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More than you expected?

You're reading everything on my blog - including, among other things:

  • notes (short, "Tweet-like" messages),
  • reposts (links to other people's work, sometimes with commentary),
  • checkins (records of places I've visited, often while geo*ing), and
  • videos ("vloggy" content).

That might be more than you wanted to see, if you're only interested in articles (traditional long-form blog posts). Click a link to filter.

Dan Q found GC1FNVT SideTracked – Kingham

This checkin to GC1FNVT SideTracked - Kingham reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Found successfully on an Easter morning dog walk from Bledington. The geopup and I came out across the fields, trying to get outdoors early before the rain that’s forecast for later in the day (though personally I’m sceptical that today’s weather will be anything short of glorious). The walk was delightful, although we unfortunately arrived right before a train was due and so there were many muggles waiting nearby to collect their arriving loved ones.

Fortunately the nature of the GZ provides a perfect excuse to be sitting around, and so I soon began my search. An initial lying-on-the-floor visual survey didn’t help, nor did a fingertip search through what I figured were the obvious spots. This, coupled with the lack of any logs yet this year and the fact that the last log was a DNF, might have given me cause to worry. But a deeper dive through the past logs indicated that perhaps this cache is just… hard!… and so I continued on.

Dan sits in a glass bus shelter, hugging a French Bulldog.

The next trick in my caching toolbox was my phone. Switched to selfie mode and recording a video, I swept it slowly and methodically through all of the hiding spots I could think of. Watching the video back (while offering my patient pup scritches with my spare hand), I caught I glimpse of something: a flash of metal of an unexpected colour! Now I knew it was there! I renewed my search with fingertips focused on the spot I’d identified: an unusual area for this kind of cache, perhaps, but easy to find once you’re sure where to look!

Soon the cache was, at last, in hand. Careful patience, logical elimination, and a determination not to give up were the keys, here. TFTC!

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F-Day plus 50

The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure!

Children play in a village green flanked by grey stone cottages and a pub.

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Dan Q found GC1ZEKG Church Micro 2809 – Bledington

This checkin to GC1ZEKG Church Micro 2809 - Bledington reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF for the geohound and I as we came out for a walk from the house we’re borrowing this week – the latest of many AirBnB-like week-long lets we’ve had to decamp to after our house was rendered uninhabitable by a flash flood around fifty days ago. Hopefully the last, though, as the insurance company may at last have found us somewhere to live longer-term while our house is repaired!

Cache container seemed slightly exposed by damage to a nearby fence so I tucked it back in slightly deeper than I found it.

Dan crouches on a footpath running alongside a field, next to a French Bulldog.

TFTC and for showing us this delightful footpath which is sure to become a favourite walking route for the doggo and I during our week here.

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Predictions in a Hat

Two decades ago this month my friend Matt posted five predictions about the future of the world. I’ve revisited these predictions twice since: ten years later and twenty years later, and “scored” his predictions both times.

I love that the Web’s memory (and the persistence of URLs) makes this kind of long-term conversation possible.

Note posted at UTC on .

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Dan Q found GCARTHE Rope Swing

This checkin to GCARTHE Rope Swing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Found without difficulty while the geokid amused himself on the swing. Shame about the litter near the GZ, may be a CITO opportunity up here! Loving the views: think I can see our accommodation from here! TFTC and for showing us this rope swing!

A boy hangs from a rope swing over a grassy hillside.

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Wood-Fired

This week I’m at Three Rings‘ annual “3Camp” event. Owing to Some Plot, we had a gap in the cooking rota, and, seeing that there was a pizza oven in the back garden, I figured… I can make a couple of dozen pizzas to feed everyone, right?

Dan, a white man with a ponytail of blue hair and a goatee beard, uses his hands to gather a huge pile of flour on a marble worksurface in a spacious kitchen.
Step one, as previously-indicated, was to make a lot of dough.

There was no mixing bowl large enough to accommodate the 4.5kg of flour so I just dumped it onto a surface, added some salt and sugar, made a well in the middle, and introduced my oil, water and rehydrated yeast right into the middle of it.

Minus a few minor spills, it broadly worked as a technique.

A small wood fire burns inside an outdoor brick pizza oven.
We weren’t able to find the woodpile at the house we’re staying at, so I eventually had to seek a volunteer to go and forage to B&Q to buy a couple of sacks of wood. I can’t wait to hear our treasurer’s response to this unusual expenses claim!

After an initial rise I knocked-back the dough and separated it into balls, and got started on building the fire.

I own a small, portable Ooni pizza oven that’s fired by woodchips, and I find it pretty challenging to use. It eats fuel pretty quickly and loses heat through its thin walls just as fast, and so it’s hard to maintain a consistent temperature while simultaneously maintaining the supply of wood and cooking pizza.

This brick-built oven, though, was a different kind of beast.

The same brick pizza oven, now seen from a few steps back with its chimney and base visible.
Compared to my small metal oven, this brick oven took a lot longer – on the region of an hour – to get up to temperature… but once hot, it maintained the heat much better.

I set up a prep station nearby and had Three Rings volunteers “build their own” pizzas: stretching or rolling the dough, adding sauce and cheese and other toppings, etc. And then I rotated them through the oven, up to two at a time.

My arms were already tired from the workout of hand-kneading the enormous pile of dough, and it was hot and tiring work to keep making, moving, and turning pizzas… but it was also… amazingly fun.

Dan, holding a pair of pizza peels, stands before the roaring fire of the open brick pizza oven, with a pizza barely visible within.
Lookin’ hot, there. (The oven, that is.)

As the pizzas started to come out, Three Rings volunteers did too, gathering around the fire pit and in the covered dining areas of the garden, glasses in hand, to enjoy freshly-baked hot slices of crispy pizza, while they talked about volunteering, history, the future, and a diversity of other random topics beside (space travel, politics, music, teaching…).

Awesome.

Close-up of Dan's butt, with a large white floury handprint on it, as he operates a pizza oven.
Ruth took this photo to show me that I had a floury handprint on my butt. She claims she’s not responsible for it, but I’m not so sure.

So yeah… now I really want to build a brick pizza oven of my very own.

Obviously I’ve got other priorities right now (like having somewhere to live following the house-wrecking flood), but maybe that’s something I could look at in a future year.

A crispy, misshapen, slightly charred pepperoni and mushroom pizza on a paper plate.
The first pizza out of the oven was probably the ugliest, but it was also the one I remembered to photograph.

3Camp remains an annual tradition that I love dearly: the camaraderie, the doing-good-in-the-world, the opportunity to work alongside so many kind and talented volunteers, the chance to play with exciting technology, and whole experience… but the pizzas on the penultimate evening have got to go down as a special highlight this year.

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Article posted at UTC on .

1 comment

Note #28647

There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year’s 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.

Dan, a white man with a ponytail of blue hair and a goatee beard, uses his hands to gather a huge pile of flour on a marble worksurface in a spacious kitchen.

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Note posted at UTC on .

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Dan Q did not find GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree

This checkin to GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

After hearing of my failure to find this cache the other day, the younger geokid persuaded me to come back and try again. We poked into every hidey-hole we could find and even extended our search to the next candidate oak tree (just in case the coordinates were off), but still had no success despite an extended search.