Geocaching

Started: 2003-11-16 20:34:55

Submitted: 2003-11-16 21:50:55

Visibility: World-readable

Yesterday afternoon I decided to take advantage of the daylight and my newly-acquired toy, so I headed out Geocaching. I located three caches in Louisville, handily close to my current place of residence, and headed out in search of them.

My first cache attempt was right turn cache, which was a multi-cache and involved a little math to find the immediate waypoints. (I guess the geocaching community concluded that simply having people travel to any arbitrary waypoint was entirely too easy, so they decided to make things more difficult by creating a scavenger hunt.) I found the coordinates for step 2 without any trouble, but I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do from there. No further waypoints presented themselves, so I decided to call it good and headed back to Yoda.

The thought crossed my mind to call it a day, but I wasn't quite done yet. I headed next to One Valiant Cowboy. I figured out how to enter waypoints on my GPS receiver and how to use the goto feature, which helped. This multi-cache involved doing some math; I made it to the final location and had a pretty good idea where the cache was supposed to be hidden, but it didn't jump out at me and it was getting cold and dark, so I headed back to Yoda and back home.

Geocaching is fun. I'll have to do it more.

Last night, Mike and Janean Carey wandered over to our humble abode for something vaguely resembling evening entertainment. (Mike is a packaging engineer designing consumer packaging; I showed him the sexy packaging for my sexy iPod and he thought it was great. Janean (whose name I think has entirely too many vowels, but I might just be crazy) is a speech therapist; everyone she tells that to then feel compelled to reveal their hidden speech therapy stories. They moved to Longmont several months ago and occasionally go to Boulder church.) I learned that Mike shares my obsession with maps; I whipped out two Trails Illustrated maps of the surrounding area for our amusement while Gem and Janean sat on the couch, trying to ignore us.

In other news, Gem and I acquired some more furniture today. My mother decided to acquire a new china cabinet because both of her current ones won't fit in their new house in Oklahoma, so the old ones were up for grabs. Gem and I carefully considered our options and decided to go for the simpler, larger one that formerly resided in the living room. We also managed to get the room divider that has been a fixture in my house for as long as I can remember. We needed an extra lifting entity, and I didn't think I could reliably accost any of my friends so early in the morning, so we called Mike and Janean, distracted them from their furniture shopping attempts (fortunately for them, their furniture tastes aren't nearly as disparate as Gem's and mine), and enlisted their help. The bookshelves previously residing in the living room ended up in our bedroom, and now we have two new pieces of furniture in the living room. Gem amused herself rearranging everything -- now we can actually use our linen closet as a linen closet. Crazy how these things work.