I rather ached when I
woke this morning. After-effects of Friday’s vaccinations or too much jumping
about on the trampolines yesterday?
I
made toast and sparked up my lap-top. Two Facebook friends had birthdays today.
I sent out birthday wishes to the one with whom I see regularly… the other made
me think… The one to whom I sent the birthday video is someone with whom I
work. The one to whom I didn’t is someone with whom I used to work twelve years
ago, haven’t seen since and (in all honesty) probably never will.
Work
is strange, isn’t it? You spend so much of your life with some people all day
every day. Then one or other of you leave the workplace and you never see them
again…
I loaded the dogs into the car and we set off for
WIllesborough. As we drove the pundits on the radio were interviewing someone
or other about his experiences with someone else. I have absolutely no idea who
the person being interviewed was, or any idea who they were talking about, but
it was rather captivating.
We got to the Skoda garage where we left the car (to get
the brakes sorted) and walked the two and a half miles home. The walk went
well even if the dogs did have to stay on the lead the entire time. We met a
few dogs; most encounters passed off uneventfully. One didn’t though. There was
an elderly couple with a white Labrador. The dog didn’t seem fussed, but the
elderly woman started shrieking “Ooh, Ooh, Ooh” with increasing volume
and increasing panic for absolutely no reason at all. Needless to say this
wound all the dogs up.
And then another woman screamed and jumped on to a wall as
we walked past. I’m seeing this more and more and (at the risk of appearing
racist) especially from the immigrant community. Are my three hounds really
*that* scary?
As we walked we went past where I once hid a geocache (nearly ten years ago). I’d had a
report that the thing was missing. Was it? I don’t know – I couldn’t get
anywhere near the tree where it was supposed to be; the brambles were that
high.
We came home where I sorted a cuppa for me and “er
indoors TM” and warmed up the last of the pains au chocolat from
yesterday, and then had a little think about that problem geocache of mine.
Having thought about it I then put right whatever
geocaching dot com had done to the description of one of my geocaches near work (rendering
it unsolvable), then strained my brain on a puzzle geocache that I spotted on the
geo-map not far from home.
The puzzle was straightforward. There were eleven
photographs of Lego models of famous landmarks each with a letter from A to L (geocachers
don’t use the letter “I”!) You have to identify each landmark, then order
them from the most westerly to the most easterly. If the most westerly was “F”
and the most easterly was “B” then F=1 and B=11. (*If* they were…
which they weren’t). Given a numeric value for each letter you then
substitute each letter into the formula N51 (H-H)(C+G-B).(K-L)(L-F)(J-D+C) E000
(D-E)(L+C-H).(A+B)(K-G)(J-F+E) and come up with a location either a short(ish)
walk from home or somewhere out on the Romney Marsh, depending on whether you
got it right or wrong.
I got it right…
I had hoped we might be walking past this geocache when we
went to get the car from the garage in the afternoon. I won’t give any
spoilers, but I will say that it would have involved a little more than the
teensiest diversion. Luckily “er indoors TM” suggested we drove
out in her car on her lunch break to see if we might find it.
We did.
As we drove home so my phone rang. My car was ready. So
pausing only briefly for a quick sandwich I got the dogs onto their leads again
and off we went to get it.
We walked out past where my problem geocache was. I put out
a new one on the footpath a few yards from the old one, and then a little later
I replaced one of “er indoors TM”’s geocaches which was
missing.
Eventually we got to the garage and got the car. There’s no
denying we drove home a lot faster than we drove out.
I spent an hour reading more “Game of Thrones” on my
Kindle, and once “er indoors TM” had boiled up dinner and
gone bowling I sparked up Netflix and sat on the sofa amongst a swarm of dogs.
As they snored I watched a film. “In Time” started off with
an interesting premise; rather than having a cash-based economy, the currency of
the society in the film was lifetime. Given enough time people could live
forever. However this was just the basis for a police story with a difference…
the difference being it was pretty much the same as every other police story
that has ever been told. It descended into a sort-of sci-fi version of Bonnie
and Clyde. Sadly despite being total paupers, Bonnie managed to have a complete
change of wardrobe in every scene.
I watched it with a sense of déjà vu. Some of it seemed
really familiar. Had I seen it before?
Today was rather busy; not a bad start to a week off work
really.
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