3 January 2025 (Friday) - No Internet

I slept like a log. Despite a very cold night the hose of my CPAP machine didn’t fill with condensation which was a minor result. I woke after a nine-hour kip and made toast. For once pretty much nothing of note was happening on my Facebook feed.
Seeing the electrician’s report still hadn’t arrived I phoned the emergence people who assured me that the report was with their “work in progress team” who were rather busy. Having spent a lifetime working in an environment where everything really is immediate and right away, it amazes me how slowly some people work.
 
Seeing the sun coming out I decided that despite the heavy frost I’d take the dogs up to the woods. We got them into their coats, scraped the ice from the car and off we went.
The woods were busier than usual, but again most people we met seemed to be within half a mile of the car park. No one wants to go too far from the car. We had a good walk, and with coats on we weren’t shivering when we got back to the car.
 
We took a minor diversion as we came home. There had been a report of an issue with one of my geocaches. Despite a dozen other people finding the thing over the last two months I was told the co ordinates were out and the spoiler piccie was wrong. The co-ordinates weren’t as good as they might have been but the piccie was fine. The thing was exactly where it was supposed to be.
I came home and made a cuppa, and as I tried to update the problematical geocache’s web page so the internet connection died. You don’t realise how much you use an internet connection until it isn’t there. Rather like the house’s electricity.   
 
Being unable to work from home, “er indoors TM drove in to work. I settled in front of the telly and watched episodes of “Four in a Bed” in which some particularly difficult woman running a guest house only five miles away from my brother’s house insisted all her guests be in bed by nine o’clock every night.
The internet came back on after an outage of two hours, then went back off again just as I got the text message saying it was fixed. I thought there might still be ongoing issues so I left it and watched the remastered Doctor Who episode “The War Games”. Originally broadcast in ten black and white episodes taking more than four hours to watch it’s been colourised and cut down to an hour and a half. It was rather good.
 
And then seeing the broadband was still down I phoned the helpline. A rather helpful chap asked a few questions and arranged for an engineer to come out tomorrow. I got an email confirming the visit. The email said “During your appointment, you may need to update your WiFi settings. This means you, or whoever is home, will need to have access to the My Sky app”. I downloaded it, and not having any idea what my Sky ID login or password was I phoned the people at Sky. The rather helpful chap had clearly gone on his tea break and had been replaced by Captain Useless. He wanted to know what my Sky ID was. I said I had no idea. He said he couldn’t tell me what it was as it was a secret. After a lot of arguing he suggested I might put in my email address and ask for a reset. I tried that (with him listening) about a dozen times and no reset email came through. Captain Useless wouldn’t do anything but keep repeating set phrases from his script. After a while he announced that I didn’t need my Sky ID login or password for an engineer visit even though it said that I did on the email they’d sent me.
After twenty minutes I gave up on him and eventually I found out what it was from pure guesswork just as “er indoors TM came home.
I’ve managed to connect my lap-to to the internet through my mobile, but it is all rather slow.
 
We had a rather good steak dinner washed down with a bottle of plonk and followed up with cheese and biccies. And having had fish, steak and biccies (no cheese though) Treacle is now demanding more food…

2 January 2025 (Thursday) - Chess, A Walk, Traitors

I slept well last night – for over nine hours. I was woken by a strange gurgling bubbling sound. The hose of my CPAP machine has been getting condensation forming in it over the last week. I expect that’s to do with it being cold at night.
I made toast and looked at the Internet as I do. This morning my Facebook feed was again heaving with the posts about chess which filled it yesterday. The adverts for dog training were still there, but loads of people were commenting that they had paid good money and had nothing back from these courses. I also saw quite a few posts featuring the navy’s aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales too. I wonder why.
I had two messages from Facebook as well. The two porn adverts that I reported yesterday have been removed. Actually applying their community standards might be their New Year’s resolution.
I munzed, got Wordle on the third attempt, then seeing sunshine got dressed and got ready for the off.
 
Once I’d scraped the ice from the car I took the dogs up to the woods. It was a foggy day, but we had a good walk. Once we were away from the car park we walked for nearly four miles and only saw one other group. Mind you we did see a huge buzzard flying through the trees.
We walked for four miles and didn’t get *that* grubby. Mind you the little ones were shivering when I loaded them into the car. We came home for a quick shower of paws and tummies and then I had a rather frustrating half-hour on the phone to the insurance people. “Stewart” was more helpful than the other two people had been at Sainsburys insurance, and after he’d taken all my details he put me through to the underwriter. The underwriter said that he needed an electrician’s report. I said that one had been done on Monday and had been emailed through… I got on to the people who sent the electrician on Monday and they said they’d email me a copy of the report.
I’m still waiting.
I’m left pondering though. I have an insurance policy with one company. However when I come to claim, it turns out that the actual insuring is being done by another company. All the first lot are doing seems to be acting as a middleman. Next year I will go with the actual insurer and (as Oliver Hardy once said) “cut out the middleman”.
 
Pausing only briefly to put back a fence panel that had blown out in yesterday’s winds I then cracked on with some CPD. For dull reasons that I explained over on that other blog I spent a few minutes Googling and I found an advert. You can see it here. It is offering blood film analysis (with a two-week turnaround time!) for three hundred and twenty-eight quid. Bearing in mind I can do fifty of those a day I think I’m missing a trick here…
Then finding myself underneath a pile of dogs I watched a couple of episodes of “Victoria”. They were rather good, but again finding myself woefully ignorant of nineteenth century history I turned to Wikipedia. And again found that what was being presented as a historical drama was actually factually incorrect. Chartists never stormed Buckingham Palace… and certainly not just as Princess Louisa was being born.
 
I had another look at Facebook; I found myself still being bombarded with adverts for chess-related pages. So I set myself up an account on chess.com. so far I’m kicking the ass of a both with difficulty rating “rather easy”.
 
“er indoors TM came home from babysitting littlun, and boiled up fish and chips which we scoffed whilst watching the first two episodes of the new series of The Traitors”. It’s a good show in which everyone turns on everyone with the least provocation and at the slightest excuse whilst the actual traitors pretend not to be at each other’s throats.

1 January 2025 (Wednesday) - Wet New Year

When I went to bed last night I’d left the landing light on in case littlun got up in the night. This morning I rolled over and saw the light was off. Panic immediately set in. “er indoors TM had clearly got up in the night and turned it off. The bedside clock and my CPAP machine were both going, but I keep fretting about the leccie and after that shock I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. I got up. So did Morgan. He’d spent the night with me but on seeing I was going downstairs he went upstairs to join everyone else in the attic room.
It was only a shame I’d not woken in panic a couple of hours earlier ten I could have driven out to Ramsgate for the sunrise geocaching meet. We’d decided against going to this one as getting to Ramsgate for half past seven on New Year’s Day would have been a tad keen, but if I’ been up in time…
Back in the day there was always a geocaching event on New Year’s Day. I organised two of them myself. One in 2016 when thirty-six people and four dogs went for a walk round Great Chart, and another in 2022 when thirty people (and a few dogs) went over to Frogs Island to play Wherigo. Sadly other than a lady from New Zealand staging a meet outside her hotel just before her brekkie, no one organised anything for this year. Several people had asked it there was anything on the cards; no one had offered to do anything though…
 
As I made toast I peered into the internet. It might be a new year, but some things never change. I’ve taken to following a Facebook group all about people taking early retirement and sharing their experiences. It makes for interesting reading if nothing else. One chap in his early forties had saved up half a million quid and wondered if that was enough to retire on. How can you have saved up half a million quid by your early forties? And other people were asking where the best place to retire to would be? Several people on this group (and a few I know personally) have left everyone they know and moved hundreds (if not thousands) of miles away to lead their dream retirements. I suppose if your dream retirement is a lonely one then this is the way to go?
And my Facebook feed featured seemingly endless adverts for on-line dog training classes and chess-related groups.
 
I put washing in to scrub. I sorted the undercrackers I’d washed last night. I braved the elements and harvested the dog dung from the garden. Our plan for today had been a gentle walk before taking littlun home, but the wind and the rain weren’t good and were forecast to get worse by mid-day. So I spent a little while looking at the geo-map searching out a relatively easy geo-find that we might pick up on the way home from having dropped littlun off.
 
After slightly more than four hours “er indoors TM and Darcie WaaWaa TM got up. Littlun was in something of a bossy mood; poor grandad wasn’t allowed to play with the cars or the Lego. She then got the hump that the dogs wanted to eat her breakfast, and got even more stressy when she threw it at them and they ate it.
After a little while we persuaded her to allow Nanny to get dressed, and it was time to take her home… once we’d persuaded her that I was allowed to come along. We drove down to Folkestone where “Daddies’ Little Angel TM and Pogo were pleased to have littlun back.
I’d planned a few possible geo-targets for our way home. Logging a geocache find today would give us a souvenir. Fortunately we found the first one and didn’t need to go on to any of the backups; the forecast wind and rain were getting worse.
 
We came home and settled ourselves in front of the telly where I slept through a re-run of the new Wallce and Gromit film, and then slept through Mary Poppins. Having been wide awake far too early this morning I slept through what I wanted to watch on the telly.
 
“er indoors TM boiled up a very good curry which we washed down with a rather good bottle of plonk whilst watching the second part of the Christmas episode of “Lego Masters: Australia”.
According to the Internet the Northern Lights are visible tonight. Such a shame it is still hossing down.