Practice Pratice Practice

Back in April the fine folks at the Augusta National opened up a lottery allowing the hoi polloi a chance at actual tournament badges for the 2012 Masters. What the heck, we have been extremely unlucky in the lottery for practice round tickets the last decade or more, maybe we will have a chance at seeing the real thing. While we were there we also took another shot at a couple practice round tickets too.

About a month ago we got an email telling us to log on to masters.com and see if we were selected for a daily tournament badge. All excited about the possibility, we logged on, only to have our hopes crushed. We didn’t get in.

Today we got the second email from the Masters organization telling us to log in and see if we were selected for practice rounds tickets. We were not really expecting much, so it made for a pleasant surprise that we were granted the privilege of attending Tuesday’s practice round next year.

When I say privilege, I mean privilege, because the cost of one ticket for one practice round is $50, or a 1000% higher than they were when we first went 21 years ago.

You Guys Call Each Other?

If you have ever worked in a office environment you have probably had the post title asked of you. Standing there at the water-cooler in your khaki pants and blue polo w/ white horizontal stripes, talking to a co-worker similarly attired, when person #3 dressed in black slacks and a maroon dress shirt asks… Your response comes automatically, “Didn’t you get the memo?”

Well, now, at The Valve Store(TM) that question actually has merit. A woman in the front office has taken it upon herself to actually schedule certain colors for certain days, with the help of some of the participants. And there are days where you will notice 4, 5 or 6 folks dressed in the same color scheme. Donna and I have always gone out of our way to make sure we don’t dress in the same colors, so you can bet that if a Bogardus happens to randomly match the color of the day, the other Bogardus will not match.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
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Montgomery Purple Whales

Purple Whales Logo

I haven’t had any real interest in the NFL since the Rams left Los Angeles, maybe even since Roman Gabriel was their quarterback. But in spite of my pathetic lack of knowledge about professional football I have agreed to join up with several of my coworkers and play Fantasy Football this year. In addition to this, my knowledge of playing fantasy anything is even less than it is about pro football. Should be entertaining…

One upside, I am not alone in the whole rookie thing, more than half of our twelve team league are in the same boat.

The one advantage I do have is my Arts & Craft Engineering background will allow me to have the best looking logo in the league. A purple killer whale for the new Sonata and the city name Montgomery for where it was built in Alabama.

Started down, went up, still up.
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Trip Prep

We did a little more preparation for our trip out Seattle way this morning. We didn’t try and weed out any geocaches, instead we watched 4 back to back episodes of Fraiser.

The Trail With No Name

The trail this photo was taken on goes from the Mange to Rabbit Valley crossing several major thoroughfares in the woods, including Pioneer Trail, yet it has no designation of its own. I like to call it the Clint Eastwood Trail.

We did in fact go find the new cache in Hitchcock Woods this morning, but we didn’t just park, walk to, find and leave of course, we took the long way. The temperature was in the middle 70s, but the humidity felt higher and by the time we were done with our 3-3/4 mile walk my T-shirt looked like I had been running from the “Others” along with Jack, Kate and Hurley. It was a very nice walk and I think we saw or heard more woodpeckers eating breakfast than we saw humans.

Started up, went down, still down.
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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.
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