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?

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