Rivington With Stu
When I left work the main thing I was worried about was losing touch with my friends, but that’s not really happened. Lots of opportunities still present themselves to get together and there’s plenty to talk about besides work. Although I’m not immersed in the same work as they are now I’m still familiar enough with the industry and the picture of CSC that I get from so many different people that even work chat can be interesting. Today I met Stu for brunch at the Rivington barn Tea Rooms, which is one of my favourite walking cafes, after starting the day at Caffe Nero. I parked up at the Mill Road View Point and hiked for an hour to get there. We didn’t have time to get out for a walk unfortunately as Stu still has a job to do, but after he’d left I climbed the Pike, returned to the cafe for a reading break and then walked back to the car. It was a great day, a great mix of social time, podcast listening and tranquil solitary walking. While reading I discovered that Amazon are experimenting with physical book stores, this post is decorated with a photo of their first and it books pretty cool.
The walking was incredibly variable weather wise, with parts almost clear of mist, some short lived sunny patches and then higher up the Pike almost total whiteout, needless to say there was no view at all from the Pike, despite Stu’s suggestion that “it might be sunny up there”, sometimes he can be as optimistic as Rob is (that’s an inside joke). I’ve been seeking out mostly flat routes for my walking recently so it was a bit of a shock to the system to be back in the hills today, the 9 miles seemed like much, much more, good fun though.
The drive in the car caused me much amusement as the satnav presented me with a truly crazy route and then when I ignored it, kept on trying to send me down the most whacky of alternatives. In the end I found that it was set to provide routes that maximised ‘windy roads’, how it got configured in this was is beyond me and I’m certainly never going to be using that setting!
On the way home I took the opportunity to buy handles for my raised bed frames, because now I’ve fitted the netting there’s no way to lift them (this is not a design flaw, it’s a feature). I also did the shopping for the heavy stuff (cat food, cat litter etc) and bought Debbie some bags for her school’s enterprise project. Finding these bag’s in Poundland proved to be quite a challenge, I knew they were in the Christmas section, what I didn’t realise was that this section was nearly a third of the shop and it took me several sweeps through it to find them.
Back home I just had time to do a bit of cleaning, the day’s washing up (how we create to much is beyond me) and the clothes washing before a nap.
I’m hoping to go for a quick bike ride and swim tonight before TV time and some well earned sleep.
