i_id | Entries tagged with geocaching

The number 9 is written on this design 27 times, in a variety of different written languages. Can anyone help me identify them all?

1. Chinese/Japanese
2. Korean(?)
3. Hebrew
4. Armenian
5. Bengali
6. Brialle
7. Khmer
8. Arabic-Indic
9. Tamil
10
11. Thai
12. Telugu
13.
14. Octal
15. Devanagari
16. Greek
17. Tibetian
18.
19.
20.
21. ASL
22. Binary
23.
24.
25. Gujarati
26. Roman numerals
27.

What I'd really like to learn to play is the violin. And this one would be up to the rigors of the cruise.

But $130 is far too much for an impulse buy. Perhaps I'd just be better to find a very used traditional one on Craigslist and resign myself to destroying it with tropical humidity.

Also:

So, yesterday started off slow. I peeled myself away from the computer to drive

wanderingoddity to the transit center in Everett, since on weekends, her 'I can get to Seattle by city buses!' plan goes all awry. She paid me with one (1) tank of gas, because she is a nice sister. Mission was a success, she got on her bus. She'll be home Monday. (She'd damn well better be, she has work.)

After that, I hung out in a grocery store cafe, and RPed via my magical internet phone for a while, and talked to people. And ate a delicious chonda bagel. Must have bagels more often - I'd forgotten that I actually like cream cheese.

Then the urge to be a responsible adult bit again, so I tried to go find the North Region Office where I'll have to report at eight on Wednesday morning for training. Everett is entirely set on an angle, and poorly signed, but I found the place easily enough, and marked it on my GPS. Nothing will keep me from getting back there on time now, mwahahah.

So then the responsible adult went and found two of the three geocaches closest to the NRO. They were both nanos, bah, but fun was still had.

Then, on the way home, I stopped in at my Aunt J's, because I had in the car a book that I wanted to give her. She wasn't there, but Grandma was, watching the three cousins. I hung out for a little while, and got myself invited to a family party back down in Everett. My cousin Tim graduated with a degree in computers, today. So a bunch of family I am tentatively related to through one or more marriages was gathered in a very substantial buffet down there. I'm not ashamed to admit that I gorged. Mm, sushi. Mmm, Mongolian grill.

So back to Aunt J's house, then. Or almost back. The kids are mad about geocaching, so they pleaded and pleaded for me to find them a cache. So we pulled over at the park just shy of their place, and my magic interphone found us two possibilities. The first one was a bust. No luck at all. (Checking later revealed that it was a micro in the nettles, something my magiphone doesn't tell me.) The second one, though, took us up into the campground, and for a nice 1/3mile hike out into the ferns. Grandma came with us, which surprised me. We found her some sturdy walking sticks and helped her over the deadfalls. She was huffing and puffing by the time we got to the cache (mostly due to our wrong turns), but in good humor. It was a great cache, best I've seen in a long time. Big ammo can, full of swag, atop a scenic cliff looking down towards the mouth of Port Susan. The kids each got something, and I left a small handful of swag, and signed the log for all of us. Going back to the car was a much shorter walk, though keeping up with L and A was tricky.

Back to the house then. T was wild to go find two more, a little ways north of their place, but it was nine at night, and after the horse chores were done, it was beginning to get dark. And bedtime was looming. So instead, A and I went down to play with Luna, her ancient, patient mare. I rode bareback for the first time in my life, and didn't fall off or piss off the very large mammal under me. And after that, I made my farewells and went home.

A bath was much needed. I smelled of buffet and horse, and itched comprehensively from sunburn and nettlebite.

And then this morning I went to church, which I haven't done in a long time. I think I'll go back after training is over.

3 DNFs.

Eight waspstings.

I know when to quit for the day.

( Last night. )
----
( Today. )

Here's a puzzle I could use help with. (It's for a geocache, of course. One I haven't found yet, even though it's somewhere near my home.)

Many classical compositions have been permanently categorized according to a series of Opus Numbers. They are also titled by their melodious nature, and referred to as Ballades, Concertos, Symphonies, Dances, etc. Below are listed five musical compositions:

Composer/ Opus Number

Rachmaninoff 18
Chopin 64
Moszkowski 15 no.1
Rubinstein 03 no.1
Grieg 46 no.3

The name of the composer and Opus No. is given. What is not given are the basic titles, some of which may be revealed above.

1. Fill in the title blanks (Is it a Concerto, a Dance, etc?)
2. Rearrange the order of the compositions so that they are listed alphabetically by title.
3. Arrange the five 2-digit Opus Numbers in order after the compositions have been listed alphabetically. This will result in 10 numbers.
4. Apply the first five numbers to the North coordinate; the second five to the West coordinate. This will give you another coordinate location. N 48` --.---, W 122' --.--- This new location is Not the location of the cache.
5. Add 11.434' to the North coordinate determined in Step four. Add 10.054' to the West coordinate determined in Step four. This will give you the final coordinates for the cache.

Google didn't help much, but I've been known to be an utter idiot about these sorts of puzzles.

( And nothin' under here but pixeldragons. )

Also, I found something to do today. I spent a good hour or so spraypainting a new cache, with very nice ivy-patterned camo, and sewing up a handmade logbook made from a recycled Pirates of the Carib. calendar.

I think I sprained my ass.

So, these past two Sundays have been utterly fantastic. Saturday before last, the first, I went to a geoparty down the local pub, and I met a bunch of local cachers. BrewerMD, force behind a good string of high-elevation caches, roped no fewer than eleven of us into a cachemachine for Sunday.

We met up at Geobell's cache, Undercover Brother. Now that is a clever hide. I don't know if we'd have ever found it without their help; we were looking 30' away, and for a bucket covered in ferns. Not a bucket that is a tree. The cache was most decidedly not a bucket covered in ferns. We ran into some cachers from the north, Old Growth, and after we made the find (Can I reiterate how much I love this cache?), we headed out. Me, BrewerMD, and the four Geobells in one car, and Toni R, Franc333, Tye, and son (And geodog Lucy, of course) in the other, and headed north.

The plan was to take Lynden by caching storm, and boy, did we ever. We found, literally, two dozen caches up there. Smylegirl met up with us en route, and we found everything. Eeeeverything. With that many people, we never had to search more than fifteen minutes for any one cache. We found skirt-lifters, fake logs in the forest, multi-caches in an old farm-turned park, we found fake bolts hidden in a well-traveled bridge. We found ammo cans under highways, bison tubes under benches and in light pylons, tupperware inside a holly tree. We were not stealthy, but we had nothing but fun, and found our last cache after sundown, just in time to see Bellingham light up through the dusk. We even ran into more cachers (Three Bottles), stopping back at Undercover Brother to retrieve BrewerMD's car.

So that was Sunday, 3/2. Cache count: 27.

But I hadn't quite had enough. So Tuesday, when I went out to the UPS office (Oh god, why is it hidden so well), to pick up my package of awesome from Amazon, I took a handful of coords with me. And then when the UPS didn't open until 3 hours after I expected it to, I found myself with plenty of time. I found a nifty morse-code-based puzzle cache first, found a condom in there, and a geocoin. So that was fun. Then I went for a walk around a lake, and found a piece of bark I mean to use to camo my own cache. I got help from a friendly forklift driver to find a bucket hidden in a parking lot, and then had the beezesus scared out of me by a rubber hand. Sat in the parking lot of the Bellingham Institute of Scientology for a while finding the coords to a few more on my phone, couldn't find the right road in for another skirt lifter, finally got my package (Yay! Dexter! ER!), and finished the day by startling a pair of teenaged lovers in a little park with a clever little hide. I should have given them the condom.

And that was Tuesday, 3/4. Cache count: 6.

And then this Sunday! Room-mate and I made plans to meet with Geobells, and we were going to go cache-machine in Mount Vernon, but conflicts arose and we abbreviated the idea down to a handful of caches in scenic Chuckanut. We decided to meet at their cache in Arroyo Park at 1, but thanks to Daylight Savings, we met at 1:30. Which was fine, we'd run late anyway. It was just us grownups, the two weeBells being ill and at a friend's respectively, but that was fine. This promised to be a pretty grueling hike. Just looking up the hill from the trail-head gave me pause. I am so out of shape. But the four of us were there to goad each other on, so up we went! Marika's new GPS was the star of the day, locking and holding when the rest of us were cursing the trees. We flailed around on the wrong trails for a bit before finally finding the right one, just past an unfriendly dog at a very hippie house, and found the first of a string of BrewerMD's downright GRUELING caches, right where the satellites said it would be. From there, the trails were straightforward (Hah, if such a term can be applied to endless switchbacks), and we found our way up to the top of one peak, then another, appreciating the view and the hidden treasure in each. None of us brought enough water (except for Marika with her camelpack), but I brought chicken strips and Girl Scout cookies*, so we had a great little picnic up there and took many pictures. It was a fantastic mountain. Even when I knelt in horse shit on accident, the cache had little wet naps right there, so no problem. I left my new, handmade geocoin up there, and I hope it does well.

On the way back down, we moved much, much faster. When hills are so steep that running is significantly easier than walking, you cover ground pretty quickly. We made it from the last high cache to my car, about 400' elevation, in something like half an hour, when it had taken us nearly three to get up there. We rounded out the day by finding a clever cache under a classy little bridge, and a decon can hidden in the detritus of a rotten stump, kept company there by a buried tire that probably belonged to the rusted shell of a Volkswagen in a tree above us, victim of the twisty road up the bank. I found a thermos that probably hailed from the late seventies in the loam, and was going to bring it home and make a cache out of it, but I set it on a curl of root while making the find and forgot it there.

And that was Sunday, 3/9. Cache count: 6.

Add to these Saturday's event and the Geobells' cache I found right after it, and I've found 41 caches since 3/1. Not half bad.

And now I am lurking in wait for Geobells' newest cache to pop up so I can zoom on out for a FTF. BUT with my luck, it'll come out while I'm at work.

Current Mood: dorky

~~Doctor~~ Eric, I took a picture of you.

You look tremendously happy but slightly sinister, all red-lit like that.

So, I got home from work and there was this email waiting for me. New cache, it said! Oh noes, but it'd been sitting there for four hours, while I wasted my time selling things. But I checked the page, and it didn't look like anyone had found it... and it was a weekday, in the middle of a rather chilly day... Maybe they were all at work! So maybe, just maybe, I could sneak out and brave the potential rain and be first! So I raced out, in my trusty TARDIS, and with only my GPS and the directions of a pizza guy who I lucked into at a red light, I zoomed off to find it!

The trail is beautiful. It's been a while since I've gone for caches more involved than a park-n-grab, so I hoped I'd be up to it. No problem. Even the mud just made the walk easier on my legs. I had on some great music, all stuff my parents might have listened to (though I doubt it. They were never that cool. :p ), and the woods were calm and quiet, once I left the doggy area.

Getting there, I was going for speed. I couldn't hear anyone behind me or ahead, but I wanted that FTF, I really did. So when I found "A Walk in the Woods," entirely by accident, I passed straight by. And I didn't take pictures of the beautiful arrangements of stones on the mossy stumps, or the dramatic view further along. I was goal-oriented and fearless, and having a blast! I sang to myself, whistled, had all the fun solitude has to offer, and then I found the cache.

Kudos to the hider, it's a great cache, and the location was perfect. Just a bit of challenge to the find, but nothing even approaching impossible, once I slowed down and applied logic.

I wasn't first, I was second, but STF* is nothing to sneeze at, and I'm still very grateful for this cache, and for the California coin. In return, I left some batteries for anyone who might need some extra energy.

I strolled back, picking up everything I'd missed in my rush out. I turned the music down, let the sounds of the forest fill the space, and brought out my camera. The light was perfect for pictures of those tiny stacked stones, rather zen and shadowless, and the deep, water-breathing green of the woods made me want to take as many as I could, to take them home and line my white walls. Now, I took time to log "Walk in the Woods," and startled a jogger when I stood up from it. Neither of us had heard the other coming, him with his dog and me with my Manfred Mann. But no harm done, just a jump, a laugh, and a wave, and we were past one another.

On my way out, I eyed every other person in the parking lot to see if they had a GPS.

( Pictures! See my pretty green state and my crappy photography skills! )

*Second to Find

Current Mood: cheerful

Sorry, everyone, for disappearing and not coming back. I ended up going to K's for dinner, getting embroiled in the best game of Catan evar (Wood for sheep. Fuck sheep!), and then taking Percy and James's friends geocaching. It was an awesome night! But I feel bad for ditching internet peoples, particularly as I'm going to be gone a large chunk of the weekend. I have to split around 2 tomorrow to head south, for Diana Gabaldon is going to be in Seattle and I wish to see her and give her money so she will give me a signed book. By all accounts, she is awesome. And after that, I'm going to the parents' and spending the night. This plan has the advantages of access to an actual bath tub, and not just a shower-tube, and Dad wants to do a fluid change on my car. Who am I to stop him? So, if I don't see you in the morning, I'll be back early Sunday afternoon.

._.

..

Three good things.

Having Jen there for my full shift. Damn, but that made the day move so much smoother. Love ya, girl.
Geocaching with Kaitlyn. Heehee, phonetree. Good find.
Caught the tail of a Doctor Who marathon, just in time for Torchwood to start next Saturday. Pity I won't be here for the premiere, but I'll be in Seattle meeting Diana Gabaldon. Forealz, yo.

To get that day off to go see Diana, I will be working M-F for the first time in a while. I'm opening Monday, Labour Day, but hey, it's time and a half, so dude, why would I miss it?

Three good things about yesterday.

Beautiful drive down to Mount Vernon. Wind in my hair, new clothes, gorgeous sun, nice music. It was sweet.
Geocaching with Bog and Pater. We found 2/4, but hey, still fun. Even if they were only micros. I'm glad Bog's back from Florida.
The top is back up on my car! I don't, however, get to take it down again until I get a new top. This one's just shrunk too much. It is, after all, 13 years old.

Three good things about today.

Everyone was in a good mood at work.
My fingernails are fabulous, but four colors excite less comment than all-green, apparently. Or maybe it's that I cut that long, long one.
I can dance like an idiot for twenty minutes straight, in public, and never blush once.