Fast Food Followup

Phillip and I were talking about the loss of Taco Time this morning, and I realized that when I wrote last night’s post, I’d been thinking only about national fast food chains. Phillip reminded me that we used to have a Kidd Valley on 15th. (I never felt guilty about eating there, either.) He also reminded me that Dicks is still on Broadway. Phillip told me there was a Burger King on Broadway for a few months, but I have no memory of that.

I Never Thought I’d Be Missing Fast Food

I had the day off today, and spent it working on a piece for this Sunday’s Writers’ Group. Then Phillip and I went out to The Elite, trying unsuccessfully to break the terrible scores we’ve had at pinball the past two days. Then we had dinner at Amante and imagined we’d been caught up in the middle of a mafia front and subsequent FBI investigation.

We came home, and I wondered what to write about for this post. I started reading through my favorite blogs. I came upon a post on The Capitol Hill Blog that informed me that the Taco Time on Madison Street will close on Sunday. I actually liked that place. It was the one fast food place I never felt guilty about eating at. I remembered that Taco Bell no longer on Broadway, the Jack In The Box no longer on Broadway (good riddance to that place, actually),  and the Kentucky Fried Chicken no longer on Pine Street. Fast food restaurants are vanishing from my neighborhood. I think the Subway is still on Broadway.

I Had Another One Of Those Dreams This Morning

In this morning’s dream, I was returning from somewhere. I had luggage with me, and it was at night. I wasn’t going home, yet, but I was going somewhere familiar. (The Crossroads neighborhood of Bellevue?) I boarded a bus that was laying over at a transit center. There were several other passengers on the bus. At the moment the bus started moving, I realized that it wasn’t the bus I had assumed it was. My first clue was it was an ST bus, not a Metro bus. The bus I had boarded seemed to be going in the general direction, so I didn’t panic. I was paying close attention to my surroundings, however, so I could exit close enough to where I wanted to go. I hoped that I wasn’t on an express route. The bus pulled into an empty parking lot, circled around, and stopped. I realized that it was a makeshift Park-N-Ride lot. Then the bus merged into traffic and continued moving in the direction I wanted to go. There were images of a map, showing that the area had been developed since I’d been there last. End of dream.

Blog-Worthy Stuff

There have been some blog-worthy stuff going on this week, but every time I’ve  sat down to write a post, I’ve gotten overwhelmed by the amount of blog-worthy stuff and have written nothing.

• The Unwind yoga class was canceled yesterday. I had the foresight to check on the class before I left for work, so I didn’t bring my gear with me. That’s two weeks in a row that I’ve missed yoga class.
• A lot of people on the bus ride home yesterday were visibly and audibly scared by the lightning and thunder yesterday. (“Oh my god! What was that?”)
• A few of my coworkers act baffled by my declaration that I enjoy storms at the ocean.
• Several of my coworkers say they enjoy storms at the ocean, too.
• A long-lost friend found me on Facebook this week.
• I slept past 10 this morning.

I am in the mood to go geocaching today, but it is pouring down rain out there, and I don’t want to go out.

Caching By Rail

Our recent geocaching experiences in south Tacoma (the last half, anyway) and on Long Beach Peninsula have reinstated the caching bug in me. I’ve blogged more about geocaching this week than I did for the month of August.

I spent some time this morning (the last day of my vacation) surfing around the geocaching.com site. Suddenly, I had an idea to set up a bookmark of caches within walking distance (a half-mile, round trip) of Link light rail stations. I discovered that there aren’t very many, and most of them have been previously Found by us. There were two however, across the street from Link stations. (Hiding a cache in a station would create a security concern.) Then I thought: Instead of bookmarking the caches, why not just go look for them?

I packed up our Magellan (both caches were micros, so there was no need to bring swag) and my cell phone, and took a ride on Link. I Found both of them.

Archival

I spent a good amount of time this morning working out a method for clearing out archived caches from our GSAK database. It’s a known issue, stemming from the fact that pocket queries never include archived caches, which means that they have to be manually updated and removed from the database. We ran into the problem on the peninsula. Phillip spotted a geocache, close to the cabin, on the TomTom screen. It wasn’t in the Magellan. We stopped into a coffee shop and tried to look up the cache online. We were told the geocache doesn’t exist. It used to be that geocaching.com had an option on its maps to include archived caches, but that feature no longer exists. If you try to search for the name of an archived cache, you are told that nothing matches that name (or you get a list of other caches with the same name). The only way to see information about an archived geocache (or to confirm that it’s been archived) is to either look at the list of caches hidden by the cache owner (if you know who the cache owner was), or the list of Finds for someone who’s Found it (if you know that). That’s the problem of clearing out archived caches – you just have to know they’ve been archived.

I think I worked out a pretty good method, however. I looked at areas that have recently been updated with pocket queries and then sorted by “Last GPX”. I then investigated any caches older than a few months. I actually found four caches in our relative neighborhood that had been archived but were still in our GSAK database. I suspect that a macro exists, or could be written, for this.

Uploading Geocaches Can Be Tricky

The day I won a free GSAK registration at a geocaching event was a great thing for us. Once I eventually got GSAK working for us (i.e. figuring out the problem was with the Magellan cable, and not the program), it ended our days of slowly, painfully, entering each geocache one at a time, entering each set of coordinates one digit at a time, and then writing each piece of cache information in a notebook. Hundreds of geocaches are now uploaded into our GPS receivers in seconds, error-free.

There is a problem with the method I’ve worked out for uploading geocaches, and I’m not sure what the solution is. The source of the problem is that our TomTom and our Magellan eXplorist store geocaches differently. Our TomTom stores geocaches in one big (how big, I haven’t discovered yet) Point Of Interest category I created and named “Geocache”. When I’m ready to upload a fresh batch of geocaches, all I do is filter out the  caches we don’t want to do (unsolved puzzles and multi-caches, mostly) from our GSAK database, and then upload them to the TomTom.

Things get more complicated with our Magellan. The eXplorist stores geocaches in “files” of no more than 200 caches. So far, I haven’t discovered a way to add to an existing file. The only options are to overwrite an existing file or create a new one. So, if we want to geocache in an area away from home – Long Beach Peninsula, for example – I need to create a GSAK filter outlining the area of the peninsula and Astoria, filtering out the caches we don’t want to do, and then upload them into a file named “Long Beach”.

Our TomTom has one big POI for geocaches and our Magellan has several files. The problem with the two methods is that the sets of geocaches in our GPS receivers never completely match up. A cache that shows up on the TomTom screen might have been filtered out from the Magellan. I’ve thought, briefly, about setting up mini-POIs  on the TomTom that correspond to the Magellan files, but that seems more complicated than it’s worth. There are GSAK macros that upload the entire GSAK database, 200 caches at a time into separate files, but I’m not sure how we’d find which caches are closest to us.

To be honest, I place the blame for the problem on our Magellan eXplorist. The trouble with the fragile cable was only the start of my unhappiness with the GPSr. If I thought Phillip and I had a better future in geocaching, I’d replace the thing with a Garmin.  And the start of my displeasure with the eXplorist began with GSAK.

Darn! I Could Have Been Blogging!

After successfully completing a blog post a day for August and September, I decided to skip October, since I didn’t think we’d have Wi-Fi available every day at the ocean. I was going to rejoin NaBloPoMo this month, however. After all, November really is National Blog Posting Month. Plus, there are prizes in November. We got back home from the ocean yesterday, and I was too tired to write a lengthy post about the trip. So, I wrote it today. Then I remembered NaBloPoMo, and realized that today is the 2nd. Darn.

Trip To The Ocean, 2009

This year’s trip to the Long Beach Peninsula was different from the previous trips for two things. First, we stayed for four nights instead of our traditional three. Second, I was sick.

(Also, we ate more dinners in the cabin, rather than dining out, but that didn’t feel so different.)

When we left Wednesday morning, I had a slight sore throat, and I had a little trouble concentrating, but I didn’t think too much of it. We stopped for one geocache along the way. It was a regular-sized cache on a pleasant little nature trail we had been unaware of. The rest of the geocaches along our route were micros we ignored the previous years. In other words, we’ve pretty much exhausted the geocaching opportunities between Montesano and Seaview. We stopped off for lunch at a nice little diner in Artic.

We packed more electronics this year. In addition to our Magellen and TomTom GPS receivers, we also brought three cell phones (but used only two) and  the laptop.

We spent most of Wednesday afternoon, evening, and night in the cabin – except for a shopping trip to Jack’s Country Store for food and a trip to the Ocean Park library for a Wi-Fi connection.

Every year, we seem to forget to pack something. This year, I forgot to pack my comb.

We spent Wednesday night eating Stouffer’s lasagna from Jack’s and watching The Bourne Identity on the laptop. (We would watch the rest of the trilogy over our stay.) I went to bed at 9:30. Phillip figured out that our new cell phones make very good travel alarm clocks.

Last year, Sonar and Max, while not exactly thrilled about traveling, took the experience a whole lot better than this year. Last year, they were ready to get out of bed and play on the very first morning. This year, we could not coax them out of bed that first morning, and eventually gave up and went back to bed. We don’t understand it.

The first sign that I really was coming down with an illness was that when I woke up Thursday morning, after the aborted playtime, it was 9:30 and Phillip was reading in the living room. Phillip is never up before I am when we’re at the ocean. As Phillip pointed out, I had been in bed for twelve hours.

We spent most of Thursday walking around the city of Long Beach. We bought mystery packages at Marsh’s Free Museum. (We always know we are not going to get anything near the value of the $3.5o we spent on the package, but this year we seemed to have gotten taken more than ever. A few plastic trinkets, some sea shells, and a rusty nail.) We had lunch at a very popular (and, it turned out, very good) bakery and deli in Long Beach. I felt tired the whole time.

Every year, we manage to find something to do that we had not done the previous years. This year, we went to the Thursday matinée at The Neptune Twin Theater in Long Beach. We saw Where The Wild Things Are. The owner of the theater, like almost all shop owners on the peninsula, was very chatty. We arrived at the theater very early, which gave him plenty of time to talk to us. He told us about the special Halloween four movie showing the next night. Because Phillip and I both have beards, he guessed that we’d be interested in seeing Capitalism: A Love Story. No, we told him, we were interested in seeing Zombieland.

On Thursday night, we ate reheated lasagna and watched movies on the laptop, in the cabin.

Friday morning, the boys still did not want to get out of bed. We managed to coax them out with blanched almonds we bought at Okies supermarket in Ocean Park.  We had playtime, but we could tell that neither Sonar nor Max were into it. They hadn’t eaten much. We were worried about them. We couldn’t understand why they did so much better last year. (As I type this, I am wondering: Do sugar gliders come down with colds like humans do?)

Friday was the day we’d decided to drive to Astoria. Phillip did the driving, because that bridge across the Columbia River scares me. We Found two geocaches in Ocean Park and Klipsan Beach, but mostly, we wanted to geocache in Astoria. It was also the day my cold hit me the hardest. My sinuses were clogged and my head was pounding. I did my best to hang on, but Phillip could see that I was not feeling well. We stopped into a drug store in Long Beach for a decongestant.  We stopped off for gas in Seaview. Then we drove to Astoria, via Ilwaco.

We did the geocache on the Astoria Trolley. Then we walked around Astoria a bit, looking for lunch. I was feeling worse and worse. I could hardly breathe. We visited what we thought was an underground mall (it turned out to be only offices) and the flight of stairs winded me. We found a nice little Mexican restaurant. I couldn’t finish my lunch. Phillip and I agreed that we should cancel the day and go home. (I thought that was significant: We were both referring to our cabin at Shakti Cove as “home”.) It was a disappointment, of course. We returned to the cabin. I went right to bed, and Phillip took the laptop to the library. We missed the Friday night Halloween show at The Neptune Twin.

On Saturday morning, I felt a lot better – not 100% better, but I had a lot more energy. We had a good playtime with the boys, but we still had to coax them out of bed.

Phillip had the idea to bring Halloween candy for the cabin, just in case we got Trick-or-Treaters Saturday night. A lot of the stores on the peninsula were decorated for Halloween, but we didn’t see any homes decorated. Phillip asked Harriet, at the office, if any Trick-or-Treaters ever came to the cabins. Harriet had never seen any, so Phillip decided to scrap the idea.

We spent Saturday geocaching up and down the peninsula. We’d decided to save Astoria for another year. We had a very good day. I was feeling a lot better.

We fed the boys early on Saturday night and drove to the Neptune Twin Theater for the 7:00 showing of Zombieland.  We got there early, again, and listened to the theater owner chat away about whatever came to mind. While we were listening to him, a man and two small boys walked in, Trick-or-Treating. The theater owner gave them popcorn. (I began to wonder if, on the peninsula, people just don’t Trick-or-Treat at private homes.)

After the movie, we had planned to have dinner at that Italian restaurant in Ocean Park we like so much. We got there a little before 9:00, and it was closed. We drove down the street, looking for somewhere else to eat, and spotted another restaurant we’d eaten at before. The “Open” sign was on, but when we walked in, the server told us we could get something to go, but they were closing up. Phillip and I got fish and chips to go, and ate our dinner in the cabin. We knew that Ocean Park is a small town, and things close earlier than we’re used to, but we were surprised just how early they close on a Saturday night – Halloween night, at that.

Phillip had a terrific idea for a night walk on the beach. So, Saturday night, after dinner, we picked up a flashlight and a wind-up lantern and walked down the trail to the beach. I thought to myself that the lantern was rather impractical for a night walk, since it shined light in all directions – including back in your eyes. The moon was nearly full, and it was so bright out that we didn’t really need our lights, except for parts of the trail that passed under tree cover. When we got to the beach, I realized why Phillip had brought the lantern. He turned it on and set it down at the trail head, so we wouldn’t lose our way back. Phillip is a smart fellow.

We had a great playtime on Sunday morning. We had to coax the boys out of bed again, and they still weren’t eating much, but once we got going, they seemed to have a good time climbing and jumping.

Our plan for Sunday was to pack up and leave early, stopping only to do the webcam geocache in Ocean Park, and get home. Phillip was starting to get the illness I’d had, and we slept in later than we’d planned, but we handed in the cabin key a little before nine.

Phillip dropped me off at Long Beach Coffee Roasters, and then drove to the webcam location.  The coffee shop was more popular than we’d anticipated, and I was still in line for my drink when Phillip called to tell me he’d arrived. I got my latte, got the laptop set up, logged on to the webcam, and we discovered that some ringtones are louder than others. After my third call, Phillip finally heard his cell phone ringing, and we got our webcam shot.

We made one stop in Montesano for drinks (to go with our decongestants) and another stop around the corner for gasoline, and we were home.

It was a great trip, all in all, despite plans being dropped due to illness. But the plan this year was to have no plans, so it was all good.

As for geocaching, we reached Find number 1050 on the peninsula (three and a half months after we’d reached 1000). We Found twelve geocaches (including a Webcam cache, an Earthcache, an Unknown cache, and a Letterbox Hybrid), had no Did Not Finds, and cleared up one DNF from last year.

Phillip and I have both been lazing around the apartment for the past two days.

Getting To 1034

Phillip and I attended a geocaching event yesterday evening in an area southeast of downtown Tacoma. We decided to go there several hours before the event and do some geocaching. It was an area we had never been to before. Being so close to the industrial area of Tacoma, and also close to the residential areas around Highway 7, I was expecting to be caching in a suburban district. Maybe Phillip was, too. Instead, the area was very rural, with small farms and produce stands. Geocaching is about discovering new landscapes.

The first geocache we attempted had too many muggles around (watching a soccer game) for us to do a good search. The second cache was overrun by muggles buying pumpkins at a farm. (We ended up posting notes for those two geocaches.) The next cache was supposed to be a very easy 1/1.5, but we searched for a very long time, and were ready to call it a DNF, until Phillip spotted it – 20 feet away from where the coordinates had sent us. We were getting frustrated, and were not having a fun return to geocaching. I was feeling that if it weren’t for the event being three hours away, and us being so far from home, we should have ended the geocaching and gone home. But we kept going.

The next cache was listed as an easy 1.5/1.5. We found ourselves pushing through some overgrown, hardly there trails in a wooded area. I kept wondering aloud why the terrain was rated only a 1.5. Phillip kept wondering aloud why anyone would hide a small cache in such an inaccessible place that could have easily hidden a regular sized container. We were not having a good day.  As we approached the coordinates. we found a gentle, developed trail which the cache description had neglected to mention. If we’d taken the trail in, it would have, indeed, been a 1.5 terrain. It took us a lot of searching to find the cache. It was actually a rather clever cache, but we were not in the mood to enjoy the humor. As we were signing the log, we spotted another pair of geocachers pushing their way through the woods, the same way we had come in. (At least it wasn’t just us.) Phillip and I followed the trail out, and discovered that we’d parked our car just a few feet from the trailhead. If we were in a better mood, it would have been an amusing story.

We went on to another geocache, very close to the previous one. It actually wasn’t too difficult, despite never getting better than 176 feet accuracy from our GPSr, because of the tree cover. Because neither one of us was in a good geocaching mood, Phillip decoded the hint before we even got close to the cache. It didn’t help us at all. The hint for the previous cache didn’t help, and neither did the one before that. We were not happy.

We moved on to the next cache, which was closer to Highway 7. and suddenly we were running into enjoyable caches. Our mood changed, and we were enjoying geocaching again. Phillip kept wanting to do one more. We kept going, with a stop to buy food for the event potluck, until it was time to start heading for the event. We decided to make a stop at the produce stand we’d seen close to that first cache we’d attempted, before the event.

Along the way, Phillip spotted a geocache icon on the TomTom. We decided to pull over. It was in our Magellan as well, but it was not on the printout I’d made of geocaches within three miles of the event. We tried to find it without any information, but couldn’t. (We didn’t log a DNF, or post a note, since we couldn’t do a proper search.) The cache turned out to be less than a half-mile from the event, so I couldn’t figure out how it got uploaded into both the TomTom and the Magellan, but didn’t show up on the printout.

We bought some produce and then turned back to the event. It was a very fun event. It helped that our afternoon’s geocaching experience turned around for the better.

At the event, there was a contest in which everyone got sheets of paper with a Bingo-like grid on it. Inside each square was a geocaching achievement or occurrence.  The object was to find, among the event attendees, someone who could say yes to an achievement or occurrence. We managed to fill the whole grid. What was interesting to me was how many of the things we could say yes to. We own a Magellan. We’ve hidden more than 10 caches. We’ve completed a challenge. We’ve Found a A.P.E. cache. We’ve Found a 5/5 cache. We’ve used a boat to Find a cache. (There may have been more, but I can’t remember them right now.)

When we headed home, we’d Found 9 caches (including the event and the bonus cache at the event), and had no DNFs. The afternoon hadn’t started out well, but ended very nicely.

Later, when I looked up that cache that wasn’t on our printout, I realized what had happened. On Thursday, I had run a pocket query of easy caches close to the event. I printed out the list of those caches, using GSAK. On Saturday morning, before leaving home, I decided to rerun an earlier pocket query I’d set up for south Tacoma, just to update the caches already in our TomTom and Magellan. There was some overlap between the two queries, since the south Tacoma query covered a larger area. That geocache had been published on Friday, after the printout, but before the south Tacoma query had run.