Year: 2011

Embarassment of Caches

In a couple weeks we are heading out west to Snohomish, WA to visit Donna’s brother and his family. We are spending a little more than 2 days with them before we go on a road trip that will include western Washington, western Oregon, the tip of coastal California and back up the Oregon coast before flying home out of Seattle.

We will, of course, be doing some geocaching. The Seattle area is the birthplace of geocaching which means that there are more caches out there than you can shake a GPSr at. Our first day of traveling is from Snohomish to White Salmon, WA on the Hood River. As we are prone to do, we are not taking the most direct route, but the scenic one by going through Steven’s Pass before heading south. Google maps says it is 300 miles and that is the upper limit of what we like to drive in a day, so there is not going to be a lot of time for geocaching.

I did a Pocket Query of caches along the middle 230 miles of our route, extending to a maximum of one mile either side and it returned 334 finds! Donna and I have been taking turns trying to whittle that number of caches down, with our criteria being: convenient to the direction of travel on the route, not too difficult and be somewhat scenic. So far we have managed to get it down to 217 and it really needs to be more in the neighborhood of 30. We are obviously going to be leaving a ton of terrific hides off our To Do List and from the descriptions I’ve been reading we could spend our entire week and a half out ther just hiking the trails and geocaching along this one day’s drive. We are not too saddened by this development, as the journey is always the reason, any geocaching is just a bonus.

Closer to home, there is a new cache in Hitchcock Woods, the replacement for our just archived cache “The Birds”, called “North by Northwest” that we will probably go hunting for tomorrow.

I’m Nearly Speechless

In spite of what the content of the actual movie is, the trailer is surprisingly SFW (Safe For Work.)

httpvh://youtu.be/QiKPjPLPLh4

TV shows like Star Trek or X-Files, OK, but this? An XXX parody of Star Wars? Sacrilege! Although if it didn’t include some possible kiddie stuff, the parodies of Episodes I, II & III might be improvements over Speilberg’s efforts.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1055

That’s Entertainment?

I get the start of my online news at Google. It is kind of neat in that you can customize it to your needs (you just know I’ve a Red Sox section), but the flip side is it creepily customizes itself to you from what you click on.

Browsing there just now. As I scanned down the page and got down to the Entertainment section, this headline was one of the two there, “Robyn Gardner Goes Missing in Aruba: A Maryland woman has vanished in Aruba after taking a snorkeling trip with a friend, MyFoxDC reports.” This is entertainment?

Oh yeah, I forgot, it *is* entertainment. And I bet Nancy Grace is just overjoyed, this comes around in the nick of time because the public’s interest in Casey Anthony is really waning.

Dressing Up Special

A co-worker who has been serving in Afghanistan for the past year with the National Guard is back stateside and returns to work next Monday. His direct supervisor David, who sits in the cube next to me, mentioned last week that he needed to get Ron’s cube set back up. When he left for Sand Land we were still up front in the old offices and now we are back in our shiny new area (except for the carpet that has gotten ugly from machine oil footprints.)

David thought maybe we should all dress up special for Ron’s first day back. He then wondered out loud where the nearest turban outlet might be…

I’m thinking keffiyehs would be “better.”

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1053

Geez, Could You Speed It Up A Bit?

5-1/2 innings or only 61% of tonight’s game and it has taken 2 hours and 20 minutes to play. The score? One to one. This puppy is going to be over around midnight or approximately 1 hour after I’m in bed because I’m taking a shower as soon as this half inning is over.

Brief Glimpse

As noted yesterday, FOX did show the Phillies – Giants game here locally. I can understand it though, as the “local” MLB team of interest is the Atlanta Braves and they are in the same division as the Phillies, so the Braves fans could watch and root against them (they better root hard as the Braves trail the Phils by 9 games in the standings.)

So I listened to the game on the radio, all except for an inning of the Sox – Yankees game that FOX broadcast as bonus coverage. That bonus coverage was due to the difference in the style of play in the two different leagues, the National League tangos and the American League waltzes. The Phillies and Giants are in the NL and those guys play like they have someplace that they want to go to after the game. Their game was finished in 2 hours and 14 minutes. The Yankees & Red Sox play are in the AL where it seems like they have no place they would rather be than on the baseball diamond, so it took them 3 hours and 25 minutes to play those same nine innings.

The FRS scored first, 2 runs in the bottom of the third inning. The MFY came right back and scored 2 in the top of the fourth to tie the game. I almost turned off the broadcast because because I had a feeling that the Red Sox were going to lose this game too. Lucky for me their attitude was better than mine as the Sox then answered back in the bottom of the 4th with 5 runs. The Yankees never got close again and lost 10-4.

Donna and I along with friend Joan went for a 4-1/2 mile walk in Hitchcock Woods this morning. We were in the Woods for a little over two hours and saw 2 different people walking 2 dogs each, three high school cross country runners and three folks on horseback. Busy day.

Am I Fan Enough?

Its a showdown at the Fenway Corral and I can’t stand it. We went grocery shopping tonight and when I got home the Sox were up 2 to 0 on the Yankees. My wife said, “Your team is winning, you should be happy.” But as a lifelong Red Sox fan I know that doom is just around the corner and sure enough, the very next inning the the MFY scored three runs and are now in the lead.

I gave up on the FRS last night when they were down by three with three chances to make it up against the Indians. I’ll hang on tonight with three innings left because they are down by one and because it is the Yankees, but I don’t know if I can stand it much longer. The pitching is killing me. They just walked the number 9 hitter after getting two outs. Come on, the #9 batter is in that part of the order for a reason, he’s the weakest hitter in the line-up, quit nibbling the corners and throw the ball in there. The offense isn’t helping matters either, in the fifth inning they had the bases loaded and the “best” hitter in the American League, Adrian Gonzales, struck out. In the sixth the tying run was left on second base and in the seven they went down one – two – three.

After tonight’s audible torture, I’m in for some visual tormenting the next two days as the games will be on TV, FOX on Saturday afternoon and* because the game will be ESPN on Sunday night.

* Just checked the TV Listings online and it looks like the local FOX affiliate will be showing the Phillies – Giants game. Maybe it will be raining in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon.