festival we might have done. But the way the
CAMRA operate their beer festivals mean that it isn’t possible to just have one
pint. You get a load of beer tokens,,, and off you go.
It was as well that we didn’t go in. The place had live
music. And (like pretty much all live music) they made up for a lack of
talent by cranking up the volume. The caterwauling was quite audible from over
a mile away.
Geocache-wise it was good to get back to old habits. We
searched for twenty-odd caches and found all of them (not counting the one
which turned out to be half a mile behind us). Mind you we did struggle to
find some of them; between us we had two GPS units and two phones and we all
agreed that most of the given GPS co ordinates were about twenty-five feet out.
Or that is they were twenty-five feet out *today*. What with atmospheric
conditions and tree cover, GPS co-ordinates can be rather variable. I could
well go back another time and find they are spot-on. This is what happened to
me over the winter when I was setting up all the geocaches in Kings Wood.
All too soon it was time to come home. We said our goodbyes
and I stayed awake for much of the way home. As we’d Dog Clubbed and walked
today I’d taken a few photos. I put them on-line, then as “er
indoors TM” went shopping I had a little look at the geo-admin
of today.
I eventually got it done, and then had a little fight with
my GPS unit; The new lap-top told it all about all of the geocaches in the
Ditton area last night. The GPS knew all about them as we walked today, but it
flatly refused to tell my new lap-top which ones we’d found when I plugged it
in this afternoon. Eventually I sorted it by creating a new folder somewhere on
the C drive. However my GPS unit also seems to think that at some point when
walking today I got up to ninety-three miles per hour.
And just as I was on the verge of telling the GPS who was
boss, in some sort of electronic solidarity the lap-top’s cursor went
invisible.
“er indoors TM” came home from
shopping with steak and a rather good bottle of plonk which we devoured whilst
watching another episode of “SAS: Who Dares Wins”.
I’ve whinged over the last few days about how dull my life
can sometimes be. Today was a rather good day.
I’m reliably informed there’s dessert to follow…
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