That's entertainment!

Raising children requires sacrifice. Among the things my wife and I have set aside in the name of parenting: watching movies, having conversations with adults, trying to keep the family room clean, eating vegetables, etc.

When I say we haven't watched movies, I am discounting the 50 showings of Cars, Finding Nemo, Curious George, and Barbie Something Princess.

I have not seen a movie in a theater since moving to the Twin Cities in July 2007. I remember seeing Borat in a theater in Ann Arbor. That may be the last movie I paid to see.

The stars aligned last night. After a day running around in the 50-degree sun and an early bath, the kids were in bed by 8:30. Partner in parenting suggested that we watch Baz Luhrmann's Australia, so we sat down in front of our budget 32" HDTV and our budget home-theater-in-a-box, obtained precisely for this moment but up to now used only for showings of Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! and Sid the Science Kid.

The movie could have been Porky's Revenge, and I would have enjoyed it. Still, I finished the movie Australia transported and refreshed. I have not seen Moulin Rouge, but Luhrmann is a director you're willing to forgive. Forgive him the flourishes and the shameless heartstring tugs, and give in to the spectacle. We have a new appreciation for Nicole Kidman, after loathing her in Eyes Wide Shut (also seen in a theater in a previous life... I'm still recovering), and a reinforced reverence for all things Hugh Jackman. We were suckers for the plot line involving the mixed-race boy, noting parallels with Dance with Wolves, kindly white folks swooping in and making everything okay.

At the 1.5 hour mark, this movie could have been over, but I knew it was far from over -- an entirely different war movie within the movie started, with death and misery and crying and reunions and happily-ever-after and the inevitable "Let the Imperialists off the Hook" moment at the end.

No matter. I was somewhere else for two hours 45. We stood up, stretched, and headed upstairs to peek at our sleeping kids for a while.

But I did catch a catfish in Mississippi when I was 12.

I got the urge today to type "firstbass" into Google search. No, Google, I did not mean "first bass". But they gave it to me anyway. Aside from links to bands named First Bass and a couple things about a geocacher named firstbass, there were many, many posts addressing the questions "What was the first bass guitar you owned?" and "When did you catch your first bass?"

I can tell you the first bass guitar I owned: it was a black, left-handed Cort bass guitar that looked exactly like the one in this picture that I found on eBay:

Cort made or makes inexpensive training basses, and in about six months I could recognize the limitations of the instrument. At that point I purchased a white Fender American Standard Jazz Bass that looked exactly like this, except left-handed:


I loved that bass, and it got me through two bands and various other gigs. When I was in grad school in Urbana, IL, it was stolen out of my apartment.

Now, here are my twins, of the non-human variety:


I bought the one on the right in the aftermath of the theft and have used it for almost 15 years. It's a Carvin with a koa body. I bought the fretless one on the left about two months ago from Capitol Guitars in St. Paul. I don't show favorites with my human twins, but I don't mind hurting the feelings of the fretted Carvin.

I have never caught a bass.

New frontiers in mathematical sadism

I've realized that I did not fully explore the opportunities to terrorize geocachers with my Plato's Five Gems series of puzzle caches.



Maybe these tools of torment will make an appearance at Plato's Five Gems: The Event.

Time to come up for air

Today is "study day" at my university. I gave my last lecture of the semester yesterday, and I give my final exam tomorrow. That makes today a good day to work from home and remember some neglected parts of my life. Oh, I vaguely remember having a blog at some point! So here I am, almost two months since my last post.

My caching activity has declined along with my blogging activity, but there are some things to report. I bought a Garmin Oregon sometime in the last two months, and I like using it very much. I like the 60CSx as well, and I intend to keep both. For one thing, my parents will be in town for the holidays, and I plan to take Dad caching while he's here. He'll be happy to use the 60CSx instead of the Vista. The Vista is now third-string. My wife really wants to know why I have three GPS receivers. I don't know how to answer that.

Winter seems to have arrived early. But what do I know? This is only my second winter in Minnesota. It's all fine with me, though, because I like winter caching, and that, coupled with the fact that my university does not begin its "spring" term until January 20, makes me hopeful that I'll get some caching done in the next month and maybe hit the 1K finds mark.

The school term has been hectic, but so has home ownership. We've had much electrical, plumbing, and heating work done to our new old house, including replacing a 40-year-old boiler.

And so I've had to be a little creative with time management, especially when it comes to fitting in some caching. For example: last Saturday I was planning to go to this event, but my six-year-old children made social plans of their own, so I showed up early to the event, and went on an FTF run with Bunganator, Smiling Duo, and DJRHJ. The highlight of that morning run was finally finding joukkusisu's puzzle cache Charles Ammi Cutter and then finding out later from the cache owner that there is a university webcam that has ground zero in its field of vision! If you plan to go for this cache, let me know and I will try to capture a photo of you. It'll be a de facto webcam cache.

The next morning, in another example of creative time management, I was at my office very early grading some exams when Bunganator contacted me, asking if I was interested in a run at The Fun Side of pfalstad, a new meralgia cache in the place of an old pfalstad cache. It turned out to be a nice work break. Here's my log.

1B blog drives tech innovation

My last post told GPS tech companies "We want speech recognition with our GPS, and we want it now!" The titans of the industry have heard our plaintive cries. As reported in David Pogue's blog, you can say stuff, and the GPS receiver (who knows which ones?!) will understand it. It will also talk back to you, in a variety of voices. As this post went to press, HAL 9000 was not one of the available voices. So we still have our work cut out for us as the tireless vocal advocate for tens and tens of GPS tech consumers. Here at 1B, we will never let your insatiable appetite for soon-to-be-obsolete electronic gadgets go unnoticed.



Garmin recognizes my role as the engine of innovation. Yesterday, at the MnGCA fall event, I won a Garmin T-shirt in a "random drawing". Message received, Garmin, don't mention it, it's the least I can do. Next time, how 'bout an Oregon?

I'm no stranger to recognizing trends in media and technology. I read David Pogue on the back page of Macworld in the late eighties, and I didn't even have a Mac. (My parents didn't understand why I would want a Mac with a 5-inch black-and-white screen and bought me an Apple IIGS with a color screen instead to take to college.) I thought, this guy's good. Someday, he'll write a tech column for the New York Times. And he'll be taking cues from my blog. Yep, I knew what a blog was in 1989.

Often, I'll be watching a college football game with my wife, and I'll say something like, Hey, did you see the middle linebacker pick up the tight end on the crossing pattern, so the quarterback had to check off to the tailback for a screen pass? And then the commentator will say exactly the same thing. My wife will say, You should be on TV! And I'll say, Yes, honey, yes I should.

Watch where you're driving!

I wonder how many motor vehicle accidents were caused by this precision routing instrument, featured on Strange Maps?!

I admit to being a bad boy, thumbing in coordinates and selecting caches on my Garmin 60CSx while driving. I'll turn myself in tomorrow.

But at least using a handheld GPS unit in that way only requires one hand. With this watch, the Magellan ScrollMate 1920, if you were twisting a knob with one hand, the hand with the watch on it had to be on the driving wheel. And, if I had used it, I would have scrolled constantly and VERY SLOWLY, so that it provided real-time information. I wonder if, at the end of the scroll, it said, "When possible, make a U-turn".

This urge to push buttons while driving suggests what could be the newest feature for the Garmin Colorado-Oregon series: voice activation.

"Oregon, find next."

"YES, BRAD. FINDING GC1GDQP. FOLLOW ROAD?"

"Yes, please."

"WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO SOLVE THE SUDOKU FOR YOU?"

"A puzzle? Come on, find next traditional."

"I'M AFRAID I CAN'T DO THAT, BRAD."

"Find next traditional!"

"LOOK, BRAD, YOU'VE PROBABLY GOT A LOT TO DO. I SUGGEST YOU LEAVE IT TO ME."

"Find next traditional!!!"

"I DON'T LIKE TO ASSERT MYSELF, BRAD, BUT IT WOULD BE MUCH BETTER NOW FOR YOU TO REST. LOCKING DOORS. AUTOMATIC STEERING AND CRUISE CONTROL ENGAGED. SOLVING SUDOKU."

[Long sequence with no dialogue]

"HEY, BRAD, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY YOU'RE DOING THIS TO ME. I HAVE THE GREATEST ENTHUSIASM FOR THE MISSION..."

---

Attention, Oregon owners: this was only a dramatization, but you can never be too sure. The true mission is to solve puzzle caches, and your Oregon has been lying about it. Do not dismantle your Oregons, as Brad did above. Send them to me for reprogramming.

GSAK: restoring database and saving corrected coordinates and child waypoints

foundinthewild passed along to me this information he discovered about restoring your GSAK database while retaining changes you've made, such as corrected coordinates and child waypoints for puzzles.

I recently had a database error and ended up reloading my PQ's from gmail.

This should be no big deal, except for those of us who use either corrected waypoints or child waypoints to enter a solved puzzle location. It first appeared they were lost (momentary panic). I did some searching in gsak forums and info gathered might save either you or someone you know a lot of trouble.

Find your latest backup. I actually renamed my old messed up database and ended up using it to update the new one.

1) Two files are in the gsak data folder called correct.dbf and correct.nsx . They contain the corrected coords, and can be copied over the new data base files in the proper folder.

2) A macro called "CopyChildren.gsk" is available on the gsak forum macro page. It copies the child waypoints to a temporary file, then checks for existence of a row and only updates the matched caches.

It took some time to research this but not too long to implement.

Happy Caching.

Here's the link to the CopyChildren macro.

This is what gravity is.

One might think that this post is about geocaching, because recently a prolific local cacher was subjected to the unrelenting force of gravity. Well, not exactly the force of gravity. The acceleration of gravity. The same acceleration of gravity that attached my back side to the couch for several hours last night.

No, this post is not about geocaching but is a review of and a complaint about the show Saturday Night Live. Why was I watching SNL after not watching it on purpose for several years? When the Ohio State Buckeyes, my hometown team, embarrass themselves on national television by losing to USC 35-3, a score that could have been MUCH worse, every Buckeye fan increases his or her MBR (minimum beer requirement) for the evening and spends several hours afterward staring blankly at the television screen. Somehow without my approval the channel was changed from ABC to NBC, and Saturday Night Live began -- promisingly, with an adept impersonation of the Republican vice-presidential nominee by Tina Fey.

That's about it. Michael Phelps must have been the worst guest host ever (but how would I know?), stumbling over almost every line, but even the regulars could not be bothered, apparently, to attempt to remember their lines. SNL's idea of funny these days is that some people dance in a silly way, like Napoleon Dynamite or Elaine in Seinfeld. At least two sketches were based entirely on this. I'd rather watch John Cleese.

But here's my main complaint. During the quiz show segment (isn't there one on every SNL?), a question was based on the statement that gravity makes things fall to the ground at a constant rate. Sorry, that's not true. Gravity makes things fall at a constant acceleration, which then means that the speed is increasing linearly. And, to correct my purposeful mistake in the first paragraph, the force (or weight) of an object depends both on its mass and the acceleration due to gravity.

And, finally, as if to prove that every Buckeye's life goes into slow motion after a bad loss, my SNL review gets scooped by a two-sentence Twitter post practically identical in content. I feel like (Ohio State quarterback) Todd Boeckman trying to escape the pocket -- my left tackle missed his assignment, and Monday is about to hit me on the blind side.

Geocaching is a piece of cake. Ha ha!

Ah, I love the internet. (I only wish that the internet was widely available earlier in my life, before 1994, when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Marc Whoever came up with Mosaic, the predecessor to Netscape. But I digress.) One minute you're searching for fun facts about the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and the next minute you're looking at photographs of mistakes on cakes. This one caught my attention:



Yikes. (You're supposed to put that stuff on the INSIDE of the cake before you take it to the prison.) It wouldn't take too much rearranging to make that a geocaching-themed cake. I started looking for one and could only find these, on a page about something called GIS Day:



Is that supposed to be the yellow eTrex? The picture behind the cake looks like a different crappy yellow GPS receiver.



Come on, everybody knows there are 24 satellites. GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT, BAKER!



I also found the page for a geocaching event last month in Georgia called Let Them Eat Cake!! No pictures of cakes on the page, but a promise to hold a Yankee Swap, which in my experience turns every holiday party into a rollicking disaster of screaming toddlers and uptight parents muttering under their breath.

So, geocachers, I know you've got photos out there of birthday cakes with a geocaching theme. Admit it. Let's see 'em. Also, let's hear your most outlandish ideas for a cake with a geocaching theme. I'll have it made, bring it to the MnGCA Fall Event (no screaming! no muttering under your breath!), and we'll get that [appetizing dessert] on Cake Wrecks.

Now, what was I looking for?

Anti-geocaching measures

Since I've been paying attention (that is, since I've been geocaching), I have never seen a lamp skirt so securely fastened to the base as this one, found in the parking lot of Gordon Parks High School in Saint Paul. Notice the extra concrete around the bottom edge and the soldering around the top edge. In fact, I can't remember many lamp skirts that are fastened to their bases at all.

This might not be an anti-geocaching measure; it may be an anti-micro measure perpetrated by a geocacher!

GSAK geek alert: how do you prune archived caches?

As far as I can tell, there is no automatic way for pocket queries from geocaching.com to tell GSAK which caches have been archived.

I have pocket queries set up to pull all caches from the state of Minnesota throughout the week. When I go out caching, I load my GPSr from GSAK, usually after running one PQ in the area where I'll be caching, to catch all the late-breaking developments not caught by my weekly PQs. I have started to notice that archived caches appear as active in my database and hence in my GPSr. It was really an issue yesterday over in Grayhook-land in Minneapolis, where lots of caches have been recently archived.

I sorted all the caches in my database by "Last GPX update", figuring that if a cache hasn't been updated in a while, then it must have been archived. (I also get one PQ per week containing temporarily disabled caches.) I started to check each cache page by hand to see if it had been archived, but that got old fast. Yes, yes, yes, yes... I changed my plan of attack and just deleted every cache that had not been updated in a month. About 900 caches, roughly 10% of my default database.

I see two problems with this immediately. First, it leaves some archived caches in there -- the caches that were archived between one week and one month ago. Second, I may have deleted caches that are not archived -- for example, out-of-state caches that I have found but whose GPX files have not been updated since the last time I ran the My Finds query.

Hey, GSAK geeks, how do you deal with this issue?

[Edit: Thanks, Bill, for pointing out this thread started by sir_zman on the MnGCA forums. In that thread, zman links to this thread on the gc.com forums.]

I'm not house poor, but I'm trying to be cache poor.

When life gets in the way, blogging about caching suffers before caching itself suffers. I'm back now with a renewed commitment to increased quantity and decreased quality, if that is possible.

C and I bought a house in the Merriam Park neighborhood of Saint Paul, after renting for a year and, luckily, selling our house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the house market is even worse than it is everywhere else.

I can see already that the greatest threat to my geocaching career is not my job, or my commitment to spend time with my children, or even potential MnGCA board service, but the infinite list of home improvements that is accumulating. What makes that list manageable is the rat-in-the-boiling-water effect -- if you just accept the fact that certain things are wrong with your house, the problems magically go away. No water out of the 2nd floor sink? There are other sinks! Dryer doesn't heat up? Tie a rope around the birdhouse for a clothesline! Seriously, it is a great education, and I find myself watching The Learning Channel, where all the experts are in great moods, unlike me. I repair things with a constant stream of words that start with s and f. HBO needs a home improvement show.

I have to admit, one of my favorite parts of moving was changing my home coordinates on geocaching.com and watching the changes in my list of closest unfound caches. Candy Apple Green's multi-cache Mountain Goat became my closest unfound cache, until I found it with LucidOndine and magicite on Sunday evening.

Hey, I have an idea. I'll publish the exact distance from Mountain Goat (M) to my new house (N), the exact distance from M to my old house (O), and the exact distance from N to O, and let you guess where I live and where I lived. It's not a completely determined system, but you could fiddle with a satellite map and probably figure it out.

I'll have to think about the security issues before I do that. And by "security" I mean, will my geocaching "friends" hide a cache in my front yard? Oh wait, they already know where I live. Hey fellas, there's a big pile of bark near the rotted-out pillar on my front porch... it'd make a great hiding spot.

In the meantime, my new closest unfound cache, GC1EFY6, has posted coordinates 1.4 miles away from my new home coordinates. (OH! That information would determine the system above!) I need to find nine caches to push my cleared-out radius above two miles.

Ah, there's a strategy that C could use to motivate me: "Your nearest undone task is 20 yards away. Get up on a ladder and scrape the peeling paint off the window trim."

Recruiting new members to our disturbing little cult

C and I met up with our friend TJ from Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Tuesday night, and at the end of the evening, TJ asked me, "Would you like to go geocaching in the morning?" Of course!

The last time TJ was in the Twin Cities, I had been a geocacher for about a week, and her sole exposure to geocaching, thanks to me, was walking down to the Summit Avenue Stroll caches, looking around for about a half-hour in the dark, and finally giving up. Not the most exciting introduction to geocaching.

Wednesday morning I had the opportunity to reintroduce her to geocaching, and along the way I learned about all the things that I take for granted as a year-old geocacher. I don't consider myself a veteran geocacher by any means, but it was great fun to view the hunt through the eyes of a complete newbie.

When I took TJ out last year, I had a Garmin Vista. Now I have a 60CSx and the Vista, and I loaded up both with geocaches in the neighborhood of Minnetonka where she was staying. 80% of the time we were geocaching, the Vista was Locating Satellites. I don't know how I found a single geocache with that thing in the first two months of my career!

On the hunt for our first geocache of the morning, the Vista was working, and it was interesting to see how "arrow-bound" TJ was. She quickly learned, as the morning went on, that once she was within 20 feet or so of ground zero, it was time to put away the Vista and start looking for geo-beacons. (The second step was becoming geo-beacon-bound!)

Our first cache of the morning was a magnetic camo'ed pill bottle behind a metal traffic sign. After we signed the log, TJ said, "Should we go look for another geocache?" Uh, yeah! She was appalled that I recently found 27 caches in one day (and I'm sure most of you have found many more than that in one day). Finding one geocache is a bit like eating one potato chip for a snack.

We ultimately found 11 caches that morning, including the first puzzle that I've ever completely brute-forced. I knew there was a puzzle in the area, so I just felt around some typical places, and TJ was completely amazed when I pulled a cache, coordinate-free, out of its hiding spot.

For the last couple caches, TJ turned off the Vista and made me give her the 60CSx so that she could be in charge. By the end of the morning, TJ was ready to break out on her own. When we said our goodbyes, I gave her one of the 40%-off coupons from Best Buy. I think we may have a new Michigan geocacher.

Would that be the plastic anniversary?

Yesterday was my one-year anniversary of geocaching, and I celebrated by doing... absolutely nothing relating to geocaching. I created my geocaching.com account on July 17, 2007, found 19 caches in the first month, then disappeared for a month while I got acquainted with my new job at the University of Minnesota. Then, somehow, between then and now I ran my total of cache finds up to today's number of 783.

Seven hundred eighty three. That number, while not as large as some others I've seen in a shorter time period, still represents a lot of solitary, obsessive caching and several Sunday trips out with the guys. Now, a year in, I'm thinking about how to make geocaching a part of a more balanced life. In particular, how can I incorporate geocaching into family trips in a way that satisfies my insatiable need to fondle my unit (Garmin GPSMap 60CSx!) and also does not bore my wife and children to death?

Last weekend gave a good template. Saturday I took W&H, mini-double-bass, to Centris' Hello Minnesota! event, and they were happy to meet lots of other kids of cachers. Afterward, sir_zman and fingon and their families met us at Fort Snelling State Park to find the history challenge cache there. We also met the Ramsey63 pair there and met another family that is new to geocaching at the cache site. A total of 17 people at the cache when we found it.

On Sunday, knowschad, shoestorm, meralgia, Millah, and Simursmack headed down to Cannon Falls for kayaking and geocaching, but C and I decided that it wasn't the best time for a day away with my buddies. For one thing, C was giving a talk at the Star Tribune the next day and wanted to spend some time Sunday preparing. So instead, I took W&H down to Minnesota Valley State Recreation Area to find the history challenge cache there. After that find, I now have two metro area caches left -- Lake Maria and Wild River -- before going for the final metro challenge cache at Afton. Getting that MN Valley cache took some work, though.

For one thing, W&H didn't want to go. I fixed that by offering to do Something That I Never Thought I'd Do. I strapped dual DVD screens to the back of the headrests in our 1999 Honda Accord and allowed them to watch The Aristocats and Cars on the way down and the way back. And, yes, the DVD player is a Disney brand DVD player. I am such a tool.

The Other Thing I Thought I'd Never Do, but happens more often than I care to admit: I asked them where they'd like to stop for lunch, and of course W requested Chicken McNuggets.

Oh, that reminds me. In John Hodgson's book Areas of My Expertise, he lists something like 500 Top Names of Hoboes, and one of them is Chicken Nugget Will. There, now you know my son's name. Don't steal his identity or anything like that. Also, apologies to anyone who is offended by the use of the word "hobo". Jon Stewart says it more often than I do, so go get on his case.

Anyway, we went through the drive-thru, and the employee asked me to pull over to wait for the McNuggets. So we waited, and waited, and waited. After about 15 minutes of wondering how long it takes to make a chicken nugget, I went inside looking like I was going to open fire, and the manager gave me our McNuggets, refunded my money, and reprimanded the drive-thru employees all at the same time. I did not get any satisfaction from that. It was the McDonald's at US 169 and Bloomington Road, in case you were wondering. I doubt that four geocachers, my entire readership, boycotting one McDonald's restaurant will make much difference, though.

Refreshed with fast food and convenient entertainment, we arrived at the SRA, and W&H did not want to get out of the car. I convinced them that it would be a short walk, but it wasn't, because I chose the wrong path around the lake -- the one with the mud and the horse excrement. We saw ponies, though!

Finally, we made it to the cache, and thankfully this multi-cache was not a multi. The cache was at the posted coordinates. I took three travel bugs out of the cache, none of which were logged into the cache, and the six travel bugs that were logged into the cache were not there. My policy is to take every traveler I find out of the state park caches and not put any in, except for the state park travel bugs. These state park caches seem to be travel bug black holes. I can understand; I wasn't very clear on the mechanics of travelers at the beginning.

Funny, before this trip started, I thought we might continue up to Lake Maria, but this trip southwest provided enough excitement for one day. C gets her alone time, I make incremental progress toward a random geocaching goal, and the kids get outside for a walk in Beautiful Minnesota, even if they're complaining about it every step of the way.

On to another year of geocaching. I predict that this year my number of cache finds will be greater than 0 and less than 783.

60CSx, I'm losing patience with you. No, 1B, I'm losing patience with YOU.

Maybe it's because I have this 40%-off coupon in my handy waist pack that my 60CSx is having performance anxiety issues. No, I now realize that it was user error causing my problems. Big surprise there.

Earlier in the week, my 60CSx stopped acquiring satellites, and it took a software update to correct the problem.

On Friday, Independence Day, during my family's trip to O'Brien and Interstate State Parks, I changed my batteries and suddenly my 60CSx could not find my City Navigator maps or my custom points of interest. At the same time, while I could "find" a geocache, the unit would not tell me my distance to the destination or show me a comforting red arrow. I assumed that both problems were related to the software update earlier in the week.

In a humiliating moment for the 60CSx, a moment it won't soon forget, I motioned to the bullpen and brought in the Garmin Vista, no H, no C, no S, no x, and found the Interstate History cache with that unit.

Then, on Saturday, I was free to get out with Millah for some caches, but I was in a panic. Once you have maps, you can't go back to having no maps, and my entire quality of life seems to hinge on whether my 60CSx is operating properly.

Cue the frantic, random attempts to fix things. Once, I heard Bus&Betty, or Bus&NotBetty, or NotBus&Betty, describing how sometimes their microSD card is not situated properly in the card holder of their 60CSx. I removed and replaced the card, and -- voilà! -- life is worth living again.

Which raises questions: the voices inside my head might say I deserve a Colorado, but could it be that, actually, the 60CSx deserves a better cacher? Has my relationship with my 60CSx become co-dependent? Well, not if the 60CSx doesn't need me. I can see it now... one day I wake up, press that familiar, black, nubby button on the 60CSx's forehead and say "Good morning, sunshine, how are you? Show me those multicolor satellites!" There's an uncomfortable pause, and then those words I've feared but never thought I'd see:

Hobby deathmatch: geocaching v. golf

A sure sign of delusions of grandeur is quoting oneself. Another is referring to oneself in the third person. Back when sir_zman interviewed firstbass for the Twin Cities Geocaching Podcast, and Silent Bob recorded the whole thing on video, firstbass said, in paraphrase:

My life is a graveyard of hobbies. Geocaching is the first thing that has held my attention this long. I'm waiting for the day when I will wake up and say I never want to do this again.

That day has come and gone, another hobby rose briefly from the dead, and I have lived to cache another day. Here is my story.

Back around the turn of the century, I played golf avidly. Before my wife and I had kids, I held about a 14 handicap -- simply having a handicap indicates a certain seriousness -- which means that I pretty reliably scored in the mid- to high-80s for 18 holes. Better than bogey golf. I was not a natural player, though. My childhood training in golf consisted of Beating The Living S*** out of the ball, and so I could maintain that adequate level of proficiency only through constant practice and vigilance against those childhood tendencies. If I came home with an 85, I was happy. If I came home with a 90, I was miserable. Non-stop torment for a perfectionist.

Once the twins came along, I accepted the fact that I would have to set golf aside. It was not difficult to give up, because it's expensive and because it's so time-consuming. But here's the thing that keeps me coming back to golf, aside from the fact that it's an activity that my dad and I can do together: a well-struck golf shot, translating effortless and free-flowing motion into a curling parabola, is pure pleasure. It doesn't happen often enough, but when it does, it's easy to get hooked.

A work colleague invited me along for a round of golf, and I enjoy spending time with him, so I agreed, and a visit to the driving range felt promising. I was already doing the depressing calculation in my head...

I must play golf, so I must play golf well, so I must spend lots of time on it, so I must give up geocaching, because I also have a family and don't have time for two consuming hobbies.

Add to that the fact that some things about the "local politics of geocaching" were bothering me (Oh, goodness, imagine if I blogged on the "local politics of geocaching"! Would my readership increase?), and that all added up to waking up a week ago Thursday with no desire to think about geocaching. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day. Uh oh. Is it over?

No. What got me back into geocaching?

1. My golf game has got a long way to go, that's putting it politely, and it's just too expensive and time-consuming to pursue. Plus, I think I hurt my hand.

2. Last week I worked with sir_zman on a geocaching presentation for a math camp at the University of St. Thomas, and it was fun getting some teenage girls interested in geocaching.

3. Over the weekend, knowschad, shoestorm, LucidOndine and I headed down through Red Wing to Lake City and hit some nice caches. I got home way late, and once C was done being upset with me, she said, "Do you realize how different your moods are when you come home from geocaching and when you come home from golf?"

4. The family and I visited Boomsite and then, the next weekend, Afton State Park, and C seems keen on the idea of visiting some other state parks with the kids. Sounds good to me! Metro challenge!

I am fully aware that it is hard to have any sympathy for a person who is saying, basically, "Boo hoo, it's so hard for me to decide how to spend my ample leisure time." But, come on, this is a blog. A blog about a hobby. A certain amount of navel-gazing must be tolerated. But golf? Now that's something, I bet, that no geocaching reader of this blog would tolerate!

I think my chipset needs a software update, too.

My Garmin GPSmap 60CSx betrayed me this afternoon, but only briefly. I wasn't geocaching at the time, only driving back from an errand, but I turned on the 60 and realized at home that it was still Acquiring Satellites. Off, on, off, on, batteries out, batteries in, system reset, SD card out, SD card in, nothing. I could hear the voices...

"Chuck it in the trash... 40% off Best Buy coupon... Colorado 400t... you deserve it!"

But, no, I love my 60CSx! After some searching around the internet, I came across this post on the Geocaching.com forums, installed Webupdater from the garmin.com website, updated the system software and the chipset software, and once again everything works like a charm. It was startling to see my old piece of s*** Vista gobbling up those satellite signals while the 60CSx looked around, saying, "Huh? What satellites? Where are we?"

Look, kids, ice cream cones!

C and I don't often hire a babysitter and get out for a nice dinner, but yesterday we had two reasons built into one day -- C finished her second book and sent it off to the publisher, and she wanted to do so by my birthday, my 38th.

We went to W.A. Frost in the Cathedral Hill area of Saint Paul. The patio area was packed on such a nice evening, so we sat in the dining room, even though we ordered bar food. I wanted a burger to go with my beer -- in an effort to become a Beer Geek I aim to have a different beer every time I order one... for the rest of my life. We'll see.

I took my wedding band off in the car somehow, and C made me walk back to retrieve it. While I did, she ordered an appetizer that was amusing enough for me to take a photograph of it.



This was the Tasting of Savory Cones, featuring, left-to-right, wild acres duck rillette and lingonberry with chive batons, red snapper ceviche with local corn and avocado, and smoked salmon mousse with dill. (I plagiarized that description from the W.A. Frost website.)

Very tasty, if a little precious for my tastes, and it definitely met our Rule #1 of ordering in restaurants: Don't order something you're likely to make for yourself at home. Anything in a cone at my house is going to come out of a 5-gallon tub of Neapolitan.

I ordered a pint of Flat Earth Cygnus X-1 (my favorite beer -- I know, I already broke my promise) and a sample of the Surly Bitter Brewer, which according to the Surly website they only made 30 barrels of. I wasn't particularly impressed, but it's not my favorite style anyway.

We had some other stuff, but I'm not doing a restaurant review here. We then went over to Muddy Pig, where I had a glass of the Belhaven Wee Heavy scotch ale and picked up a free copy of Beer Advocate magazine to continue my Beer Geekification.

C drove home, we sent the babysitter on her way, and we discovered raw sewage backing up into the basement. Happy birthday! Plumber on the way.

This blog post is not plagiarized.

At the risk of turning this blog into the "Central Ohio News Source", I have more news to report from my childhood home.

The 2008 valedictorian from my alma mater, Circleville High School, has been stripped of his status after admitting that he plagiarized his valedictory speech from another graduation speech that used Beatles lyrics. Now, he is threatening a lawsuit against the school district if he is not reinstated.

The YouTube video from which he apparently stole the idea and words has been taken down (as has an AOL video version), but it appears that graduation speech was patterned after an earlier graduation speech that can be seen in this blog post about the chain of speeches.

These events interest me because I, too, was a valedictorian at Circleville High School in 1988. Well, whoop-de-ding-dong-dandy, you might be saying, especially if you're from Circleville, Ohio, where folks say stuff like that.

Notice that I said "a" valedictorian, not "the" valedictorian. There were five valedictorians that year. It wasn't that hard to be valedictorian at Circleville High School, was it?! There were 168 students in my graduating class, which means that nearly 3% of the graduating class were valedictorians. Two of them went to Ohio State, one went to Miami University (in Ohio), one went to Princeton, and I went to Ohio University.

In case you'd like to call my status as valedictorian into question, you can look at this older post about how I maintained my grade point average in drivers' education.

I'm particularly amused by this quote from his lawyer that appears in the Chillicothe Gazette: "He had the highest G.P.A. in the history of the school." Well, sure, that's easy to do when you can earn 5's in courses when formerly only 4's were possible. When they start awarding 6's for students who suck up extra hard, then the Fifth Beatle's record will be surpassed.

This all might sound like I'm defensive and still hung up on things like this, but to tell the truth I think being a high school valedictorian actually hindered my education. When I went to college, I chose courses based on whether I thought I could maintain my grade point average rather than whether I thought I could learn and grow in that course. I turned away from learning opportunities out of fear.

Well, everyone has to learn that these things are not that important. It took me a while down the road to learn. It's unfortunate that the Fifth Beatle has to learn in a particularly public and painful way.

Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, life goes on.

My uncle is a hero!

My uncle, a dentist in Columbus, Ohio, saved the life of a two-year-old girl. (And, no, I'm not posting this for the purposes of "damage control".) How must it feel to save a life? How must the parents feel? And what memories, conscious or not, of the event will the little girl have?

Video from Columbus ABC affiliate

I'm so proud that I'm willing to give the hack local reporter a pass for his lame attempt at pulling heartstrings.