Personal – Page 6

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!

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.

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.

Dan Q did not find GC4M7C4 Scouting About

This checkin to GC4M7C4 Scouting About reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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!

Dan Q did not find GCARTHJ Knock Knock, Who’s There!

This checkin to GCARTHJ Knock Knock, Who's There! reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Ran out of time and had to give up. Nice view of our accommodation for this week from this hill, though!

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.

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!

Dan Q found GCARTHN The Bird in Hand

This checkin to GCARTHN The Bird in Hand reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Not a fan of this kind of container, but I must admit that I enjoy a decent-sized cache! TFTC.

Dan Q found GCARTHR Coton Hill Community Orchard

This checkin to GCARTHR Coton Hill Community Orchard reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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!

Dan Q found GCARTHZ Coton Grange

This checkin to GCARTHZ Coton Grange reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Quick find with the boy (thanks to the hint!) as we stopped for a sandwich break. TFTC!

Dan Q found GCARTJ3 Gone Fishing

This checkin to GCARTJ3 Gone Fishing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Incredibly easy find for the younger geokid and I: we could see the cache before we even reached the GZ. TFTC!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fools Mode

I’d completely forgotten that my website pranks visitors on April Fools’ Day with a randomly-selected one of a selection of “features” until I went to it myself and got “party mode”.

So yeah, this year I managed to April Fools’ myself.

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.

Dan Q found GCARTJ6 The Pylon King

This checkin to GCARTJ6 The Pylon King reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

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).