Rocking Your World Friday - week 9

Happy Friday everyone!  I do love me a Friday.  I'm usually a TGIF girl, but I've had a bit of a tough one this week, so I'm upgrading it to a TFIF!! :)

Not such a toughie that I don't have tons of positives to report though - so, let's see what's been rockin' my world :

Last weekend first off - and that WEATHER!  wow!

Isn't February supposed to be cold???

We went out walking on both Saturday and Sunday in short sleeves, it was so warm and sunny and wonderful.

And those walks relate to my second Rockin' thing - this weekend we really rediscovered our love for Geocaching.

Not that we had lost the love completely, but what with less than perfect outdoor weather in recent months, coupled with the feeling that we have already picked off a lot of the most interesting caches in the area (and we don't care much for a lot of the 'just for the numbers' caches and series that have been put out in the past couple of years), we had slowed right down.

But it was perfect walking weather this weekend - plus one of my caching buddies (who despite being a Bruins fan seems like a nice chap ;) ) had recently hidden a Wherigo cache in Swindon's Lydiard Park - and we have always wanted to try one of those.  So out we headed.

Wherigo caches are like a cross between a computer game and a treasure hunt - the whole thing has a story, and you interact with characters in the story on the screen of your GPS or phone, and get clues, solve puzzles etc.  But you can only meet the characters, or find "items" you need, in very specific locations, so you have to physically go to those places so that the GPS will confirm you are there and unlock the next part of the story.

Does that make any sense???

And at the end, there is a real treasure box to find, but you need to complete the adventure first.

It was a whole pile of fun, anyway :D

This one was based on the adventures of Tom Sawyer and it took us all over Lydiard Park - about a 3 mile round trip in all - very cleverly tying in real landmarks in the grounds to places in the story.  It was brilliant!

Here are some pics from our way around the park (that sundial was perfectly on time, by the way, it really was 2pm when I took the photo)

So that was on Saturday afternoon, and then the next day the weather was even MORE glorious!

So we went out geocaching again, this time out near Devizes, we did a 4 mile circuit taking in 10 geocaches around the Cherhill white horse:

A perfect Sunday afternoon stroll - good company, good weather, good scenery, good music (from my phone tucked in the pocket of my backpack :) ) - I had a bit of a "how wonderful it is to be alive" epiphany half way around -  THIS is what geocaching (and life in general) is supposed to be about.

Another plus point on this particular walk is that I found lots of letters for my photographic alphabet that I am in the process of collecting - I was particularly pleased with the D-shaped stick and the hoofprint C :

On Monday, my hairdresser rocked my world because she cut my fringe so I can see again - yay!!

I don't have any after shots, but here's a before, showing how desperately I needed that cut :)









On Tuesday, it was Waitrose's turn to put a huge smile on my face - because they have started stocking Heidi Pies!!!  Result!  These are the most delicious (if not desperately healthy :) ) veggie pies you will EVER taste in your life.  Sweet potato and goats cheese, heavenly.  My Tesco used to sell them but stopped around a year ago, and I've been pining for them ever since :(

But not only do Waitrose now sell them, they are currently on special offer.  So I bought two :)


Wednesday was Leap Day of course, and knowing that there was a special Geocaching souvenir available for people who found a cache on this special day, we were determined not to miss out.

--------> It's basically just this little virtual badge that goes onto your profile - so nothing too exciting - but it's nice to collect them nevertheless

What I hadn't thought through was the fact that by the time I was home from work and had collected Connor, and we had got the GPS, and headed back out, the light would be fading fast.  So we ended up finding our leap day cache in the dark.  But luckily I had a torch and it was actually tremendous fun rummaging through the trees at night time, it was a real adventure :)

There's the cache up in the tree, illuminated by our torch, it took us quite a while to spot it.

And the last thing to rock my socks off this week was my 9 year old Connor, who made this FAB robot costume for World Book Day almost completely by himself.  I think he did a great job!

The design was all his, and he did 99% of the work, all I did was spraypaint the head (it just looks cardboard colour in this photo but it was shiny gold), and also the stencilled circuits on the t shirt.

I should have taken a photo from the side really as he made all these cool knobs and dials for the sides of the head.  Plus you can't see the antennae all that clearly here.  But you get the jist.

I'm not entirely sure why his interpretation of my request to do "robot arms" for the photo resulted in "I'm a little teapot" though :D

That's my little roundup done, I'm off to link this up on Virginia's blog now, and see what all the other Rockettes have been up to.  Please feel free to come and join us there if you would like to share what’s been rockin’ your own little corner of the planet.  We all spend too much time in our lives worrying about the rubbish things like work, health (or lack of), money (ditto) etc – spending a few minutes every Friday focussing on the positives really does help to put everything in perspective.

Pollyanna, over and out ;)