Turf Zone – AncientBattle
Well folks, tomorrow is the first day of 2024 and that makes this the final turf blog of 2023. The last blog at the end of the year. So, what can we say about the past year? Well, I can say that I’ve now been turfing for three years since I started way back in December 2020. Who’d have thought I’d still be turfing today after all that time. And even more amazing is that I’ve managed to keep blogging about turf as well.
As far as my turf position goes, I’ve reached to dizzy heights of Rank 54 – Incredible Turfer having attained 8,000,000 points with only another 1,500,000 required to the next rank. Though actually, I’ve added another 852,000 points since then so not quite so much effort required. To date I’ve taken 2211 Unique zones, taken over 27114 zones, completed 451 assists and walked, kick scooted or cycled over 18,100 km. That’s nice.
Highlights of the year included participating in TurfEmbra10 back in January and being nominated for Turfer of the Year 2022 for Turf video blogging (no luck there!). September saw me taking part in the first ever Scottish Turf Open Championships in Edinburgh and I managed to get the Roundpointer-500k medal – awarded for 500,000 points in a single round. So, a good year as far as it goes. Oh, how could I forget! December was my first attempt at creating a turf advent calendar, 24 turf related tasks spread over 24 days. It seems to have gone down well and plans are now in progress for another one next year.
As well as turfing I’ve also been involved in a few other personal, but still turf-related projects, during the year, including building a single speed bicycle called Harley Quinn and custom painting my other two bikes as well as both kick scooters. They turned out okay but I may do them again having learned a thing or two in the process. Also converted the Surly Ogre and Surly Pugsley bikes to single speed as well. I just love riding single speed! I’ve also bought myself a new mobile phone, a Google Pixel 8 Pro, which does some amazing photographs, which is ideal for taking supporting photographs for my turfing blogs. It is especially good at night photography which was always a challenge previously.
Now, what of the coming year? Other than the usual business of everyday turfing, I’ve still got a few of the more challenging medals on my turf-to-do list. Namely, the Greed-400 (holding 400 zones at the same time), the Diversiest (taking 1000 Round Unique zones), the El Staminatore (taking 200 zones in 24-hours), and finally, perhaps the most challenging of all, the Roundpointer-750k (collecting 750,000 points in a single Round). I also want to try and better my time of 4h 13m 27s for the Seven Hills of Edinburgh challenge, completed on the Swifty Air kick scooter. My next attempt will be using one of my single speed bikes, probably the Surly Ogre.
Still looking ahead, there seems to be a new craze of choosing pronouns for yourself, such as non-binary, or identifying as something else, like a cat, which seems plain daft to me. Binary is either 1 or 0, on or off, one or the other. How can you be non-binary? There is no in between. How can you have almost 1 or almost 0 or neither? Of course, unless you think Quantum, where something can be on, off or an infinite number of states in between, all at the same time. In any case my pronoun with be “synthetic human/turfer/something quantum”. That should confuse any nutter who asks me! Mind you, quite like the idea of identifying as Borg or a Nexus-6 Replicant. Hmm, might change my mind later.
Now, the traditional New Year resolutions. Here’s mine.
- go turfing everyday, in all weathers and as often as possible.
- seek out and boldly consume new flavours of Kit-Kat.
- build that dream carbon fibre/titanium single speed bike.
- be nice to people unless I don’t like the look of them.
- stop leaving tea bags in the sink and close the kitchen door.
So, there we have it, a quick run down of the year that was 2023. A few thinks about plans for 2024 and some New Year resolutions, some of which will likely be entirely forgotten about by next week. Back soon.
Gary Buckham
Synthetic Human/Turfer/Something Quantum
Planet Gary Administrator
Copyright ©2023 Gary Buckham. All rights reserved.
