Gladden T Hart was the undisputed king of hiding in order to avoid the end of playtime. Max tries, but hasn’t yet perfected this skill. One problem is that Max doesn’t like burrowing.  Max is getting quite good at evasion, however.

At the vet’s office, Max and Sonar both came up with the excellent technique of evading us (and the clinic staff) by climbing inside our clothes. I don’t remember the Original Three trying that one.

Max’s favorite hiding spot is the back side of the laundry hamper. The problem with this is that he’s used it so often that he’s easy to find.

Max has a pretty good idea with his evasion/hiding combination on the top of the bookshelf. It’s difficult to reach him up there, and if we do manage to get close, he moves behind whatever we have stored up there.

This morning, Max may have come up with the best spot yet: the roof of the tower. It is very tough to reach him up there – even for me. Plus, he has 360 degrees of escape routes. No matter which side I choose to approach him from, he climbs down the opposite side. If he had Sonar’s gliding skill,  this would be perfect.

I was completely in awe of Avatar last night. But the question is: Was I in awe of the technology or of the story? In other words, if it were the same story filmed with less-than-groundbreaking animation, would I think it was such a great movie? Maybe the real question is: Does it matter what awed me, as long as I was awed?

In the meantime, I am hooked on Livemocha.  I’ve already completed two lessons, and have had a written exercise and an oral exercise commented on. I made a mistake in grammar, and I mispronounced three words. I am very grateful that someone told me these things.

It’s been a lazy Sunday. I haven’t done anything all day, except polish my Spanish skills at Live Mocha. I haven’t left the apartment. I haven’t washed the dishes. I haven’t even taken a shower. But now Phillip has suggested we go see Avatar at The Neptune tonight, so I’ll finish this post later.

Driving down to my family’s house this afternoon did not feel right to me. Phillip made a comment, along the way, that told me he was feeling almost the same way. There was still too much anger, too many hurt feeling, for me. I was not looking forward to a confrontation. Besides, the idea of exchanging Christmas presents with these feelings, this late, felt materialistic to me. It was as if we were driving all that way just get our presents.

But those feelings went away as soon as my family gathered. There were no confrontations. (I did not like the jokes about “us” getting the date wrong, but I kept my opinion to myself.) Actually, the day went well. Everything was fine.

This morning, our first “Renton” pocket query arrived in my email. As I uploaded it into GSAK, and I deleted our Found caches, I was suddenly inspired to rethink the “Temporarily Unavailable” geocaches.

In the past, I have included unavailable geocaches in our uploads into our TomTom and our Magellan. My thinking was that, although we won’t be able to Find them, we will at least know that a cache was hidden in a certain area as we are out caching.  In actual practice, it has caused us a small amount of trouble.

Our Magellan eXplorist 210 has several icons it uses to differentiate types of geocaches. Temporarily unavailable caches are displayed as a skull and crossed bones. The TomTom uses one icon for the entire “Geocache” category. It’s the TomTom that typically alerts us to nearby caches as we are driving around. We approach a park, see that there’s a geocache in it, and decide to pull over and look for it. Then the Magellan shows us that it’s unavailable. Or, worse, the geocache isn’t in the Magellan (due to the different methods of uploads) and we decide to look for it anyway, call it a DNF, only to find out later that the cache wasn’t there.

So, this morning, I edited the four filters I regularly use for GPSr uploads – “Seattle City”, “West Seattle”, “Renton”, and the all-cache dump for the TomTom –  to filter out the Temporarily Unavailable caches.

(Obviously, I am confused about the use of the terms “upload” and “download”. I really don’t know which term to use for the various transfers – inbox to GSAK, GSAK to GPSr, etc.)

This is my 31st post for the month of December, and I did it – a post a day for this month’s NaBloPoMo challenge. Tonight does not feel like New Years Eve. (On the other hand, New Years Eve is never a big night for us.) It does feel like a Friday, however, and it’s only Thursday. I spent too much time waiting for “Professor Fred’s Movie Marvels” to come on. (It comes on Friday nights.) We have no plans for the weekend, except for the second-try Christmas get-together at my parents’ house on Saturday. I am not looking forward to Saturday – I still have a lot of hurt feelings there.

My Spanish teacher brought a Spanish-speaking patient to me today, and I bombed terribly. The patient had a request to see a nurse, and I just could not remember how to say “I am going to give this to the nurse.” I couldn’t even remember the verb for “give”. (It’s “dar“.) And, of course, right after I passed the request to the nurse, I remembered the sentence I actually know well: “Voy a dar esto a la enferema.” It was embarrassing, especially in front of my teacher.

Later on in the day, a family entered our clinic, looking obviously lost and confused. I had a strong feeling that they spoke Spanish, so when they approached a (non-Spanish-speaking) coworker, extending a piece of paper, I jumped up and offered: “¿Cómo puedo ayudarle?” They were, of course, in the wrong clinic, and I was able to figure out where they needed to be, pass that information onto them, and give them directions – all in Spanish.

Then, later, a Spanish-speaking patient I know well approached me, requested to schedule an appointment he had missed, and asked me to page his social worker, and I did both of those things,  and I let him know that his social worker will be here soon, and he wished me a Happy New Year, and I wished the same to him – all in Spanish.

By the end of the day, I didn’t feel so bad about blowing it in front of my teacher.

The successes (and failures) of last Sunday’s geocaching has taught me three things: Geocaching is not dead for us, there are some good geocaches in the nearby Renton area, and the uploads I’ve made to our Magellan are rather lacking between Seattle and Renton.

Tonight, I created a new filter in GSAK and named it “Renton”. In the process of creating that GSAK filter, I discovered that GSAK has a very handy, and very easy polygon creation tool. (It’s much easier than my old method of creating waypoints in Magellan’s MapSend software, writing down the coordinates on a scrap piece of paper, and then typing those coordinates into a GSAK filter.) It’s funny that I’d never noticed that very large “GSAK polygon/arc drawing tool” button before tonight.

While I was at it, I created a new weekly pocket query for the south end. There will still be a discrepancy between the TomTom and Magellan databases, but this will help with our south end geocaching trips.

I seem to remember a time when area codes were a lot simpler. I remember that it used to be that if the phone number you were calling had the same area code as yours, it was a local call. If the two area codes were different, it was a long distance call.

I make a lot of telephone calls in my job. My desk is in the 206 area code, and I often call patients in 425, 360, 253 area codes – and occasionally even the 509 area code. Sometimes I can call a 425 number, and it’s a local call. Sometimes, a call to a 425 number gets me that message: “I’m sorry. You must first dial a one…” The same holds true for 360 and 253. I can’t quite figure out the pattern. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of distance – at least, not that I can see without measuring it. Everett, Tacoma, and Bremerton seem to be local, while North Bend and Kirkland seem to be long distance.

Actually, before I had a cell phone, I used to wonder why long distance charges exist at all. A letter sent to downtown Boston costs the same as a letter sent to downtown Seattle. Yet, a phone call to downtown Spokane costs more than a phone call to downtown Seattle. And now I have a cell phone, and area codes no longer mean anything. I never have to first dial a one. But long distance charges still apply for land lines – sometimes.

On our way to Craig’s house yesterday, Phillip kept pointing out geocaches listed on our TomTom. Then he suggested that we do some south-end caching today.

We set out today for some geocaching before meeting Debbie and June and Selena and Andy for dinner at Buca Di Beppo. At the very first cache, I discovered I’d made a mistake in the upload process. Although my “dump everything” method had worked to get us to the cache location with the TomTom, the cache wasn’t in the Magellan, because I’d uploaded a “Seattle” filtered set, and we had crossed the city limit. So, I had to enter the coordinates by hand at the location. I had to do that for the next four caches, also. It wasn’t too bad, however.

We DNFed that first cache, and couldn’t figure out our way to the second cache. (In hindsight, the TomTom actually did OK, considering those first two caches were as close to the freeway as any surface street.) We Found the next five caches, and then called it a good geocaching day. On our way home, we spent $90 at Grocery Outlet, and got home with just enough time to put the groceries away before meeting everyone at the restaurant.