Friday, April 25, 2008

My geocoins travel so that I don't have to. Plus, how I almost got an A- in driver's ed.

I'm too busy editing my GSAK macros to travel, so I'm outsourcing that part of my life to my geocoins.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Grey Wolf took two of my geocoins to the Bahamas. The coins have made their way to Rhode Island, and Grey Wolf is back from the Bahamas. He passed along to me a website with some information about Eleuthera, the out-of-the-way island the coins visited.

Good thing none of my geocoins tried to bring a replica sword back from vacation, or else they'd be expelled from geocoin school. See this Star Tribune article that Silent Bob referenced on his Lazy Lightning blog. I have a replica sword, brought back from a school trip -- purchased in Toledo, Spain, in 1987. Ah, pre-9/11 days. How did those kids even get the sword back into the country? Hey, does anyone want my sword? I'll bundle it with some Starplate hub connectors for a deep discount.

Another of my geocoins fulfilled its goal to go to Bellevue, Washington, where my brother and sister-in-law and sister live. Now I have to convince them, very occasional geocachers, to go root around in the back of a Saturn dealership near the Microsoft campus to grab my coin.

I'm a little irked about that geocoin: the cacher who took it from California to Washington was very nice for doing so and all, but on the way he dropped a bunch of coins at the tribute to the Original Stash, but chose not to leave my coin there. How did that decision get made? "Hey, kids, we're going to Disneyland. Except you, Tommy. Stay in the car. Don't cry, Tommy. If you were a little more handsome or smarter, things might be different. Hope you enjoy the putt-putt course."

---

An eventful Wednesday night out geocaching with and without the Weeknight crew.

1. I stopped to fix a nagging DNF and along the way met NOSNOW and Shadow's Friend, whom I've almost crossed paths with several times, and Sipidation. NOSNOW was very generous to make a straight-up trade -- my pathtag for their geocoin. (My pathtag is nice, but not that nice.)

2. On to Weeknight caching at Sunfish Lake Park in Lake Elmo. Good timing, because last Sunday Millah and I were out there and didn't quite have time to close out the entire park -- we had an obligation at another cache. It was nice to meet tesser at the restaurant afterwards, in part because she now has an obligation at that same cache.

It was also nice to meet LucidOndine for the first time and to hear about his (money-making, non-geocaching) occupation, which makes use of a lot of applied mathematics, and his (non-money-making, geocaching) occupation, being on the board of the MnGCA.

3. Between the Weeknight caching and the Weeknight beer drinking, I stopped off to do some cache maintenance here. Last Sunday, I found this cache with Millah and posted a Needs Maintenance log. Without going into details, this cache has a history that I didn't know then but now know, and so it was a pleasure and a relief to do that maintenance and then ask Our Local Cache Reviewer to remove the maintenance attribute.

---

Gotta love those Ohio school teachers, burning symbols into kids' arms with lab equipment. After telling you about my computer science teacher leaving profane tirades in BASIC code, I'll now tell you about my driver's education teacher.

I took driver's education the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. The course was graded and part of the calculation of my GPA, which at the time was extremely important to me. I just assumed that I got an A in driver's ed -- I earned all the possible points on all the exercises. At the end of the fall term of my junior year, though, I realized that I got an A- in driver's ed. So I went to Mr. Redacted's office, and I discovered that although I earned all the points in the classroom and in the practice car, I failed to...(prepare yourself) BALE HAY ON HIS FARM like everyone else in the class did, hence I did not receive those extra credit points. Now, it embarrasses me a little bit to admit it publicly, because it was not a fierce sense of justice that made me do this but rather fear that I wouldn't have a chance to be valedictorian, but I subtly threatened to expose his child labor scheme to the authorities. That A- quietly molted its minus into an A.

So now you know. I only do geocaching so that I can put the extra-curricular on my college application.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

1987, pre-Columbine... I graduated in 1997 and they allowed kids to have gun racks in their trucks (we were a hunting community -- first day of deer season was the Monday after Thanksgiving so we got it off or classes would be empty anyway).

My wife went through HS during Columbine and I'm certain her life was a little different than ours.

I hope to be at WNC for the anniversary. We're both planning on it at least -- hope to see you there.

firstbass said...

Great, it'll be nice to meet you. I've got to give my students an exam that evening, but I should be able to get away in time for the event, if not for the pre-caching.

Unknown said...

Two things... first, I think I heard about this on KFAN, didn't the principal of that school get in trouble too for plagerizing his speech at the same graduation (I believe they said the principal plagerized from a valedictorian speech years earlier and the person who wrote that speech was now a teacher at the school)?

Second, that reminds me of a day in high school math class my Sophomore year... we individually went up to the front of the class and the teacher showed us our grades and asked if we had any questions (quietly so others couldn't hear). One girl found out she got an A- she started crying and, loudly enough that everyone in the class heard, begged the teacher to change it to an A. He did. When we graduated she was the valedictorian of our class. If he wouldn't have changed the grade my friend would have been the valedictorian, instead he was the salutatorian. Other than bragging rites, it didn't really matter to him because the University of Wisconsin gave free rides to both of them due to the size of our class.

firstbass said...

Interesting, I hadn't heard that about the principal. Do you have a link?