Year: 2009

What the Heck Happened?

Ugly WallThe FRS started the “second half” of the season with a three game lead over the MFY in the AL East. Both teams have played four games since then, and after last night they are in a first place tie. Tonight the Sox are losing to the Texas Rangers and the Yankees are beating Baltimore, if everything stays as it is they will find themselves looking up in the standings to the Yanks.

We attempted a nifty puzzle cache that took us to the Aiken County Veterans Memorial Park the other night. We had a list of names to look for in the brinks in the walkway surrounding a fountain, they were a mixture of individual donors, companies and tributes to the fallen. To facilitate finding individual bricks they were arranged in a grid with letters for columns and numbers for rows. We quickly realized we needed the numbers to arrange them into the next set of coordinates. Didn’t have time right then, so we finished the juggling at home with the intentions of going back.

Yesterday we headed back over there with our new GZ to look for the cache. The GPSr led us right to a big crape myrtle surrounded by lots of low bushes and seemed tailor made for hiding a cache. It must have been hidden real good because we didn’t find it after 10 minutes of crawling around there. When we got home I emailed the cache owner and asked for confirmation of our coordinates.

This morning the reply came to the effect that there were no bushes anywhere near the cache. Dang we have the wrong coordinates. Rechecking all the possibilities it turns out we missed one and it was only 137 feet due west from where we were looking yesterday. After dinner tonight we went back to this set of coords and there were no bushes and there was a cache.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Around The Block

Rollerblading TrackWent for a neighborhood blading session this evening and put the GPSr in my pocket. What you see here is my path. One big loop around the ‘hood is a little more than 3/4 of a mile, but I include several back and forth passes through the side streets to make it longer. This is route resulted in 2 miles. If I want to go further than that I can just leave the safety of my neighborhood and head out into one of several nearby places that are just as flat and traffic free.

Tonight’s obligatory geocaching content: While regaling my co-workers with tales of my weekend’s worth of geocaching, one (Hi Mark) asked me if I was planned on visiting all of the geocaches in South Carolina like I did for the Post Offices. I said I doubt it, there are probably a lot more caches than POs. This got me wondering, how many are there in South Carolina. Turns out it was easier to find out than I though. If you click on the SEEK link on Geocaching dot com it takes you to a page where you can find caches using all kinds of criteria, with by state being one of them. Turns out there are over 3,700! (there are almost 68,000 in CA.)

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Old Guys Almost Rule

1) Fifty-nine year-old Tom Watson almost won the British Open.

2) Thirty-seven year-old Lance Armstrong couldn’t hang with Alberto, but still is in 2nd place in the GC.

3) Fifty-three year-old Brian Bogardus can only seem to find half of the geocaches he is looking for.

Brian_the_Red found The Retirement Cache (Traditional Cache)
We were 2 for 2 on the Odell Weeks caches tonight after a pizza dinner at Ferrandos. Nicely done on the hide, been wondering when we would see one of these in action.

Brian_the_Red found Love Sports-Hook, Line and Sinker (Traditional Cache)
We were 2 for 2 on the Odell Weeks caches tonight after a pizza dinner at Ferrandos. We had never attempted these 2 at the Weeks Center for fear they would be right along the walking track and awfully hard to get stealth-fully. But we were pleasantly surprised that they were far enough away as to be easy to not get muggled.

Brian_the_Red couldn’t find “SECTION” (Unknown Cache)
Sometimes you get the cache and sometimes the cache gets you.

This one has got us stumped, we just can’t find stage 1. The cache owner has confirmed we solved the code right, so our coordinates are correct and he even gave us a small clue…

They say it takes a big man to admit defeat, well tonight I am a very big man.

Brian_the_Red couldn’t find Valor is a Virtue (Unknown Cache)
Didn’t get a chance to find the cache yesterday as we got a late start with this one and ran out of light to finish solving for the coordinates.

Came back today and went hunting for the cache. We spent quite a bit of time hiding in the bushes avoiding the surprising amount of cars driving by. While we were in there we looked with no success.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

More Geocache Logging Fun

Had a fun day caching today, so in lieu of an actual blog post here, I’ll let you in on what I have written in the logs of a couple caches from today.

Chicken-or-the-Egg (Multi-cache)
After our monthly breakfast meeting just down the street at the new Gary’s Hamburger place we coerced 2 other couples from the MMC to join us for the hunt. Figured with the difficulty level (4 out of 5) we could use all the eyes we could get. Turns out I spotted it right after some one else just walked by the spot.

Thanks for bringing us here. Mazda actually experimented with a hydrogen fueled Miata with a rotary engine a decade ago. Nothing ever came of it, but if it had I could have filled up here (if they took Visa.)

Attack of the Clones – 2 (Traditional Cache)
Easy grab.The only clones we saw were the look alike homes and they left us alone because my wife sat in the landspeeder and used her Jedi powers to project the thought, “These aren’t the cachers you want.”

Does it Shine? (Traditional Cache)
We usually don’t do these that say, “located on private property” as they make us nervous, but we were in the neighborhood and on a roll, so we gave this one a try.

We stopped the car and sat for a moment, my wife got up her courage first and got out. After about a minute of looking, a voice from the heavens spoke to her, “You are almost touching it!” Odd, I have always thought of God as male, but this was a powerful female voice. Already skittish, we almost bolted, but Donna took it as a challenge and looked some more. Embolded by her bravery I joined her in her dancing around the light pole.

My first instinct was to inspect the nearby Bellsouth junction box and obviously a lot of others thought so too, as the cover was partially off, but that probably wasn’t it, per an earlier log. A lot of cachers also thought it might be behind a shiny silver SCE&G plaque that identified this particular pole, as it was partially pried off. As we were about to quit and drive off with our GPSr between our legs, God sent an angel our way with a hint.

Sure enough, as it has been so far all weekend, my wife was right on about the location and I managed to talk her out of it, then spend unnecessarily minutes looking elsewhere before ending up right where she first pointed.

In this little drama the part of the angel was played by the cache owner who gave us a big clue, while the part of God was performed by his elderly mother that lives with him and was looking out the front window. Disrespect to any religion, living or dead, was not intended and is purely coincidental.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Logging A Cache

When you find a cache, to have it count, you are required to sign the log book in the cache. This varies from just date & initials on a tiny rolled up piece of paper in a Micro to a complete description of the hunt and what items you traded out on a 4 x 6 notebook in an ammo can.

Afterwards it is suggested you go online to geocaching.com and fill out an electronic log on the cache’s page. This has the advantage of giving you plenty of space to write no matter what the physical size of the container.

One of the caches we found today had us stumped on our first two attempts to find it on Tuesday and Thursday of this week. I’ll let the online logs tell the story:

July 14 by Brian_the_Red (131 found)
Another in a long string of DNFs for us. We would like to blame it on the approaching darkness, but it wasn’t that dark yet. Oh, what the heck, we couldn’t find it because it was dark. That’s it. It was dark. We’ll come back another day.

July 16 by Brian_the_Red (131 found)
Today is another day. This time we were a little earlier getting here. We would like to blame this miss on the fact that it was light out, and it was still pretty light. Oh, what the heck, we couldn’t find it because it was daylight. That’s it. The sun got in our eyes.

July 17 by Brian_the_Red (131 found)
You know how at the cine-plex, after you’ve finished that giant bucket of popcorn covered with a butter-like substance, you spend the rest of the movie working your tongue around near a back molar trying to get that piece of kernel out from between your tooth and gum? Well, that’s what this cache was.

We had tried late in the day, we had tried earlier, the only time left to try was high noon. That is when we were out in the parkway of Sumter St SE today. The GPSr was acting all weird on us at first and had us standing in front of the 7′ wall surrounding the house on the corner. I knew this couldn’t be it, so I rebooted the GPSr. This time it led us to a slightly different spot than the last two attempts.

As I stood there intently staring, looking for something that seemed out of place, my wife chimed in from behind me, “There it is!”
Me: “Huh?”
Her: “Right in front of you!”
Me: “Where?”
Her: “Right there!”
Me: “Huh?”
Her, putting her finger right on it: “THERE!”
Me: “Oh.”
Me & Her: “Ooooh, clever.”

Plugged in the 2nd stage coordinates and off we went. At GZ it took only a minute or so for our finely tuned ammo can radar to spot the hide. Took a Curious George rolling thing and left behind a blue headed Alien toy.

TFTF (Thanks For The Fun)

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Friday Night

It may be physically Thursday night, but it is Friday night for me (and everybody on the other side of the International Date too, or is it Wednesday over there, I never can get it straight.)

It seems like Friday night because we have the day off of work tomorrow. Plan is for sleeping in a little late, taking a bike ride, watching stage 13, watching a movie and maybe looking for a cache or two. Then we’ll start the weekend…

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Gravatars

Mystery ManFor the few of you who comment here, you now have your very own fancy image to go next to your pithy sayings. No longer are you stuck with that dull and boring Mystery Man.

 

WavatarBuilt into WordPress is support for a various computer generated images based on your email address. There were several options to choose from like Indenticons or MonsterIDs, but I chose Wavatars.

 

GravatarIf you are unhappy with the Wavatar associated with your email you can file a protest with the Commissioner’s Office or get yourself a Gravatar. Gravatars don’t cost a nickel and you can use any kind of image as long as it will look good small and square. And it shows up other places too.

 

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 298