Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Oddly, when Sturgeon’s Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to ‘crap’.
About a year and a half ago a friend, about the only I keep in contact with (if by contact you count exchanging Christmas cards*) asked me to check out his new Facebook page. Turns out to see anything on anyone’s Facebook page you have to join. So join I did. I looked at his page.
*Actually it is more like our wives sharing cards.
My page just sat there until a month or so ago when a couple of wives from the Miata Club decided to get an FB page. We became “friends.” Then a CD Swapper from like a half dozen years ago sends a friends request. She is followed in short order by someone who I may or may not remember from high school, Donna’s globetrotting State Department operative and her youngest brother.
I need the Facebook For Dummies book*. My “wall” is filled with constant patter of my new friends and photos and games? and gifts? and what all. But the only time I look at my wall (or anybody else’s wall for that matter) is when I get a friend request.
*When I typed that I have no idea if there actually was such a book. I suspected there was because there is a book in the ‘for Dummies’ series for everything. Probably one called Scratching Your Ass for Dummies (but I ain’t looking on Amazon for that one.) Well, sure enough there is one.
So I’m not much of a FB friend other than I’m a sucker to be people’s friends thereby helping them inflate their friend count giving them a greater sense of being popular. Every time I do log in to Facebook I get a string of people who I should be friends with, but I don’t know any of them (and the ones with slightly familiar names invariably don’t have a photo so how can I tell if I know them.)
Tonight I got one from Mr. Eyepulp himself, Andrew Hughes. Andrew is a fellow Miata owner and he blogs too. His blog post are sporadic, but that is fine because when he does post it is worth the read. Unlike here where I post everyday because I like the sound of my typing. I recognized his name and his photo, so I became Andrew’s newest friend. So I went to Andrew’s page and I was his third friend (which I consider a great honor considering we haven’t actually met in person) and he is so new, his little progress bar was barely filled in from the left.*
*Of course it might fill in from the right and Andrew is making great strides in his quest to be a Facebook Maven, I just don’t know. If only there was a book that explained things.
So good luck with conquering Facebook Andrew, I hope my being your friend helps you fill your progress bar. I’ll check back up on you next time someone asks me to be their friend. I will still check the blog regular like…
Oh, yeah, the friend who got me to join just to look at his page, he bailed, took his page down. Rat Bastard.
Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 275
We are packing up our cough medicine, decongestants, expectorants and throat lozenges and going on a day trip. We have been threatening to go to the Concord Mills Mall for several weeks now and it is high time we did.
Donna needs a new pair of hiking boots, so a trip to the Bass Pro Shop is in order. We’ve both had a hankering for the spicy food at Razzoo’s just across the parking lot from the BPS. As an extra incentive Clunk (or is it Thunk?) is racing his Miata, AKA POS, at Lowe’s Motor Speedway at NASA Firecracker Run. We are going through geocaching withdrawal too.
So we are loading up the Miata. Film at Eleven.
Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 277
While circling the Lowes Motor Speedway loop road looking for the registration building, the Emperor rolled past the 93,000 mile mark.
Today’s mission was a resounding success. We spent the morning watching all variations of cars race around 3/4 of the big oval and a t-shaped infield course at the Speedway. Lunch was a taste bud tantalizing mixture of red beans and rice with andouille for me and stuffed shrimp for Donna. That was after our appetizers of Crawdaddy Fondue Dip for her and Rat Toes for me (don’t worry, I saved you some Mark.) We found some nice light hikers for Donna that were cheaper than expected and we snagged three caches (1 at the race track and 2 near the mall.)
I even have the film I kiddingly promised, but it is so lame I won’t post it. I decided to use the camera and take a short video of our friends Miatas as they went by. The movie consists of about 3 seconds of cars flashing by and then the next 12 seconds are of my (and Donna’s) feet and legs as we walk away from the fence. I forgot to push the shutter a second time to stop the movie…
Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 279
They should be worried too, today I ate the chocolate chip cookies that were meant for our neighbor’s birthday.
In honor of American Independence Day we watched a bike race in France, but to make up for it we had grilled hot dogs for dinner.
If you have any doubts that the gene pool isn’t too shallow, just go and read a few pages of The Customer Is Not Always Right. Here is a short and sweet one:
The Joy Of (Repeat) Checks
Computer Repair | Monticello, MN, USA Me: “Sir, your computer is all ready to go. We got all the viruses off of it.” Customer: “Question: do you get viruses from looking at porno sites?” Me: “Yes sir, the majority of those sites contain viruses.” Customer: “….hmm…well then, I’ll probably be back here soon.”
Be sure and at least read the ones under the column headed Popular Quotes.
Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 280
We went for a hike in the woods this morning real early to beat the heat and to be home before Stage 1 of Le Tour started at 8:30AM.
This objective was to retrieve the small cache, “Jump At Your Own Risk,” we placed last week and move it to a different spot in the woods. We also wanted to place cache #2. The second one is titled “Out West” because we placed them in the western part of the woods and it is filled with some of the inexpensive souvenirs we brought back from our trip out west last April.
Yesterday evening we needed something to watch on TV so I poked around on Encore & Starz that came with our Tour de France digital package and found the third Pirate movie on one of the channels. When I first attempted to watch this movie back at the end 2007 I could only stomach 19 minutes of it. In the back of my mind I have always wondered had I bailed too early on it because people said it didn’t get good until Captain Jack Sparrow made his entrance. Wonder no more. We came in somewhere near the middle of the movie and lasted about 5 minutes. What a waste.
To make up for it this afternoon we watched the one and only TDPM on our copy of the DVD.
Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 280
The two caches we hid yesterday were published (listed on geocaching.com and announcing emails sent out) a little before 9:00 PM last night and in less than 12 hours both were found.
I checked the site at mid day and “Out West” was logged with a FTF at 7:50 this morning. The same cacher logged “Jump At Your Own Risk” as a second to find, some one had beat them to it, and they wondered aloud in their log how they could have possibly missed each other.
The answer came this evening when the FTF of “Jump” logged in. They went out hunting as soon as they got the email last night. Now technically you are not supposed to be in the woods after dark, but that is not what was so wrong about this person caching at 10 o’clock at night, it was the fact that at that time Aiken was in the middle of a big ol’ thunderstorm. To quote from his log: “with the lightning flashing so much it was like hiking with a strobelight on!”
Such is the lure of being the First To Find a cache for some people.
Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 281
About two weeks ago I got two insect bites on both sides of my right leg just above the knee. They itched, swelled and oozed clear stuff, staying that way for about three days until a scab formed. I’ve never reacted to mosquito bites that way, so I guessed they were from a spider, but whatever they were from they were unpleasant.
Then a week ago I got bit 4 times. Back of the right side of my neck, about four inches further down on my back, near the waist on the left side and on my left ankle. I don’t feel the initial bite, but then I’ll notice something itching and scratch a bump.
Those four had just about cleared up when on Monday morning I had an itchy bump on my left forearm. Then later that morning I noticed an itch under my left arm and then one further down the back on the same side.
It is just me, Donna hasn’t been bothered a bit. They could only be coming from a couple places, my dresser or I’m getting bit each time we venture into Hitchcock Woods. My plan of attack to combat this issue was to wait until I had had been bitten enough that my body developed an immunity to what ever was feeding on my, but it didn’t seem to be working. So last night my wife saiid let’s take everything out of my dresser and wash it. Then in the morning you can spray the drawers and everything down with some bug spray.
Washed, sprayed, replaced, we’ll see how it works out.
Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 283
Normally because this is Wednesday I could use the upcoming broadcast of TDTVS as an excuse for not writing anything here, but we have at minimum 197 days before that happens again, so I have no real excuse.
Started up, went down, back up, down again, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 287
We had to make a run to get gas this evening, so while we were out we decided to attempt a cache that was just published yesterday. We would be like the third to find if we did find it. While we didn’t expect to find it, it was one of those that purposely left off the size and gave no hint to make it more difficult, but we were still slightly disappointed when we didn’t. 0 for 1.
There was another cache just up the street that we had logged a DNF on the first attempt, so we headed to it hoping for a second chance find. We didn’t. 0 for 2.
Dang. How about that cache over by the lawyer’s office that we missed the first time? OK, let’s go, it’s just one block over from our intended route home. On our first visit the GPSr was leading us to a bush that looked like it had recently been chopped in half. When we didn’t find it we just assumed that it must have gone missing during the pruning. Not long after we didn’t find it, another cacher tried and they failed too. The cache owner went and checked on it and reported it was still there. Some one else has found it since, so we figured we should find it this time. We didn’t. 0 for 3
Gonna have to go back to ammo cans…
Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 290
After last night’s 3 for 3 DNFs I’ve found out how to generate some ‘negative’ stats. I use a program called GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) to do my off line organizing of caches to hunt and transfering data to the PDA for paperless caching. There is a nifty macro for creating a mind boggling array of statistics, but only of your finds. I guess not too many people really want to put a face on their misses. Me I don’t mind, it is all part of the game and fortunately someone else felt the same way. He has written a couple macros to use the GSAK stats engine to create a nice look of our Did Not Finds.
If you are a member over at geocaching dot com you can see my stats on my public profile page, but if you are not you can’t. I tried dumping them into a blog post, but the formatting got all weird. Oh, well, give me something to mess with in all my spare time.
Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 290
Stage 8 of the TDF resulted in zero change at the top of the leader board. Old Man Lance is still in third place 8 seconds out. We are in the Pyrenees Mountains, but today and tomorrow’s stages are the kind that probably won’t determine who will win the Tour, but can decide who will lose it. While there are two or more big ass climbs on the stage, they don’t end at the tops, there are 30 to 40 miles of downhill & flats before the finish line allowing any of the contenders who is dropped on the climb to catch back up.
Appears that some of the blog’s theme CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) conflicts with the theme stuff that is produced by the stats generator and I’m not smart enough to know if there is an easy fix and don’t want to spend the time, so I took the easy way out. Just click on this link — Geocaching Statistics
I guess it is OK to blog about this because the FRS apparently don’t need me to jinx tonight’s victory over the supposedly lousy Kansas City Royals because right now their relief pitching is busily snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. When John Smoltz left the game after pitching 5 solid innings they had a 9 to 1 lead. KC scored 5 runs in the sixth. Now after a solo homer in the 7th they have a men on first and second with nobody out, so now the current batter represents the go ahead run!
At the pool party with the MMC this morning it was pointed out to me that I had misspelled retirement in my countdown widget in the right sidebar. What happened here, either all of my readers are as bad as I am when it comes to spelling or you all enjoyed watching me humiliate myself with the Internet equivalent of toilet paper stuck on the bottom of my shoe.
Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 292
Nope, didn’t go geocaching today. Nor yesterday either for that matter. The F in this case stands for finish, not find. We started to watch a movie from 2001 called Happy Accidents that stars Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio, but stopped after 15 minutes. It seems like we are on a streak here with not finishing movies. In the last six weeks we have received 16 discs from Netflix and we have DNF’d 6 of them or almost 38%. The ratio is even worse because there were 6 discs of West Wing which are golden to us, so if we forget about WW the ratio jumps to 60%!
The search for good movies for us is kind of like geocaching. The stars of the movie are the coordinates and the blurb on the Netflix page is the cache description. Roger Ebert’s Review is the hint and all those reviews on the Netflix movie page equate to the logs of fellow geocachers. With all that information, finding a good movie should be easy, but sometimes you just can’t see it.
The car has sat in the garage all day because we rode the tandem around town early this morning paying 3 bills and saving $1.32, so I was going to title this post “The Emperor’s Day Off”, but there is now a possibility that we may have to make a run to the store for some essentials that were missed the other day when we did our weekly grocery shopping.
Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 292
To quote that famous philosopher, Captain Jack Sparrow, “It’s remarkable how often those two traits coincide.”
This is either the lamest thing ever I have ever come across related to geocaching, or the coolest.*
Imagine you are driving down a back country road looking for a cache. Your navigator is in the right seat watching the readout on the GPSr. The direction arrow is pointing straight ahead and the mileage to your target is dropping steadily. Two miles, mile and a half, under one now. Point five, less than a quarter mile, so you ease off the gas. The numbers continue to decrease and once you get below a tenth of a mile the display swaps to showing the distance to your target in feet. Four hundred, 250, less than eighty and the needle is starting to point a little to the right. BAM! Twenty four feet and the compass needle points 90° to the right. You slam on the brakes and steer quickly to the side of the road and succeed in getting almost all the way off the pavement. Both of your heart rates have ticked up a notch. “Hurry, its got to be in that small patch of woods,” she tells you.
“Oh wait a minute dear,” you reply, “Where is that placard? We need to put that on the mirror in case anyone comes along so they’ll know what we are doing.” Riiight.
* I actually printed on of these out and laminated it. My intention was to hang it from the mirror of the Emperor and snap a photo just to have a picture for this post. But I never got around to it.
After watching the TDF Donna talked me into going on a quick geocaching run. The first one was a multi-stage cache in a small park. It was on our remedial cache list so it was an ammo can, but we didn’t see that the first stage was a nano, AKA itty bitty!! Donna found the nano on the second pass and it held the coords for the second stage ammo can. We then spent the next 15 minutes poking around where it should have been without success. Dang another DNF.
Throwing caution to the wind, we headed off to the next nearest cache .6 miles away. It was not on the easy list, in fact it was one of those pesky 35mm film canister well integrated into the environment. And it stayed that way. DNF number two.
There was one more multi on the way home with the second stage being an ammo can. At least the first stage was bigger than a film canister. All the logs showed that this was a unique hide and the GPSr lead us first to a crape myrtle and then to a second one about 10 feet away, but poke as we might we once again came up empty. Another 0 for 3 night.
Watch ebay for a used and quite possibly inaccurate Garmin eTrex Venture HC.
Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 296
For 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.
Built 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.
If 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
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
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
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
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
Went 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
The 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
A couple weeks ago I had an unauthorized charge show up on my PayPal account. I only had a little over $10 in there, the charge amounted to about $35 and because my checking account was linked, they took the overage from it. I disputed the charge with both PayPal and the merchant and they both agreed I was wronged, so my money was returned with in a couple days.
I basically only use PayPal for an occasional eBay purchase, but in the past I’ve used it for snap deals found on the net, so a credit card is also linked. After digging through the PayPal help pages I discovered that they could do an instant transfer from my checking because I had that CC listed as a back-up source. Wanting to ensure that they couldn’t just yank money out of my checking account again, I removed the credit card.
Well, because someone had used my account without permission PayPal had me do a couple of things before they would let me access my money again. One of which was change my password and another was to change my security questions. Both were no brainers and easy to do.
The third thing they wanted was to confirm my address. This was the sticky one. The easy way to confirm my address was to link a charge card to my account. Nah, don’t want to do that, that’s what got me in this mess in the first place. There is another way, PayPal could mail a code to my snail mail address that I could, when received, enter into their site. Trouble was I didn’t meet the requirements for this option, because I had a dispute within the last 3 months.
I stewed for a week figuring out what I should do.There were no worries about anyone getting any money out of the account during this time because it was frozen while we confirmed my address. The plan I came up with was to confirm with a credit card and then once I had access to my money, pull it all out and close the PayPal account.
To make sure that the card, and consequently my address, were good they were going to charge the card $1.95 and then promptly refund it. I forgot all about the whole thing until about 5 days later when I got an email from PayPal saying they were giving me a bonus. I thought, wow, that’s nice, must be to make up for the hassle I’ve been through, they added a dollar ninety five into my account.
Hey, wait a minute!
I checked my CC online and sure enough they had no trouble withdrawing money, but they never refunded the card. They turned around and credited my money into my PayPal account and called it a bonus.
That cinched it, I transferred my measly $60 back into my bank and I’m shutting down my PayPal account.
Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300
In case any one every asks if I have a license to geocache, I can now say yes thanks to Renzo Tobias. I took his idea, added a little color, printed one out, signed and laminated it then tucked it in my wallet:
io9 has a post today that digs up 201 different Star Wars T-shirts. If you owned all of these and started on the first of the year you might just be starting to wear repeats about now. My favorite, #149:
From the Download Squad, behold The Most Amazing Website On The Internet:
Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 301
Because folks know I bicycle and that my wife and go out of our way to get the cable upgrade just so we can watch the Tour de France every year, I have received this picture via email from co-workers 3 times in the last two days. Ha, ha, ha.
We toke a hike in Hitchcock Woods this evening and hid our third geocache. This one is called “No Horses Allowed” because it is placed along one of the two trails we know of that are closed to horses due to erosion concerns and or steepness. We have got a couple more planned for placing in the woods and then we are going to have to find some other locations. Not that the we are getting anywhere close to having caches too near each other, within 500′ is the limit, but when we are done with those two there will be an even dozen in the Woods and that is probably plenty.
Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 302
About 4:30 this afternoon we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go.” We loaded up the Miata with knapsacks, walking sticks, hiking boots, some ice water, a cut up apple and headed into Hitchcock Woods to find “SECTION”. I had pretty much given up on finding this one, we had the Stage 1 coordinates, but in three attempts could not locate the small cache with the coords for Stage 2. A fellow cacher who was one of the half dozen or so to have found this one had offered a hint after our second try, but I was reluctant. Call it a function of the gene that makes us males incapable of asking for directions, I didn’t want the hint, but Donna with Marisa Tomei’s help convinced me to take it.
Mona Lisa Vito: So what’s your problem? Vincent Gambini: My problem is, I wanted to win my first case without any help from anybody. Mona Lisa Vito: Well, I guess that plan’s moot. Vinny Gambini: Yeah. Mona Lisa Vito: You know, this could be a sign of things to come. You win all your cases, but with somebody else’s help, right? you win case after case, and then afterwards you have to go up to somebody and you have to say, “thank you.“
[pause] Mona Lisa Vito: Oh my God, what a f**king nightmare!
With the hint we found the Stage 1 container within minutes of arriving at GZ. The coordinates for Stage 2 were loaded up and off we went. A few minutes into the trip a big rustling sound came off from our right. We had spooked a deer. She circled through the woods a bit and came back out on the trail 25 yards ahead of us, eyeballed us for a minute or so, then danced away. When we started it said the cache was .25 miles away right straight down the Palmetto Ride trail where the Stage 1 was hidden off of. The distance steadily decreased to about half that before the trail headed off in a perpendicular direction. The distance to the cache grew and grew until it was over a third of mile off, before the trail turned back and the distance started to came down again. When it got down to around 300 feet the trail again turned 90 degrees away from the cache.
Knowing the trail eventually looped back again, but not for a long while, when went off-trail and made a beeline for our goal (well, as much a beeline as possible through the thick brush and brambles, dang, the scratches from last weekend’s bushwhacking expedition were just starting to disappear.) The GPSr led us straight to a small dam that we had been to long before when we were just hiking in here and not looking for ammo cans well integrated into the environment. To the left was an algae covered pond, to the right was a 30 foot drop and the direction indicator said 60′ straight across the two foot wide concrete dam. Neither of us were foolhardy enough to try the balancing act, so we weighed the steep wooded drop to the small stream below the dam or the long trail to the other side.
The long walk won out because we knew that was easier to get to the dam from the Low Country Ride trail from previous experience. When we got around to the other side of the dam the GPSr did it again, pointed straight across the dam the other way and read sixty feet. Niiice, now what?
We fight the only slightly less steep downhill on this side through thick underbrush to the very bottom of the ravine about 90′ downstream from the dam. The GPSr was now pointing right at the dam. Damn. We daintily hop a very murky looking stream and fight more thick vines with thorny sides until we are at the base of the dam. There inside the three foot square opening of a water gate was an ammo can. FOUND IT! (For some reason it was totally unnecessarily hidden behind a couple pieces of broken clay pipe, like there would ever be any foot traffic down here and they might accidentally spot it…)
We signed the log, climbed the hill back to the trail and headed out of the woods. Total miles walked, 3.0; total time spent in the woods, 1:55:30; average speed, 2 mph; total bleeding scratches on my legs and arms, 5.
Sure hope they never have to open that overflow gate, they’ll no one will ever see that ammo can again.
Oh, and OddAngles, “Thank you.”
Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 302
Instead of listening to the FRS ballgame on the internet I spent an hour or so watching the videos from Comic-Con of the panel for TDTVS (only six months to go.) The producers answered questions from the audience (as cryptically as they could on some, more honestly on others), they had several of the shows actors join them and there were several videos shown, including a phony America’s Most Wanted segment on Kate Austen. But my favorite was this commercial for Mr. Kluck’s:
When I finally decided to see how the Sox were doing I went to their home page and there was a large photo of John Smoltz pitching and this bit of verbiage underneath: J.D. Drew singled, moved to third on Adam LaRoche’s single and scored on Jed Lowrie’s sac fly as the Red Sox broke through in the fifth. Reading that you might think things were going well for Boston, but in fact it was just the opposite, they were losing six to nothing when the run scored and Smoltz had already pitched his last pitch in the game. With this loss the FRS will have won 2 out of three games in this series and usually when you are winning 2 of 3 you are playing good ball, but they can catch the Yankees playing like that because right now the MFY are 9–1 in their last ten games.
Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 302
I ordered some stuff from CacheAdvance last Thursday and it was on my doorstep today. Four days from Spokane, WA to Aiken, SC, two thousand six hundred miles to the southeast. That is because they sent it via the USPS not UPS. The minions of the Postal Service keep on chugging over the weekend unlike the United Parcel Service, which seems to stop everything and take a couple days off.
Over the weekend we found 9 caches, three Saturday and six on Sunday which is about what we consider just right for the amount of time we want to invest on this “hobby” during the summer. The trouble with that total was that it left us sitting at 149, an oh so uneven mark. Tonight after dinner we went out to get just one. Now things are better balanced here at the Bogardus Manor.
We hit Wally World on the way back to peruse the Clearance Aisle to find swag for placing in caches found or to put in the new Lock and Lock from Spokane. I also picked up some flat olive and tan paint in spray cans for cammoing my fireman’s hat for another hide I’m working on.
I think I’m going to have to get a Geocaching category for sidebar and search some linkage to put over there. I’ve already got ton of bookmarks on the subject, but now I need to go out and find a bunch of Geobloggers…
Started down, went up, back down, up again, down once more, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 306
We went for a hike in Hitchcock Woods this evening and checked on two of our caches and scouted a spot for our next hide, Hats Off to Caching in SC. It is inspired by the fellow who was also responsible for my Geocaching License, Renzo Tobias.
It is going to be a mystery cache and we found the perfect place to put it, a place in the Woods that is called Mystery Field. It is more of a thinned out piece of woods than an actual field and it doesn’t have a sign, but it is a spot of the woods that is little used and all up hill on the way out, so heading back to the start is a pleasant walk down. If someone wanted to get this one and the other two we checked on tonight it will be a nice little 3 mile loop.
Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 308
Wanted to show you what it would look like on my first day at Sterling Cooper if I flashed back to 1965.
Less than 3 weeks to go before new episodes of TDTVS2 and you can amuse yourself until then by recreating yourself in Swanky ‘60s Style With MadMenYourself.com.
We are in Hendersonville, NC to visit my sister and her husband in their new town home that they just bought. They are planning to retire here in the near future and decided to go ahead and buy a place, so that when they visit here a couple three times a year they will have a place to stay instead of the Red Roof Inn.
Donna and I are going to be the quasi-caretakers of the place (when they aren’t in residence) for however long it takes Allen to get fed up at work and retire…
We will be coming up once a month to flush the toilets, run the AC/Heater and check to make sure the picture is still clear on the HDTV in the living room. All it is going to cost us is I pay for the high speed internet access (because I’m the one who wants it) and that we keep the small patch of level ground on the empty lot he owns in the development mown. I’m going to have t-shirts made up.
Started down, went up, back down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 313
Didn’t notice it until we got in the car this morning that sometime last night just before we got to the hotel the Emperor passed over the 94,000 mile mark. Leaving the Red Roof Inn to come over to 607 Carriage Commons Drive I looked down and the odo read 94006.
Our plan was to visit the Western North Carolina Nature Center this morning, but the rains came down so we opted to try and find something indoors to do, so we spent an hour in the Asheville Welcome Center, most of it waiting for Allen to try on shirts off the clearance rack before ending up at the Grove Arcade. We then spent another 45 minutes sitting in rocking chairs while Allen bought a recliner for the living room.
Lunch was at Donna and my favorite place in downtown Asheville, Doc Chey’s. Aftr eating we walked in the rain to the next block to visit a Mast General Store (where Allen bought a straw hat.) With the rain showing no sign of letting up we just drove back to Hendersonville. Where it was sunny!
Allen went off to arrange delivery of his chair and Diane, Donna and I went into downtown H-ville to give St. Frank a new home at the Hospice Home Store.
Allen and Diane are of the Jewish faith and the previous owners of the Stricker Mountain Home were Catholic and left behind a 4′ tall concrete lawn statue of St. Francis of Assisi outside the front door. They weren’t sure what to do about him and I said let’s pop him in the trunk and donate him to the Goodwill, failing that we’ll just leave him on the side of the road as a corner monument. Neither of the two ladies were keen on option 2, so we donated him to the Hospice Store.
The Emperor had the top down all day in the rain, but he is as dry as could be because he is in the garage here while the four of us have been tooling around in the rental Pontiac Vibe.
Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 314
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