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.
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.
The elder geokid and I had a search in all the likely spots we could find after attending her cousin’s 2nd birthday party nearby. No luck for us today!
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.
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!
We enjoyed sitting on the nearby bench while we cracked open this decent sized cache (and emptied out the accumulated water!). Log still in good condition, though. TFTC!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It took the geokid and I a moment or two to work out why this pylon was king, but once we had it was easy to find this (good-sized) cache. What a delightful Spring afternoon it was! And
then the geokid found a tree under which the banks had eroded, making a perfect “hobbit hole” cave within its exposed roots (where he ate his ice cream).
I’m volunteering at the building right next door to this bridge, this week, working on software that helps charities… among them, Samaritans! So finding this thematic cache was a
must-do for the younger geokid and I on our lunch break today. A quick and easy find thanks to the clear telegraphing in the description, aided by our direction of approach. It’s a
wonderful large bridge, and we got to watch a train zoom along the tracks beneath us as we crossed.
