7 February 2025 (Friday) - Late Shift

I slept well. I was pleased about that. I peered into the Internet as I scoffed toast, trying to see if this full fibre (that we had installed yesterday) had made any difference. It hadn’t. It seems to have been a lot of faffing and upheaval for absolutely no benefit whatsoever. I had a little look on Google this morning which seemed to think that with ful fibre I should be having download speeds of up to nine hundred Mbps. Not one hundred and eight as it managed this morning. USwitch claimed that if I told Sky to stuff it and went with some bunch called YouFibre I could get speeds of one hundred and fifty Mbps. Bearing in mind it all comes down the same cables I’m not sure how that would work. I suppose it’s like the electricity and gas which come into my house which have different prices according to who I pay the bill to.
 
I had a look at Facebook. I wanted to ask opinions about an idea I’ve had. As we walked round the Romney Marsh last weekend I saw a rather pretty ornamental pond in someone’s garden. I’ve got enough odds and ends to make most of something along those lines, but the whole thing focusses on a waterfall. I’ve no way of easily getting leccie to the front garden so I wanted to ask for people’s experiences with solar powered water pumps. Sadly one of the Facebook UK pond groups has been formally paused. I can’t help but wonder why. I asked on another. That should be good for an argument. I’ve had a few replies – apparently solar powered pond pumps are of variable quality… or are “hitty miss” to quote one of the replies I had.
 
I munzed and Wordled, and seeing the drizzle decided against taking the dogs out. Instead I settled on the sofa and carried on writing web pages for my Kings Wood geo-series until geocaching dot com crashed. 
I took that as a sign that it was time to go to work.
 
As I walked out to my car so the bin men were blocking the road. About five hours later than usual on a Friday. Were they running late or have they changed the collection times?
 
I drove through a very wet morning listening to the radio. Various windbags were pontificating about healthy eating. Apparently healthy calories are twice the price on non-healthy ones. Perhaps that's where my diets have been going wrong? There was all sorts of talk about how politicians on all sides agree that whatever government is in power it should try to legislate in favour of healthy eating. However they all pointed out that the masses like a maccy D and don't like being told why it is bad for them. As Ronald Reagan once remarked about any political debate, “If you're explaining, you're losing”.
 
I took a minor diversion on my way to work. A new geocache went out yesterday and still hadn't been found. I thought I might get First to Find; the chap who was there first was doing the secret geo-rituals round about the time I was leaving home.
Mind you it was an odd cache. Someone's first hide and stuffed in the scout's bug hotel. I bet the scouts don't know about that. I shall be seeing one of them tomorrow - I shall see what he thinks.
 
I got to work and had a rather busy late shift. Certainly busier than I had hoped for.
 
I came home to find that “er indoors TM had been painting. Ostensibly the door. To be honest there was more paint on the door than there was on Treacle, but not much more.

6 February 2025 (Thursday) - Full Fibre

Despite a rather vivid dream in which Bailey announced that she was no longer a dog and from now on was identifying as an arctic fox I slept rather well. “er indoors TM ‘s alarm woke me immediately following a dream in which I had been told that the answer to today’s wordle was “smear”. What was that all about?
 
I made my toast and had my usual look at the Internet. It was still there. There was a surprising amount of grief being expressed about Brian Murphy who died yesterday. He was famous for being George Roper in “Man About the House”; a rather lame comedy from fifty years ago. He was in his nineties. This morning I read poems written about him and lamentations about his passing. The chap was ninety-two. That’s not bad, is it?
I Munzed, I found that not only was “smear” not the answer to today’s wordle but not a single one of its letters were in the word, which was actually “pupil”.
 
I took the dogs up to the woods. We set off driving through a glorious morning, but the woods are on much higher ground and as we got closer so the fog got thicker. I often wonder if it is fog or low cloud, but when we arrived visibility was less than fifty yards.
We met quite a few people in the woods today. Dogs on twenty-metre leads seemed to be popular today. I can understand having a dog on an epically long lead might be needed if there are recall issues, but an epically long lead is an ideal thing to get tangled round the trees. And we met one very nervous dog… or (to be precise) a dog whose owner told us he was nervous. The dog seemed fine. I suggested they came to Dog Club to socialize; she seemed quite keen on the idea.
As we walked so the fog/cloud lifted. We did one of our usual circuits which my watch told me was a shade over three and a half miles. It was just under four miles when we walked the same route earlier in the week.
It was only a shame that Bailey tried to eat a dead bird.
 
We came home and for once didn’t need baths. I made a cuppa, wrote up some CPD, and offered to help tidy up. The nice man from Openreach was coming to upgrade the broadband and needed to get to the front wall to drill a hole. “er indoors TM said I wasn’t to help tidy up; it was a job she could do better on her own. She probably had a point.
It has to be said that upgrading the broadband wasn’t my idea. The nice man at Sky suggested it when the broadband went down just after Christmas. I got the impression that it was some sort of a bung to keep me sweet because the internet had been down for three days. But he also gave me two months’ supposedly free Sky Sports and I’ve just been told that from next month I’ll be charged for Sky Sports. Not that I ever wanted the sport channels. I’ve now cancelled them.
 
The nice man from Openreach arrived, fiddled about and after an hour and a half he went leaving us a nice new white router box thingy. He left the old one as well and said it would probably work for another hour or so. I plumbed my lap-top and mobile into the new network thingy.
I cracked on writing cache pages for my new load of geocaches in Kings Wood. After three hours I had a first draft for about a quarter of them. And then the Alexa stopped playing music. The old broadband had been turned off and we had to plumb it into the new. There was a minor issue in that Alexa wouldn’t accept the new network without “er indoors TM telling it that all was fine. How many other devices want your password when connecting to a new network?
Connecting the telly was simple enough, but connecting the SkyQ box was hard work. We’re now running everything on Full Fibre. Go us!!

I’ve done a before and after speed check. The upload isn’t much faster, but the download is thirty per cent quicker. I suppose that must be a good thing, but I never had an issue with the old broadband.
I wonder how long it will be before Full Fibre is old hat and the next new thing is being foisted on us?

5 February 2025 (Wednesday) - Early Shift

I had a rather restless night. Despite having the internet connections turned off, my phone loudly announced that I had a message (about trivia) just as I was nodding off. I then did my annoying trick of sleeping soundly for two hours, waking before two o’clock and then laying awake for the rest of the night.
And so I was up silly early watching more “Poldark” in which Captain Monk Adderly started sniffing round Elizabeth. I can’t work out why Elizabeth is seen as the local beauty; she always has a face like a smacked bum.
 
I then sparked up the lap-top and saw sad news… The local Husky group is no more. Running Dog Club isn’t difficult. All I do for our group is show up, open the gate, hang up the money pot and tie a carrier bag for dog turds to the fence. Admittedly someone else from one of our later groups takes the turds away and locks the gate, but it is hardly arduous. You just stick the bag of turds into the nearest bin. And the money – count it up, pocket it and transfer that amount from your own account to the account of the people whose field it is. It really isn’t that much to do, it probably takes me five minutes each week, and everyone (humans and dogs) have such a good time.
Our dog club meets on a Saturday morning. Until recently there has been a similar group meeting on a Sunday for huskies and other large dogs. The woman running the group has had to step down, and sadly the group has now closed down. No one was prepared to take over. Could no one have found five minutes a week to keep the group running?
 
Taking care not to wake anyone I got ready for work, and once I'd scraped the ice from the car I set off. Having a few minutes spare I took a little diversion in the general direction of Stanhope to capture a dozen flat friends (it's a Munzee thing) before heading up the motorway.
Sadly I'd timed things to get on the motorway just as a load of lorries had come up the motorway from the ferry, and so with the slow lane full of lorries going at fifty miles per hour and the middle lane full of lorries overtaking them at fifty-one miles per hour I took my life in my hands and went in the fast lane. I pulled into the middle lane when I could; there was a seemingly never-ending queue of vans wanting to voom past at breakneck speed.
 
As I drove the pundits on the radio were talking about President Trump's latest stroke of genius. He's going to solve the Gaza problem by annexing it and forcibly evicting two million Palestinians. Clearly that goes entirely against international law, but in cases like this who is it that enforces international law? Yes - the American army.
Will he go ahead with his plan? Probably not. I suspect he will actually claim that the plan couldn't go ahead and cite whoever is seen as Public Enemy #1 in the eyes of the American electorate and come out more popular than ever. Like him or loathe him, you have to admire him.
 
Needing lunch I popped in at  Sainsburys. I got what I needed and again there were no tills open with till operatives. That suited me today; with a ton of change from emptying the collection pot from Dog Club I bought several odds and ends and paid for it all by emptying all the silver and brass coins into the machine. One of the staff was glaring at me; I gave her a sickly smile and carried on dropping in the five and ten pence pieces.
 
I did my bit. I came home. I had an email. Someone had commented on something I'd posted to my CPD blog. They'd written "die!"  five hundred and thirty-six times. Some people would be concerned about that; I think it is rather sad that some people have nothing better to do with their time, and that whoever it was that wants me to die is too cowardly to put their name to the comment.
I wonder who it was. I have absolutely no idea.
I’ve changed the settings to stop people posting anonymously. I did that on here several years ago.
 
I wonder what’s for dinner… I’ve got seven hundred and twenty calories left on today’s allowance.

4 February 2025 (Tuesday) - This n That

After a good night’s sleep I made toast and had my usual rummage round the Internet. This morning some chap had posted on one of the work-related Facebook groups to say that yesterday a patient had brought in a lump of plastic, claimed he’d coughed it up and wanted it to be tested. This provoked a flurry of posts about other objects which other people had brought into their labs with demands for testing. I didn’t reply (which is the best way to avoid being embroiled in an argument I neither need nor want) but I remembered an incident from twenty years ago. Some aggressive chap marched through a door clearly labelled “staff only” and thrust a jam jar at me. It contained what looked like a lump of snot. Apparently this chap had peed it out that morning and caught it in his sieve. Apparently this chap always peed through a sieve so that he might trap anything untoward which he might be peeing out. He demanded that I test this object. I asked him what tests he had in mind (I was wondering about suggesting the nine times table or Latin vocabulary); the chap screamed “TEST IT” and stormed off never to be seen again.
And this morning’s squabble was from a supermarket in Rye posting CCTV images of people recorded shoplifting. Is the supermarket allowed to do that? Someone was claiming breaches of GDPR. Can you post someone’s photo without their say-so? I can remember my photo once being spread far and wide. In the mid-1980s the Boys Brigade brought out a new handbook in which a photo of me featured prominently…  I had a huge zit on the side of my nose. I hated that photo, but legally I could do nothing. It turned out that provided the photo wasn’t invading my privacy I had no control over my likeness. Mind you whether or not posting a photo of someone and accusing them of shoplifting is a whole other thing.
 
I took the dogs to the woods. Yesterday the puddles and mud were frozen and the dogs wore coats. Today was eight degrees warmer. We walked one of our standard walks of just under four miles and had a rather uneventful walk. There was a minor incident when Treacle found a deer skeleton, but she lost interest after a minute or so. Bailey wasn’t interested at all. Morgan peed on it and wandered off.
 
As we drove home there was something frankly amazing on the radio, Some woman had been going to yoga classes two or three years ago and got invited to go to a weekend yoga retreat. One thing led to another and before long she found herself in an “advanced yoga class” which involved travelling abroad, handing over her passport and phone, posing for nudey pictures, giving topless massages and doing the dirty deed with the tutor. All of which (so she claimed) seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, and it was only later that she realized that none of this was standard yoga practice.
The woman speaking seemed sensible and reasonable, and wanted to be sure that no one else got taken in like she did.
Makes you think, eh?
 
Once home the dogs had the obligatory go in the bath. Paws and tummies get filthy in the woods, but they are as good as gold at bath time. I sorted us both a cuppa and the last of the Christmas cake, then wrote a new Wherigo for this year’s Kings Wood geo-plan. I went on Amazon and ordered thirty (or so) self-inking stamps for my letterbox hybrids, and with that done all that remains is to work out sixty puzzles, calculate thirty projections, write over a hundred geocache descriptions, then go stick a load of pots under rocks in the woods.
That should keep me busy…
 
I then cracked on with the ironing whilst watching more “Poldark” until the doctor rang about my blood pressure. For once I talked with someone I could understand and who seemed sensible. She didn’t patronize and tell me what I already knew. She said that coming off of night work for the time being was definitely a good thing, and said I should continue trying to lose weight. She’s arranging for all sorts of blood and urine tests and an ECG to be done, and suggests I should continue to measure my blood pressure weekly. She talked about long term medication but (like me) seemed to think it was best avoided if possible. She suggested I carry on with walking and dieting and she’ll review me in three months’ time.
 
“er indoors TM boiled up a rather good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching moreCelebrity Hunted”. As I asked a couple of days ago, are these celebrities stupid?

3 February 2025 (Monday) - Geo-Planning

Whenever I’m on a diet I have a weigh-in on a Monday morning. Since I started this diet ark three weeks ago I’ve lost ten pounds which is something of a result. Mind you I’ve always found that provided I ignore the pain of being constantly hungry, weight loss is easy. Keeping the weight off is the tricky bit.
I made toast and had a little look at the Internet as I do. This morning’s petty squabble on Facebook was about the unit used for measuring radiation exposure. Most people favoured calling it the roentgen, but a vociferous minority were claiming the unit was called the ronkin.
Oh, there was some serious attitude going on.
 
I went out to the car and scraped the ice off, then loaded up the dogs and took them to the woods for a little walk. We went up to Kings Wood where I checked up the final locations on some more of the geo-series I’m planning there. We had a good walk over four and a half miles; once away from the car park we didn’t see anyone else at all.
At one point I saw movement in the woods about a hundred yards in front of us. Deer. A herd of about twenty. They’d obviously seen us and were walking as fast as we were, just keeping that distance between us until we reached a crossroads of the tracks. At that point they all ran across the path in front of us. My ever-vigilant dogs completely missed them.
When we left home the thermometer in the car said it was half a degree above freezing. When we got back to the car after our walk it was nine degrees. What a difference in under three hours.
 
We came home. I’d put coats onto the smaller dogs thinking that might keep them warm and clean. But once home I had to wash both the dogs and the coats.
I made a cuppa and cut myself a slice of Christmas cake, then sparked up the laptop and carried on with my current geo-project. After three hours I’d come up with the artwork for the geo series – what people will see on the map before they start solving the puzzles and correcting the co-ordinates.
And after another two hours I’d re-written my old Crystal Maze Wherigo into a little series of brain teasers.
 
Once we’d scoffed dinner “er indoors TM went bowling, and as the dogs snored I settled in front of the telly and watched more “Poldark”. Cornwall of two hundred years ago would seem to have been a very unmoral place. Mistress Morwenna was hankering after Drake. Her husband the vicar had tubbed her sister. And on seeing what Ross was up to with Elizabeth, Demelza decided that what was good for the goose was good for a goosing.
I gave up after two episodes. I needed a rest.

2 February 2025 (Sunday) - A Day at the Coast

As I headed to the loo in the small hours so Bailey appeared from her basket. What was she doing downstairs? I let her into the garden, and once we’d both done our things she ran up the stairs to bed… and stopped. Treacle was standing at the foot of the bed glaring at her. I picked Bailey up and lifted her past Treacle, and all was fine. But Treacle clearly didn’t want Bailey coming up.
We all went back to bed and slept through until nearly nine o’clock.
 
I made toast and had my usual rummage round the Internet. Several people were kicking off on one of the local Facebook groups. Apparently some trees had been cut down in a local car park this morning, and some weren’t happy at the sound of a chain saw at half past seven on a Sunday morning when supposedly hard-working people were trying to sleep. It never fails to amaze me how so many people don’t realise that not everyone works and sleeps at the same time. Presumably those complaining were the same ones who have been complaining recently about how they claimed these trees were dangerous.
And then “er indoors TM and the dogs came down. I took them into the garden and chased round with the turd-harvesting bucket. Bearing in mind I fetched in two epic harvests of dog dung yesterday I was amazed at how much was waiting to be brought in this morning.
 
We got the dogs onto their leads and went out. There is a little adventure lab series along the coast from Littlestone to Dungeness so that filled an hour. Part of it involved a little walk across the nature reserve to the sound mirrors. It was rather pretty down there, but walking on the shingle was hard work.
With ad-lab ad-labbed we then failed to find a geocache on the road to Lydd. The description said that we should look behind the concrete post. We could only see one post and there was nothing behind it.
And with a little time on our hands we went on another geo-adventure. We drove down the road from Lydd to the beach as far as we could. We parked by the sign which clearly said no motor vehicles past this point. That was just over half a mile from where we needed to be, so a little walk down a track with no cars and then a run on the beach would suit us. Or so we thought. No motor vehicles? You wouldn’t believe the number of idiots driving down that track. There were pot holes deeper than my wellies, and you could hear the crunching as the undersides of cars scraped along. But we had a good walk. We got to the beach where there was a little statue of the Mystery Man of Denge Marsh. It’s a statue of a human figure laying on the beach. No one seems to know who put it there, but apparently it has been there for at least twenty years. And (needless to say) there’s a geocache nearby.
It was only a shame that on the walk back to the car Bailey had to run under the fence into the Army shooting range (twice), but she came back.
I took a few photos as we were out and about.
 
We came home for a late lunch. A cup of coffee and a bit of Christmas cake (about half the calories we’d walked off this morning) and I had a look at my next Adventure lab project. I’ve got quite a few ideas in mind for geocaching adventure labs, and one of them is now ready to go. I shall activate it next Saturday in readiness for the geo-event I’m planning for then.
 
“er indoors TM boiled up a rather good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching a couple of episodes of “Celebrity Hunted”. Are these celebrities really that stupid that they have pre-arranged live TV shows? And are the hunters really that stupid that they didn’t check the celebrities’ schedules?

Today has been rather busy…

1 February 2025 (Saturday) - Darcie Went To Dog Club

I slept right through until the alarm off at seven o’clock this morning. I don’t know how everyone else slept, but I didn’t hear anything all night long.
Being the first of the month I cracked out a new razor blade, and once I’d scraped I sorted toast and had a look to see what the Internet had done overnight.
Yesterday evening before I went to kip I wrote up some CPD. Quite a few people had had a look at it. Over the last week it has been looked at over one thousand three hundred times. I can’t see the attraction myself; it is dull in the extreme.
I sent out a birthday wish to the one friend having a birthday this morning, and then the dogs came downstairs. By the time I’d taken them out and gathered up an epic collection of dog turds so everyone had woken and was swarming about downstairs.
 
We had brekkie… or to be precise some of us did. Others (littlun) turned their nose up at a succession of offerings.
And leaving “Daddies’ Little Angel TM laying in state on the sofa the rest of us drove round to Repton and a rather muddy Dog Club. We arrived and opened up, and before long people started arriving. Pogo had been before, but he probably didn’t remember, and responded like pretty much every other dog does on their first time. He found it all rather overwhelming to begin with, but before long he was in the thick of it. Just like so many other dogs I’ve seen there. Little Rouleaux is a classic case in point. A month ago he arrived toward the end of a session, hiding behind his mummy’s ankles. Just like Honey who came for the first time a year ago and who also wouldn’t leave her mummy’s side. Today both of them left their mummies at the gate and came charging in to join in the fun. Mind you Dog Club probably isn’t for everyone; some rather posh woman who came for five minutes last week came along again today. I heard her apologizing to everyone about how her dog jumps up, how she’s been to so many trainers and still he jumps up. And how Dog Club doesn’t seem to be helping at all with the jumping. I just smiled – we don’t run a dog training session. We just hire a secure paddock in which dogs can run and play and generally get used to there being other dogs around. Personally I like dogs jumping up at me, but that’s just me.
After twenty minutes I saw this woman standing off by the paddock’s fence looking down on everyone else in much the same way that God might judge a dubious creation.
But we had at least twenty-one dogs along today (I counted a few times) so we can’t be doing it entirely wrong.
 
Pausing only briefly to drop “er indoors TM at craft club we came home. As we drove Steve was doing the Mystery Year competition on the radio. Ian Dury – Hit me With Your Rhythm Stick and Driver 67? !978 definitely!
I was one year out.
We got home. Having fetched in a bumper crop of dog dung before brekkie I went round the garden again and got another epic harvest of the stuff. And then we spent the morning watching silly animal videos on YouTube and gathering up the washing up until it was time for me to fetch “er indoors TM. I needed a break.
We came home. Littlun carried on wreaking havoc until ”Auntie Chel TM came to visit. ”Auntie Chel TM is littlun’s current favourite; there’s no denying that.
 
“er indoors TM drove “Daddies’ Little Angel TM and Darcie WaaWaa TM home midway through the afternoon. I had a little tidy-up as the dogs slept. They were worn out with it all. As was I.
I ran round with the Hoover; the smaller dogs didn’t even have the energy to try to attack it.
 
“er indoors TM returned and did me sausages and chips for dinner. I’d suggested she baked up the leftover KFC chips from last night’s dinner. In retrospect it wasn’t my best idea.
She then went out with Steve and Sarah to the Old Dairy Taproom where an old mucker was playing with his band. I’ve known Rick for over forty years. It would have been good to have caught up with him, but there’s only so much catching up you can do with the lead guitarist of a band; they are busy as they are working. And I’ve seen his band before, Whilst they are vey good they are also very loud. I resent going to see any sort of live music as I end up spending far too much money just to come home with a headache.
 
Instead I did a second dishwasher load and set the washing machine loose on the undercrackers and settled on the sofa underneath a pile of dogs watching more “Poldark”. Mistress Morwenna has married the sex pest vicar. Lieutenant Armitage has unhealthy desires on Demelza. And Aunt Agatha croaked.