mortonfox's soup

Sunny, 45-50°F. Today, I had 3 events from 3 different interest groups but I picked the geocaching breakfast event in Lehigh Valley because the last few of these have been very good. Unfortunately, even though the 3 events are at different times of the day, it was impractical to try to attend all 3 because of the distances involved. Once I made the 90-minute trip to Lehigh Valley, I had to spend the whole day and evening there to make the trip worthwhile. I hope there won't be event conflicts next time so I can do something else next month.

Anyway, the "LVGC Breakfast in the Lehigh Valley" event was at Borderline Restaurant in Bethlehem this time. I had bacon and eggs with French toast. After the gathering, a group of us (Wizard1626, ST.FU, SilverKat1, Theenighthunters, Zix7, Zox7, Zobx, Captinsparrow, B Team, SAJSKI1, and I) went to do a bunch of geocaches in Allentown. The group got smaller later in the day (because some folks had errands or work to do) but we continued westwards into Berks County to do a cluster of geocaches in Topton. We were a rather successful geocaching group because each of us brought different searching skills and different ideas to the table. Through team effort, even the difficult geocaches we attempted didn't take very long to find. And of course, what mattered was we were a fun group.

The group split up at dusk. After that, I found a bunch more geocaches around Fogelsville before having dinner at the Arby's and Long John Silver's restaurant in Fogelsville. This is an unusual combination that I haven't encountered anywhere else yet. It's a single building with Arby's on one side and LJS on the other side. So I had a fish basket combo on the LJS side before moving over to Arby's for mozzarella sticks.

Cloudy, 30-35°F. Today, I started with a few geocaches up by Exton and Uwchlan. The reason I did those two first was so I could take the Pennsylvania Turnpike over to King of Prussia and pick up "76 east 2" along the way. It took me a very long time to get to this rest area geocache because I don't ever use this stretch of the PA Turnpike. The Turnpike is not intended for local travel. Exits are 10 to 20 miles apart and usually not where I would prefer to enter/leave the highway. It's a toll road, besides. "76 east 2" turned out to be a somewhat tricky geocache but I read some online logs and those clued me in on how to search for it. Thank goodness there isn't any yellowjacket activity in the middle of winter because it was placed where one's fingers may come into contact with stinging insects.

It looks like Pennsylvania is now firmly in winter mode. The lake in Willows Park in Radnor, for example, was frozen solid and pretty much all of the field and wooded area was covered in a snow and ice mix that was piled up high in some places. Most of the geocaches still weren't that hard to locate though. The one that took a bit of effort to retrieve was "Well, at least it's not another LPC". This one was iced over. I tried several methods to get it unstuck without success. Then I kicked it and that finally loosened it up.

Icy rain, 30-35°F. A passing snow shower deposited a few inches of snow/ice mix overnight so I had to do a bit of work shoveling out the sidewalk and driveway and cleaning up the car before I headed out. I went to the "2012 Delaware Geocaching Lunch Event" (It was supposed to be a breakfast event but it got postponed a few hours because of the weather.) at Smyrna Diner in Smyrna. It was still raining at the time so it was good to have an indoor event. It was also good to meet up with some people who I ran into previously at geocache sites. I had a BLT. I thought I'd keep it simple this time but it's actually a pretty good BLT.

To be honest, I didn't think I'd do any geocaches after the event because of the freezing rain. However, I noticed that by 3pm, the rain had stopped. So I went and did six of the new geocaches that were placed for this event. Some of these were significantly easier with snow on the ground because all I had to do was follow tracks made by other geocachers until I got to a spot where all the tracks converged. The only real issue is snow made off-road parking harder in some places. Parking at "Diospyros Lane" was the worst because the road shoulder had become a mud pit. To play it safe, I parked my car with two wheels on the asphalt.

Sunny, 20-25°F. It was a cold day so I wasn't keen on doing any geocaches where I'd have to walk a significant distance from parking. My technique was to create a pocket query centered somewhere around Egg Harbor Township for geocaches of any type with difficulty and terrain of 1.5 and below. Limiting the query to really easy geocaches makes it possible to cover pretty much all of South Jersey in one download. Of course, low difficulty and terrain ratings don't tell the whole story. There are some geocaches, especially bike trail geocaches, with low terrain ratings even though the distance from parking is considerable. There are also numerous misrated geocaches. So this query was just a starting point and I still had to check the map and read cache descriptions and logs to be sure. In any case, that's how I picked the first few geocaches of the day. After those, I browsed the summary listing in Neongeo to pick more likely candidates.

Anyway, I went from Salem to Gloucester County, east then north, circling Williamstown. It wasn't really that cold once I got used to it, so towards the end of the day, I did try a half-mile round trip walk for "Senner Property". That went pretty well, even if I thought my fingers were going to freeze off before I got back to the car! To be fair, there were a few other geocaches, "Gone Fishin'", "My First Cache", and "Ducky", with a bit of walking. However, it felt much colder walking across an open field area than in a wooded area because of exposure to the wind. That's another factor to take into consideration beyond the terrain rating.

The only geocache I had difficulty with today was Chop-A-Block. According to the cache description, it is in the cache owner's friend's backyard with permission. Fair enough. When I got there, I noticed that the residents were home. So I knocked on the door and asked them if it was okay to look for the geocache in their backyard. They didn't know anything about the geocache! So I left. Given that coordinates may be a bit off, I think it would've been a good idea for the cache owner to provide a street address in the cache description or hint. However, I'd still knock on the door and ask anyway because it doesn't seem proper to just walk right into someone's backyard. On the other hand, if that was the correct house, then we have a problem.

Sunny, 36°F. It was cold and windy, but after wading across the stream at Bringhurst Woods through icy-cold water, I didn't think the weather was really that cold any more. The first three geocaches had the roughest terrain of the day, so thank goodness the next half dozen or so were pretty easy. I'm guessing few people went out geocaching in the cold and windy weather. I was FTF on 4 geocaches (BYOB, Lewis and Dyke, CR42, and Carlise) and I didn't even have to rush out for those. I think most of the geocaches I found today were placed for next weekend's geocaching breakfast event, but I figure since I found these already, I can go further south after the event. There are a bunch more geocaches down the shore that I haven't done and I need to visit the outlet mall too.

In the evening, I joined the Furst State folks for a hibachi dinner meet at Hibachi Grill & Supreme Sushi Buffet in Wilmington. I thought it was a good way to end the day. I had noodles and seafood from the hibachi, miscellaneous buffet food, every kind of sushi they had, and ice cream, fruit and jelly.

Yes, it's already the second week of the new year but I was busy the first week and 2011 was such a busy year that it was hard to distill the important things from the year. The biggest change is after 16 months being out of work, I returned to work for a small startup (literally a 6-person office when I joined) in Wilmington. My previous job wasn't at a big firm but this one is microscopic in comparison and it's a lot different. There is no bureaucracy, no office politics, no cubicles, and very little formality. I was given full access and was trusted to do the right thing from day one. I learnt a lot as I went along and within a week, I had started contributing important code to the system. Best of all, I was never left with the feeling that anything I did was futile or a waste. Any software I wrote was put to good use pretty much right away and I deployed it myself most of the time. So all in all, it's been a promising start. Then again, I thought the same thing back when my previous job began, so let's check back on this one in 14 years and see if it has withstood the test of time. :)

Of course, with the new job, I had less time for geocaching but I think I did as much of that as I wanted to on weekends and after work in the summer. I ended the year with more geocache finds than year 2009 but not 2010. The year was dominated by Lancaster with two big geocache series, the battleship caches and the rail trail caches, although Delaware was no slouch either with the DGT caches, the C&D power trail, and the First State Challenge. I tried to get out to more geocaching events as well, especially the ones in Bucks and Montgomery County that would've been a 2-hour drive from my old home in North Jersey. Now that these are only an hour from home, it hardly feels like an arduous journey getting there. I also started going to a few Where's George events locally and in Maryland. And of course, I went to local furmeets too whenever I could and attended 3 furry conventions, FA: United, Anthrocon and Furfright. The great thing about this area is there's an event or gathering going on pretty much every weekend. On the other hand, the downside is I haven't had as many mascot gigs now that I'm distant from Hi-4. I'm also losing touch with NYC-area folks but that is to be expected.

I kept up the pace on personal projects as usual. In its 4th year, TwitVim had another round of incremental improvements, although I thought the multiple login feature was big enough to bump the version number. My Foursquare webapp, 4sqNoGPS, became PlainSquare when I rewrote it for the Foursquare V2 API. I also changed the CSS so it looks more like a mobile app on small screens while keeping the desktop interface simple. I've found this setup to be good enough for most day-to-day use and really only hit the official app to upload photos and claim specials. Remember the beta Google Chromebook I received in December 2010? Well, I used it a lot more throughout 2011 and that led to my participation in the Cr-48 binaries project. I probably wouldn't use the Cr-48 for serious development work but now that we have a text editor, a few scripting languages, and some dev tools ported to it, light work is possible. And finally, I did get around to scrapping my old website and reworking it into a Drupal-based site. This doesn't mean that I'll update it any more frequently but when I do, it'll be less of a pain. :)

Sunny, 48°F. Went geocaching in the near side of South Jersey today just because I thought it was time and also because there was a new geocache in Deepwater. Apparently, the newest thing since I last visited Salem County is the "0h No A Nano" series. There were a few last time but Bikehammer has added more towns to the series. These are all unincorporated villages, often just a single crossroad with a church or fire station in the countryside.

Later in the afternoon, I took a walk on the Elephant Swamp Trail in Elk Township for four geocaches. ("Further Down and Sloppy" thru "More Swamp Then Elephant", but I moved the car between the first two and the next two.) I ran into Joe 'n Sue at a cache site later in the day and they told me the legend of Elephant Swamp. The trail follows a Pennsylvania-Reading Railroad line. Back in the 19th century, a circus was traveling by train through the area and an elephant escaped into the swamp. The elephant was never found again.

The last two geocaches of the day were on the Rowan University campus, so it's a good thing I did those during winter break when the campus was deserted. Probably would be hard to even find parking once school is in session.

Sunny, 60-65°F. It was an unusually warm day for winter. I had a very late start but fortunately, there were a bunch of new geocaches right within the county. Of the four, I'd say "Wheels on the Bus" was probably the toughest one but I was lucky and saw it within a few seconds because I happened to start the search right where it was. I met rapprapp and ripejeff as I was leaving.

Since I was not far from Elsmere (well, it's not a big county so it really isn't that far from any point within it to any other point but I think in this case, I was within three miles) and I had a lunch coupon for International Grill, I decided to break for lunch and have Chinese buffet and Mongolian BBQ. This restaurant was where the dinner portion of DE Furbowl used to be held before they moved to Cici's. However, they changed their name back from East King Buffet to International Grill. I'm not sure if there has been a management change as well but prices seem a bit lower now. Unfortunately, they got rid of the frogs' legs and ice cream sprinkles.

There was still a bit of time before sunset so I decided to try finding "Out of Bounds" at Roser Park in Hockessin. This is a tricky 3-star geocache but after looking around for a while, I figured out by elimination where it had to be. Then I saw the method of attachment when I looked really closely. The cache site is in the swampy area beyond the far edge of the soccer field. That area has become a bit of a bottle dump. Since I brought a trash bag and the trash barrel, I picked up some of the trash before I left. By the time I was done though, the barrel was so heavy that it was quite a struggle to get it back to the parking lot. (I should get a small trash cart with wheels for litter patrol.) Hopefully, that was worth doing.

Sunny, 40-45°F. I couldn't let the "Finds for Each Day" series of challenge geocaches go unfinished, so two days after I did the first one, I returned for the other four. Qualification for these challenges was trivial. I've geocached on all 366 days of the year, so of course I have all four seasons too. Along the way, I stopped at the Maryland House rest area on I-95 and did four geocaches there. You'd think rest area caches would be quick but these ones required over a mile of hiking through the rough wooded areas at the north and south ends of the rest area.

Then I did a bunch geocaches along a stretch of Route 7 where there was a geocache every quarter of a mile or so. Then finally, I did the four "Finds for Each Day" caches. Then I arrived at the White Marsh mall area. The roads around there were so busy that I decided to keep going east to Middle River. "Speeders BEWARE!" is noteworthy because this cache was mentioned in a geocaching forum thread about dangerous/illegal geocaches since it is next to a highway. I was intrigued and decided to go right to that one as soon as I recognized its location on the map. Well, despite the controversy, there really isn't a problem. The highway is probably one of the least busy highways in that part of Maryland. The only real issue I could see is my car was partly on the bike lane when I parked next to the cache site. But I was there only for a few minutes so it's not a big deal.

Cloudy, then rainy. 50-60°F. It was another warm winter day. I was going to try to attend two geocaching events today but decided to just do the one in Collegeville because it didn't seem worth the extra driving to go to Lancaster first and then Collegeville. Besides, this way, I'd have time for some geocaches before the Collegeville event, which was at lunchtime.

So I attended "Ringing in the New Year 2012", which was held in the cafe area of Wegman's supermarket in Collegeville. I thought this was a pretty good event. Familiar crowd and rather laid-back. Funny thing is whereas the main topic of conversation at the Baltimore event was geocaching drama, the topic of conversation here was job situations. There are quite a number of geocachers in the Philly suburbs who work in software development and they all had stories about their layoffs and how company management demoralized IT departments. I had nachos with pork from the prepared foods section of the supermarket.

After the event, I headed out with the Hoagies and Elmh to do the series of geocaches on the Schuylkill River Trail near the Cromby Generating Station. That was fun even if it started raining while we were halfway out there. It was dusk after we were done, so I did some shopping (70% discount on Christmas candy at Target!) and then went to Cheeseburger in Paradise in Newark to use a gift card. I had fish and chips because I figured ordering the food in the restaurant name would be too easy. :)

Sunny, 50-60°F. I thought I'd go somewhere a bit different on the last day of 2011. Well, it's different for me anywhere since I rarely go to the Baltimore area. (That was only my second time there in 2011.) That $6 toll before the Susquehanna makes me think twice before going past Cecil County, but I digress. I started the day at the "Anchors Aweigh!" geocaching event at Nautilus Diner in Timonium. I didn't feel like having actual breakfast food so I ordered gyro with fried onions. Since I hadn't been going to geocaching events in Maryland, I didn't know anyone there. Funny thing is though, geocaching seems to be pretty much the same anywhere. I heard quite a bit of intriguing geo-drama listening in on the conversations, but it's not so different from what I've heard at geocaching events in Lancaster, Bucks County, New Jersey, and Long Island. It's the usual cases of people cheating to get FTFs, signing each other in, and stealing geocaches.

After the geocaching event, I went and found geocaches in Lutherville-Timonium, Towson, Northwood, and Pikesville. I didn't actually do all the geocaches I could've done because it was time for dinner. When I went to the White Marsh area for dinner though, I didn't count on most restaurants shutting down early for New Year's Eve. Denny's in Nottingham was still open, however, so I had a Holiday Turkey Melt. After that, I did two more geocaches in White Marsh / Rossville before going home. The last one I did was "Finds for Each Day of the Year Challenge-4 Seasons", a challenge cache with the prerequisite of finding at least one geocache on each of the 366 days of the year. I qualified a long time ago, so it was a snap but I thought it was a good one to close the year on.

I didn't go out anywhere on Christmas Day. I got a spiral-cut ham from the warehouse club a week ago, so I baked it and had that for lunch and dinner. After two meals, there was still enough ham and side dishes left over to pack four lunch containers for the coming work week!

The day after Christmas was sunny and 45-50°F. I went to work in the morning to take care of a few things but left in the afternoon. I figured there was plenty of time to do after-Christmas shopping in the evening, so I went geocaching in Downingtown first. Nothing fancy; just a few simple ones in area parks and a walk on the Struble Trail.

Sunny, 35-40°F. It was a lazy Saturday morning of a holiday weekend. I figured I'd just go for a few geocaches and then return home. Well, I did those few geocaches and it wasn't even noon, so I thought I'd do one more and then a few more, and before I knew it, I'd gone from Parkesburg to Oxford and straight through Cecil County, Maryland! Self-control does not exist.

Anyway, "Babbling Brook" had a nice stream. I'd never explored much of Parkesburg so I didn't know about Bert Reel Park, which is not on the main road. "In The Trenchez Again" was a strange one where the hiding spot already looked very familiar to me even though I hadn't been there for the original "In The Trenchez" geocache. I saw that weird tree with a horizontal trunk growing through its own hollow in a dream a few months back! (There's probably a Freudian interpretation too. :) ) And yes, that turned out to be where the cache was really hidden.

The last geocache of the day, "Another Eye For You", turned out to be harder to get to than I thought. It's only 5 miles from North East, as the crow flies, but Port Herman is actually on the other side of one of the fingers of the upper Chesapeake Bay. So the driving distance turned out to be just over 20 miles! That's really what made me run out of time for any more geocaches after that. On the plus side, this area is about the same parallel as Middletown, so I went to Hardee's for dinner and had Buffalo Chicken Tenders, their new item. These are about as spicy as the third-hottest sauce on the Buffalo Wild Wings scale, which was a surprise to me because I assumed fast food hot sauce would be on the mild side.

Cloudy/rainy, 45-50°F. Central Jersey geocachers have been holding monthly meets every 3rd Tuesday of the month but since I returned to a full-time job, I haven't made it to a single meet. For the last meet of the year, I figured what the hey? Let's take a day off and go there.

It was an evening meetup, so I had the whole day to do some geocaching on the way there. First, I did a hike in Mercer County Park for a bunch of geocaches. That was not my original plan but the construction traffic delay on the NJ Turnpike made me decide to take exit 7A and so that's how I got there. Later in the day, I hiked Rutgers University Ecological Preserve. (The abandoned car was the only thing I photographed there. The wooded area is not actually full of abandoned cars, except for that one section of it.) Then it started raining, so I just did a number of quick geocaches the rest of the way to the meet.

The meetup was at Fuddruckers in Bridgewater. It wasn't a big gathering but I saw some of the regular attendees. We had the back section of the dining area, behind a partition. I ordered a turkey burger and loaded it up with fixings. (If you can still see the burger, then there aren't enough fixings! :) ) This particular Fuddruckers is one that offers free refills of fries.

Sunny, 34-40°F. It was a cold Sunday but I was fine once I started walking. I began the day with two geocaches in Delaware, one of which was this burger-shaped container. Then I went north into Chester County through Embreeville (3 geocaches in Cheslen Preserve), Thorndale, Downingtown, Caln, West Brandywine, and West Nantmeal.

I thought the four new geocaches in Thorndale were pretty good. Three of those were crafty but not in a way that made them hard to find. The only surprise location was "Hideaway Farms Micro", near Springton Manor. I thought it was going to be a farm or farm preserve, but "Hideaway Farms" turned out to be the name of a new housing development. Finding my way around back there was interesting, to say the least, because the place was so new that none of the roads were in the GPS map.

Cloudy, 40-45°F. I was intrigued by a series of geocaches, all titled "Plainsboro Preserve...", that showed up at the top of the recently published list. That was two weeks ago but I finally went up to Plainsboro this morning to take a stab at this series. It turns out that those were all Ranger Rick themed geocaches! The geocaches were placed by the nature center people. There was a side game in this series. In each cache, there is a paw print stamp and as you find each cache, you can stamp your Ranger Rick's Trails passport. I brought my completed passport back to the nature center and the prize was a 10% discount in their nature store.

After that, I left the preserve and went geocaching in and around Plainsboro. There weren't many geocaches to find since I'd already been in that area just a few months ago. However, I was finally able to do "Plainsboro Cache & Dash #2", which I couldn't do the last time because there were people nearby. So this cache is easier when it's cold and dark and the plaza outside the Plainsboro Public Library is deserted.

For dinner, I went to On The Border in Princeton and had empanadas, tostada, refried beans and rice, house salad, and sopapillas. I had an On The Border coupon that I just had to use this evening because I almost never pass by an On The Border restaurant.

Just this morning, I added most of the items mentioned in Gifts for Geeks, 2011 Edition to my Amazon wishlist. It's not a real wish list though. I only use this feature to bookmark stuff that I may consider purchasing later if there are specials or discounts.

Sunny, 40-45°F. I decided not to go very far today so I started with a few geocaches on the near side of Chester County. I thought "The Chamber of Death" was interesting. I have no idea what it was used for but it's an abandoned stone building set into the side of a slope, so one would actually walk onto the roof and then take some stone steps down to the door. "Claddagh" seemed like a harder geocache to find than it should be. I think this location puts a whammy on people. A number of geocachers mentioned having to look more than once to see the cache. I saw it only on my second pass even though the cache was hidden on the most obvious object in that location.

The last one I did today was "#3.5 Kayak way up or Walk beyond "Past the Don"". I'm always a bit wary about doing geocaches in the area behind the Christiana Mall because mall security is bound to come around and wonder why someone is parking at an odd location at the edge of mall property. Worse yet, I parked at the entrance to the sand pits and construction area, where no shoppers park. However, I did the one-mile round trip hike from there with no incident.

With the short daylight this time of year, I know I'm not going to do that much geocaching. So I pretty much let geocaching events decide where I go. So on Tuesday, I took the day off and went to Lancaster for the "L.O.S.T. at who's place? Your Place!" geocaching event. It was held in the evening at the oddly-named Your Place restaurant. (I imagine some conversations go like this: "Where are we going?" "Your Place." "My place?") I had a crab cake sandwich. Since I was in Lancaster, I took the opportunity to get some of the remaining Battleship grids and also a few other geocaches at the edge of Lancaster County. I also got some whoopie pies from the Masonic Village market in Elizabethtown. It's like a brownie with cream filling.

Wednesday evening was scheduled maintenance for the car. Mileage is 170,443. There isn't even a maintenance schedule past 100,000 miles so the service tech just did the "winter maintenance special" from this month's circular plus the usual inspection.

On Saturday, I went to the "FSC-2011 Celebration Event" at Uno Chicago Grill in Dover. It's a little awards ceremony for everyone who completed the First State Challenge series of geocaches last month. I got a certificate and a pathtag. (The pink mouse is not part of the prize. :) ) I had a muchos nachos appetizer as the entree. It's priced like an entree, so I figured why not? I went geocaching in Kent County after the event. I didn't think I'd do very many but there was a good trio of quick geocaches in Frederica and two more in Milford that I thought were potentially troublesome but I had good luck on this evening.