chris | Entries tagged with geocaching

malachan is staying with us over the Easter weekend! He is in good health and it's always fun to see him. We like having guests come up and stay on our futon. (We turn it into a marshmallow bed by stacking extra duvets between the futon and the bedsheet.) Unfortunately my dear wife has been ill for two weeks or so; she had to work long hours when many of the local youths, and one of her co-workers, were affected by a cold that was going around; last week, the pilot light in the boiler heating her workplace went out and she had one particularly cold workday before they fixed it, with the result that a persistent sniffle has turned into a productive cold. Nobody wants to spend their Easter holiday coughing up phlegm; hopefully she will get much better very quickly.

Nevertheless, we've had a great deal of fun while R. has been here. We have spent time introducing R. to strange Northern supermarkets like Morrison's and ASDA, spent lots of time and money on purchasing and cooking exciting food. We have been having little salads daily, as starters to our main courses, and have been enjoying exciting pasta dishes. (Tonight there will be a filled hand-made pasta, mainly due to an exciting KitchenAid pasta-making attachment. Last night we had steak tips with all manner of vegetables, including some smashed potatoes laden with garlic butter.)

During the days, we have mostly been watching Doctor Who - repeats of the Ten era on Watch, the Four-to-Six era on Sci-Fi and the start of the Eleven era on, er, BBC 1. No spoilers, but we all greatly enjoyed the first episode - though M., who knows much more than I do about these things, recognised a great number of repeated themes from episodes written by our new Executive Producer. A second viewing confirms that it was very tightly written; ( this bit might be slightly spoilery. ) The weather here has recently mostly been grey, though generally dry.

This afternoon, I convinced R. to accompany me on my first ever trip geocaching. I don't know whether I need to explain geocaching as it's nothing new (I first mentioned it in passing here in October 2002, and was hardly on the cutting edge even then) but the concept is that members of the public have hidden small boxes around the world in interesting locations, then invited other members of the public to find these boxes by publicising the longitude and latitude of these boxes as observed by GPS receivers, so that other members of the public might attempt to replicate the quoted longitude and latitude on their own GPS device and thus find the hidden caches and enjoy the interesting locations in which they have been secreted.

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Thanks to R. for being a geocaching enabler, as well as a great house-guest! I hope we can make the chance for both to happen again before long.