I slept like a log last
night, but wasn’t too pleased to see the rain as I took the puppies outside
this morning. Admittedly the rain had been forecast, but I had hoped this would
be yet another of their wildly inaccurate predictions. Sadly it wasn’t.
I
took wet puppies upstairs to bother “er indoors TM”; they
love going to see her in the morning but won’t go past the landing without me
as they are scared of Treacle who is always very grumpy at them in the morning.
Having left Treacle snoring on my side of the bed when I’d got up, Treacle had
deliberately moved to guard the door. The puppies love her so much, and she is
hateful to them.
As
the washing machine did its thing I made toast and scoffed it as I waited for
my lap-top to boot up. The poor thing is struggling to get going these days.
Eventually it got going. There was concern in the Munzing world today… Every
month there are “Clan Wars” in which various prizes are awarded to teams
who scan certain amounts of bar codes stuck to lamp posts. There are levels of
prizes, the lower the level, the easier it is to achieve. We go for level four.
Level three is a tad too easy, but level four can be a bit of a stretch. It
would seem that some who’ve gone for the dizzy heights of levels five and six
are finding that what was supposed to be fun was fast becoming a chore.
I
then spent three hours preparing a presentation for next week. I’ve applied for
the position of Training Lead and have got an interview in eight days’ time. As
part of that interview I’ve got to give a ten minute presentation entitled "Personal
development plans, to meet current and future service requirements".
Creating
the first draft of a PowerPoint presentation that will play for ten minutes
took me all morning, and it’s still not quite right.
I
took the dogs round the block for a walk; we didn’t get *that* wet. And
with the dogs thinking that they had had an outing I went round to the scout
hut with “er indoors TM” for the scout group AGM. She had to
go; she’s the group secretary. I didn’t have to go, but I had nothing else on
the agenda.
The
old place brought back some memories, as did listening to the reports presented
to the AGM. Scouting amazes me; so much is achieved for the children by so few
people. Half a dozen leaders effectively give up their lives for the place, and
(for the most part) their efforts are totally unrecognised. It turns out
that the group scout chairman is throwing in the sponge and they need a new one.
Is that something I could do? Possibly? Of all the activities and clubs and
hobbies I’ve done over the years, Scouting never descended into being one big
argument…
We
came home and I spent a few minutes assembling my new leaf sucker/blower.
Seeing how it was far too soggy outside to test it, I had a go in the living
room. The “suck” settling sucked up some of the carnage the dogs had
strewn over the living room floor, and the “blow” setting rather wound the
dogs up.
I
then had this (frankly genius) idea that Alexa might help in calming them down; sadly “Calming
Music for Dogs” was an abject failure, but I did get Alexa to swear. Sort
of… She only knows one swear word; “knickers!”.
After
a few minutes spent frantically tidying up, “My Boy TM” and
Cheryl came to visit. It was good to catch up. Cheryl is particularly envious
of our Alexa; it has got a screen (which hers hasn’t), and to add insult
to injury she had been planning to get us an Alexa for Christmas.
Once
they’d got home we then did an “Alexa call” at them to prove the thing
works.
“er indoors TM” boiled up a very good
bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst watching an episode of “MacDonald & Dobbs”.
I don’t usually like police-based TV shows, but this one is rather good…
