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.