More cherry picking and jam making, paperwork caught up, quirky caching app and a lovely walk to a cache in a meadow

Jam being poured into jars

I am  back quite quickly after my last post, but I'm hoping to catch up after a long delay. Thankfully, even in 4  days there have been a lot of stuff that had happened, so this post will also have some interesting stuff in it. Since we came back to the village, we have had lots of village like activities. Cherry picking, preserving, tractor mowing, having guests in the Bunkhouse and a few other delights. The last lot of cherry we picked got made into 10 little jars of jam, which was, for once, a quick and clean affair. Normally, making cherry jam leaves the kitchen like a crime scene, with lots of bright red stuff everywhere. This time, Roy and I worked in such well organised unison, that hardly any jam was dropped, all went cleanly into bottles, then into the dunst and away in the box. Washing up was minimal and we finished it in about a couple of hours. 

10 jars of beautiful Germersdorfer cherry jam

Since then we picked the rest of the crop as well, excluding the very high ones, which we cannot get to, and which we happily let the birds have. This lot is about 3 kg again, and this afternoon we will make another 10 jars, or thereabouts, of delicious cherry jam. The weather has been very nice lately: mostly sunny, but with a breeze, which is very pleasant to be outside in. The girls in the Bunkhouse loved our roses, which are now getting round to their second set of blooms, and my beloved salmon coloured ones bright out a few glorious blossom by the pavilion. 

C

Cherry pickers are busy 

On Sunday I made a brave purchase, which I hope will work out, but who knows? I have been paying a few pence less than 100 Euros/year for my VPN for many years by now. And then, this year they came up with an offer, which reduced the renewal to barely over 30 Euros, provided you renew for two years and accept a yearly charge of 120 Euros after that. Well, the odds were that the yearly figure would be around that much in two years' time, so I went for it. They also re-credited the sum that was not used out of my current subscription fee, so I think I made a good deal. Life will prove me correct or otherwise in the next two years. 

Roy having a rest, while I go caching

You may recall I was playing catch up with my paperwork and online chores after our trip to the South West, and I am happy to report that 2 days ago I caught up in all respects: e-mails, responses to those that needed them, posting on FB and most importantly, the extension of the geocaching logs from the trip. Only one misery appeared to annoy me last week, but happily I think I sorted that today. Namely, one morning in the SW I realised that I am unable to navigate in my caching app, as the map is wobbling like there was no tomorrow. Apparently this was a great improvement, because it meant that the map is setting itself, like one used to do in orienteering, by then manually. 

One enormous river side meadow under big skies

Well, the idea was great, but the way it worked almost made me seasick. The map was wobbling like it was drunk. Had it followed my movement accurately and reliably and at a reasonable pace and correct manner, I would have loved it. But that permanent wobble drove me mad, so I asked Heni what I could do. She told me how to stop it, and I am very happy now. I also had to work out the cost of petrol on our trip on days 2, 3 and 4, when we had Heni and Szabolcs with us. Roy made note of the mileage, but not all of it was for the time they were with us. I looked at our roots and made a reasonable assumption, based on that and the usage. I finished with 300 km for those three days and everybody was happy with the result. 

Looking East into Slovakia

Another annoying thing that got to me and is still bothering me is the fact that FB seems to be doing upgrades and fundamental changes, which are not explained and you just see them and don't know whether you are the idiot, or this is the new normal. Further complications were involved by the fact that in the middle of last week FB, Instagram and Messenger very nearly totally collapsed. They brought them back pretty sharpish, but I am fairly sure that a lot of the crap that I am struggling against on FB is the aftermath of that. I hope that is the case, because my total disability to upload photos into my FB albums is here to stay I think I will not stay with FB. The silly crap is, that on my smart phone it works, so nowadays I write the text on my laptop and then add the photos on my phone. Last week, it was the same on Blogger too, so perhaps it's not them, but my laptop, no idea. I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will be able to upload photos to this post, meaning that it's not my laptop to blame. 

Along my hike, I met a Western Yellow Wagtail

Yesterday, the weather seemed so nice that I decided to go and get a new geocache, which was about a good half an hour from the village by car. I had other reasons too. There is a game on the website to see whether you have cached on every day of the year, since the year you started caching. I have two months now on 100%, in other words I have cached in one year at least on every single day of that month. Last I looked there were only two days missing in June, the 16th and the 27th. Yesterday, being the 16th, I was very keen to get going. a couple of other reasons included the fact that my total finds of geocaches stood on 3499 yesterday, so I was keen to get to my next round number. Finally, I also had an ulterior motive to go, as the cache was near a river and I was hoping to pick up some riverside birds on my Merlin app.

A lookout tower to peruse the meadows from

Well, I am happy to report that all of my targets have been achieved. I found the cache, had a gorgeous mile and half walk on large riverside meadows surrounded by the river on one side and mountains on the other three, I caught a Western Yellow Wagtail on my Merlin app and definitely made it to 3500 finds in my geocaching total. Roy was offered a meal out, but chose to come home and eat what we planned. He had some German BBQ sausages, which he declared very nice as they almost tasted the same as English sausages and I had the leftover marrow from Monday, which tasted even better than the day before. Roy seemed very happy all day, had a nice little nap while I walked to the cache and back and generally looked really refreshed.

An ancient tree in the middle of the meadow

Today we are planning to make another load of jam from the cherries we picked the other day. We didn't want to do them straight away, as it keeps in the fridge for a few days, and this way we could graze on them to our heart's content. Talking of which, I am off to pinch a few from the fridge now and post this straight after that. Next post next Wednesday, if all goes well.