Netflix, YouTube and a bit of caching

Merry Christmas to all of you who read this blog! This morning I had a lovely cup of tea in bed, served in a Christmas mug and containing my very special Lyme and Lemon flavour tea that I thought we could not buy any more. Apparently, Roy has a very secret stash of it for just such occasions as Christmas, Birthdays and the New Year. So this means I will have another cup of it very soon. :)

The last week was spent in the village, where occasionally I feel as if I am imprisoned. I enjoy the quiet, peace and slow pace of the place, but now and again I get a bit stir crazy indoors and hanker after activity. Added to this, we had rain almost all week, which also imprisons you, so the time had to be spent reading and on the net.

Géza Hofi

I dug out an old book, published in 2002 from the bookshelves and am really enjoying it. It is about a great Hungarian comic called Géza Hofi and it tells you his life story in quotes from newspapers, magazines, interviews and other people's comments.

Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies as the Queen and Price Philip

I also had taken to Netflix a big way this last week and enjoyed every minute of it. Originally, when Meaghan and Alex gifted us the access to their subscription I wasn't too keen on it. Over the years, however, I had periods like this, when I managed to find several films and entire series to binge watch. I started with series 3 of The Crown. Olivia Colman is a gem and she is pretty good in this too. The general take on the Royal Family in this series is walking a fine line between showing them as humans, but humans with failings too. Quite a few skeletons in the cupboard have been rattled and they were not pulling their punches either.

Alexandra Breckenridge and Martin Henderson in Virgin River

The other series, this time its 1st that I binge watched was Virgin River. Kitsch of a particular genre that only the Americans can produce, but for a bit of mindless Christmas entertainment, it went down quite well. For more serious stuff I enjoyed The Irishman and The Two Popes. And for real true culture and quality I watched Sense and Sensibility for the nth time and still found enjoyment in it.

Robert de Niro The Irishman

Another way to amuse myself happened yesterday, when I went back to a habit I had in the past, but sort of forgot about. When I am on the net, reading and writing e-mails or on FB I can also listen to music. So I put my headphones on and listened to Kristóf Baráti playing the Passacaglia with his good friend István Várdai, then turned to one of my absolute favourites, David Grimal and his beloved creation, the marvellous orchestra called Les Dissonances. They played a wide range of music, including, Schumann, Mozart, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Bartók. Martha Argerich was next with Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 and finally Evgeny Kissin wowed me and the rest of the audience in the music hall where he was playing with Rachmaninov's piano concerto no. 2.

Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce as The Two Popes

All this was great, but me feeling stir crazy was eventually to drive us from the house on Friday. Thankfully, it didn't rain and even the sun came out, so we grabbed the chance for an outing. I have a geocache of my own about an hour's drive away from home, which has been reported to be a bit battered and in need of care and attention. So off we went to mend it, but once we were out, we did a few other things too.

The three Dashwood girls in Sense and Sensibility

I ordered a couple of pictures to be enlarged from some lovely photographs taken by the director of the Geopark, who is a great photographer. I was fearful of the likelyhood of damage if he puts them in the post, so we popped in to the headquarters of the Geopark to pick them up. Another great chance has also come up, in that one of the moving caches has been about a half hour walk from my cache and as our county is not a particular favourite of geocachers, it has been lying dormant for about 5 weeks.

David Grimal

So we walked to it or to be precise, Roy stopped at a spring where there was a picnic table and benches and I ran ahead to the cache and back. This moving cache travels between large, massive and very ancient trees and the tree it was at the foot of was indeed a beauty. It was one of three enormous beech trees majestically ruling a part of a mountainside and I took lots of pictures of them. As I was on my own I had to take a selfie, which I am not very good at, but that proved that I was there!! En route home we did a bit of shopping at Lidl and got home happily and before it got dark.

Martha Argerich

Since then we had a bit of good news too, as Robert phoned that he is coming out for a visit with Oscar the schnauzer on Friday, staying overnight and driving back on Saturday. That is great, as he has not been to visit us in the country for years. I hope the weather is good and his car behaves with its new battery.

The giant beech tree

I also had thought since then, that I might catch a lift to town with him on Saturday, as I was planning to catch the late bus on Sunday to have a chance to be on time on Monday morning to be picked up by András for our little caching trip. Roy is going to remain, but I decided that I would like to visit both the Christmas geocache and the New Year's Eve geocache this year. I have only ever been to the Christmas one once, in 2017, and had never had the chance to bag the New Year's Eve one.

The foot of the giant beech tree

Last week I rang my good friend András to ask if he was thinking of going and he said yes to both going and giving me a lift. The Christmas cache stays in place until Twelfth Night, but the New Year's Eve one can only be found and logged in the 3 or so hours the party is on. It is usually during the day on 30th, so I thought we might combine attending the party with visiting the Christmas one en route home. András and his family went to the Christmas Tree party two nights ago, but he promised that he would take me to it on 30th, the very, very nice bloke he is.

Muggins in a selfie

I hope to do some caching in and a round town on the Sunday when I am alone in town and after my outing with András get back in time to help Roy with the guests in the Bunkhouse, who are coming from the Mill as usual.

My forest companion (this time)

Have a lovely New Year's party yourselves and my next post is now likely to be in 2020!