Tuesday 31 May 2011

Speeding through the year

Can someone explain to me how it got to be June tomorrow? Life continues apace, particularly since we didn't get raptured last week (disappointingly, my desk with its mountain of work was still there when I got back in on Monday morning...). Though apparently the countdown is now on until October, when we get to go through it all again!

Hockey is going well - though the game on Sunday was a teensy bit stressful, not the match itself, but getting there. Rather than it being at our local astroturf, we were playing at the national hockey stadium the other side of Wellington. Whilst we have played there before, this was the first time for me driving there. I knew roughly where I was going, and I'd looked it up on the map, but I am not one for keeping directions in my head. What I should have done was write out the instructions from Google, but I have a sat-nav, so, I thought, no need. Unfortunately the sat-nav decided that it was going to take an early holiday, and didn't even find a satellite until after I'd driven into Wellington and off the wrong junction of the motorway, onto a one way system, which wasn't labelled as such. I discovered this the hard way, turning round in a car park to try to get back onto the motorway, and seeing that I was turning into the path of oncoming traffic. Fortunately, this being Wellington on a Sunday morning, it was one car, still quite a way away from me, and I was able to pull up onto the pavement whilst I worked out what the heck I was going to do! The sat-nav glitched in and out of contact with the satellites, so I'd get an instruction, and then it would all disappear again. What I hadn't realised was that at some point it had decided that it wasn't going to take me to the stadium, but was instead going to head back towards the previous location we'd visited, most of the way back home! I realised this when I suddenly found myself back on the motorway, heading in the opposite direction, luckily just before I passed the last turn off for 8 km. However, already being 5 minutes late for the warm up, I might have been a tad stressed by this point! Reprogramming the sat-nav didn't take too long, and it gave me a couple of directions before dying completely, but those were sufficient to take me to a location I recognised, and from there I could muddle my way through, arriving with 10 minutes to spare. It takes me 8 minutes to put my goalie kit on...

So - last time I trust technology - I sent John out to the AA shop (he's on holiday this week) to pick up our free allocation of road maps that we get for being members! Hopefully my next journey will be slightly less stressful when we go back to good old fashioned drawings. On the plus side, we won 5-2...

1 comment:

Wisewebwoman said...

Oh the old pen and paper and map trick. I have reverted too Jo. I lost my data base twice which had maps, directions and all my contacts. Never again. I am now happily on paper.
As to SATS - too risky. I had to chuckle when you were stuck backwards on a ramp, that has happened to me and the stress just about choked me.
XO
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