National Cache Coverage

To quote another meme on TheChive, this is one of those first world problems.  It seems we are rapidly running out of space to put any new caches.  I'm not sure how we're going to be able to add a dimension so we can layer caches more effectively and get a better 3-D density.

If you zoom in, there's still plenty of space.  This is just an amusing way to visualize U.S. caches.

Geocaching Woodville, Part II

A continuation of the earlier post.  Yet one more location where I didn't realize I was looking for a mystery cache.  I ended up crawling around in a drain under a highway and wondering how it would be accessible if water was running under the road.


Who is the inspector dude?  I recognize him from cartoons, but they weren't cartoons I watched.


It's Alice!!! Run for the bridge across the chasm!  Fusaki! Fusaki!!! It's ironic that I managed to get past a raptor and score the cache it was guarding, only to be chewed on later by a bloodhound.  Luck was with me, it wasn't a pack like in Jurassic Park.  Individual raptors are stupid.  Stooopid.  Play some tap music, and they start tapping their hallux and can't stop.


This took me back to the days when I had hemorrhoids and Eryn and I were doing the Halloween series here in the southern metro that Bart had placed.  That was a watershed.  Pizza challenge, Halloween caches, hemorrhoid surgery.  Put enough big events in a two day period and you never forget it.


Somewhere, nearby, natives are guarding giant gates holding back an even gianter great ape.  Or perhaps Marie Laveau was caching before me, despite the lack of a signature attesting to her presence.  More importantly, don't put a finger in your mouth after touching a rusty, corroded, moldy, cache necklace.  That's the real lesson you should come away with.


A sneaky cache hidden in some rusted out old farm machinery.


Let the photoshopping begin.  What can you put on the missing half of my head that would be most amusing?  Some caching bling.


The raptor trespassed.  Stooopid raptor.  Now he's married to some farmer's daughter.  So...a raptor went to a farm house and asked the farmer, "Can we spend the night at your farm?"  The farmer said, "Sure you can.  Just make sure you stay away from my three beautiful daughters."  The raptor assured him he could.  But in the middle of the night, the first daughter came to visit him where he was staying in the barn and the raptor found he was no match for her curvaceous charms.  Wild trans-human sex ensued and the raptor fell back to sleep.  A few hours later, the second daughter showed up and although the raptor thought there was no way he could get aroused so soon, she was even more persuasive than the first daughter and they did it dino style.  He went back to sleep.  But a few hours later the third daughter showed up and she was a vision.  The raptor perked up and showed her the meaning of terrible lizard.  Hours later he was awoken by the farmer who was pointing a shotgun at him.  "You defiled my daughters, and now you have to pay.  You'll be marryin' one of them."  The raptor, a comittaphobe, was initially concerned, but after a moment to think it through, decided marrying the youngest daughter was preferable to a hide full of buckshot.  A wonderful ceremony ensued, and the minister asked, "Do you take this raptor to be your lawfully wedded dinosaur?"  And the farmer's daughter assured everyone she did.  The minister stated, "And do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded human?"  The raptor assured everyone he did.  The minister stated, "I now pronounce you dinosaur and wife."  After that they lived happily ever after, raising a brood of Sleestak and creating one of the most profitable farming combines in history, eventually selling out to Monsanto and creating a habitat where all human/dino halfbreeds could live in peace.  Damn it...I was going to use the punchline "I don't know about his ability as a farmer, but when we were doing it, I was in raptor."  That probably would have been better.


The cache description implied these were lunch pails.  They looked more like a good place to take a leak.  Not that I did!  They just looked appropriate.


SIR! We have secured Gearburger Hill, Sir! We now have a commanding view of the entire bike.  You may rest assured that no [insert culturally inappropriate word for enemies here] will ever be able to rest this bike from our control.  I have deployed snipers to the pedals and we have flamethrowers cleaning up the headtubes where the enemy has gone to ground.  Disregard any rumors you may have heard about soldiers setting fire to innocents in the spokes.


I stood in front of this cache for a while wondering whether it was a trap.  I followed the rope up to the end of the line just to be sure I wasn't going to pull a pot full of pig's blood down on my head.


End of the line! I talked about the hill leading up to this stop sign in the last post.  When the county cop was talking to me I was wondering whether he'd be concerned that I'd reached the county line and think my dog bite belonged to the next county over.  But it all worked out.  Except for this tetanus shot.  That thing blows.  Feels like I've got the flu and my arm is a mess.  I just tried to haul a dozen bags of sticks and grass and leaves to the corner, and I have to load the dog cage in the car tomorrow and I'm not looking forward to it.  I once had a nurse who told me tetanus shots don't make your arm hurt.  To which I say, "Bull*LKDJFL!@$^#$%^."  But, it was a good day except for the bite.  Good caching.  Good bicycling.

Geocaching Woodville - Part I

Yesterday I did the first end of the trail in Woodville, Wisconsin, and logged 27 caches. I don't think that's my best day. If I go look at the geocaching statistics on geocaching.com, it appears it's my third best. 34 with Klund and Ming trumps earlier this year. And I had a 28 cache day with The Boss. I'm disappointed I didn't find two more caches yesterday just to bother Boss. That might have made being bitten by a dog worth it. But it is my best solo day ever.

Here's a summary montage of some of the pictures, for those of you like Ming who are impatient with long posts.
 

Here's a picture of the path I followed, starting from the north end.  Where the green unfounds start isn't the end of my ride, it just happens to be where I quit to find the end of the trail by bike so I was sure I'd have time to get back to the car in time to get Eryn from school.  If I had just kept caching, perhaps I'd have avoided the dog.


Whose sign is this?  Nacho sign!  If I hadn't been bitten by the dog, I would have driven out to try out the brew pub.  I may go back to try it out, but I'll cache in Stillwater on the way and only hit the end of the trail where the "13 Days of Christmas" caches are that I didn't do.

The day started at this sign, which didn't seem to officially be part of the trail as there was lots of wet grass as it cut through the woods.  It was right after this sign that I lost my camera while taking a...break.  My first geocache of the day was to find my own, new camera, worried that it was now wet with nasty...forest...residue.  From here, the path seemed to follow the direction of the path on the other side of town, so perhaps it's part of an old rail bed.


My first cache of the day! I had to hop across a narrow ditch full of water.  But prior to hopping, I put one foot into the ditch and water flowed into my shoe through the toehole I've worn in it while bicycling.  So this cache stayed with me all day in the form of a slightly soggy foot.


If there was a hot redhead in a sundress lurking in this picture, I'd be a shoe in for The Chive's hot girls in the middle of nowhere series.  I did the lighting on purpose for this picture, and it turned out nicely, so I'm very proud of myself.  "Hot Cache in the Middle of Nowhere".


I didn't pay attention to GSAK settings and it's been a while, so I didn't realize I had a mix of traditional, multi-stage, and mystery/puzzle caches in my GPS.  Unfortunately, that meant I ended up at a mystery cache at the cemetery looking for a traditional cache.  Caches are almost never on private/church land, so it made me rather nervous.  I felt like I did when the guy in North Dakota came to grill Ming and I about why we were looking around the city sign for a cache.  After 20 minutes, I figured something was up and gave up.  But this tombstone was very close to where I was looking in a series of pine trees.  The cache was something about Norwegians, so this confused me.  Virgil and Leona, very Scandinavian sounding.  Wang?  Research shows that it's a very Scandinavian name, derived from Vang.


One of the first caches.  Thought they were clever with the magnet in the old paint can.  There weren't too many magnet-based caches during the day.  Most of them were just hidden in the brush well off the trail and not exactly at the coordinates, so you had to do quite a bit of digging around to find them.  That, or  my GPS was off by up to 40 feet all day.


This was a more surmountable obstacle than the big puddle I encountered earlier on the trail.  I'm always happy to see that trees fall when no one is around, that way they don't fall on me.


Couple of caches were in pines.  Smelled wonderful.


This is an example of what I was talking about when I said they were just laying around off the trail.  Go 20-50' into the brush and junk on the side of the trail, and some of them were just laying in the open.  Others were damn hard to find, particularly when there were four or five layers of desiccated shrubbery.


Woodville's troll.  Guarding the grain storage rather than a bridge.


Obviously "official".


I found a pair of glasses in a cache.  I didn't swap anything for them.  My trades were for coins and things Eryn might like.  But I do take my picture with cache "props" when I get the opportunity.  I should have stayed on the path to being a Tudor/Stuart history professor.  I look like someone's professor.  Or grandpa.  Notice it was warm enough to wear two layers of t-shirts?  Might be the last day of the year with a reasonable temperature.


Boring cache picture.  Unless you're really into cache p0rn.


Almost every cache was slightly different.  I think someone had a lot of old containers sitting around that didn't make it out the door at the garage sale.


This one was peculiar.  I'm not sure why it needed to be in the form of a baseball cap.  One of the cachers up here did a series using all the team caps, but this wasn't part of a series that I could discern.  I did finally catch on by about this point that the name of the cache, which doesn't show up in my GPS unless I back out a screen, is uber-important.  Names like "Wrapping Tree" and "Don't Trespass" really help you hone in on the right location when the cache is just in the general vicinity.


The fence posts were interesting.  I don't know what sort of wood they were made out of, but this is one of them from the top down.


Rolling under I-94.  This is the only paved part of the whole trail.  Overall, it's pretty bumpy and hilly and, in some parts, it's composed of rocks about a third the size of a golf ball.  Rough riding, even on my mountain bike with the wide (although non-knobby) tires.  At the very end was a hill so steep, so rocky, so covered with loose dirt and leaves, that I couldn't make it even half-way up on my bike.  A strange feature for a bike trail.

Bitten!

Yesterday, I went to Woodville, Wisconsin, to ride my bicycle on the local trail and do some geocaching. There's a nice string of caches that follows the trail from Woodville south. I'll post about the caching later. Lot of fun. But let's skip to almost the end of the seven mile trail, when I'm exhausted from 27 caches (and a few did not finds [e.g. DNF]) and meet up with some small dogs that are the vanguard for a lady walking four animals. They came up to check me out and were being a little pushy, so I remained on my bike where they couldn't really reach me. Unfortunately, one of the other two dogs wasn't so small - a bloodhound of sorts - and decided to take over. Not with a slow jog along side my bike hinting of warning, but a sprint/lung/attack on my left leg. It wasn't even like I was wearing a Vikings jersey or, as Kyle asked on Facebook, a retro Brett Farve Packers jersey. Fortunately, it was rather chilly out, so for about only the third time in twenty years, I was wearing a pair of Levi's instead of shorts. That didn't stop me from bleeding, but it probably did prevent hanging strips of skin or deep punctures.

I put the bike between the dog and me and the dog stopped when his owner got there. She gave me her name, a phone number, the dog's name (Daisy) and the comforting advice that she didn't know if it had rabies shots because it was her son's dog. As I got back on my bike, it lunged at me a second time and I hopped off the far side and pushed the bike toward it. That was the only time I saw the woman panic, presumably because she thought the dog might get hurt. She grabbed his collar to hold him while I biked away. I pedaled six miles back to Woodville (actually, about eight, as I quickly pedaled to the end of the trail as that had been my goal all day) and asked the librarian to point me at the police station. She pointed me two doors down. I walked to the Woodville police station, where they asked, "Where did this take place?" When I noted it was five to six miles south of town, the receptionist assured me it was a county matter and handed me a phone number on a sticky note. Not a big deal - I wasn't bleeding out, and the local policeman came out to talk to me while I sat on a bench outside their headquarters. Twenty minutes or so later, the county cop showed up to take down my story. He learned two interesting facts. 1.) that there was a trail leading out of town. And 2.) what geocaching was. I learned the strange coincidence that his last name, an uncommon one I'd never heard before, might be the same last name as the company that just did the concrete driveway for my neighbors. He was great. He gave me a case number and assured me they'd call me after talking with the woman a second time as she was tracking down vet details. The dog was a brand new purchase off Craigslist and paperwork hadn't exchanged hands yet. As you can imagine, I was a bit nervous about that and worried that there might not be documentation, or even a vet. Rabies shots were not something I was looking forward to.

I drove back to Minnesota and picked Eryn up from school and went home to make dinner as urgent care didn't open until 6:00 p.m. and there wasn't a chance I'd die from rabies or lockjaw in the next hour or two. I was less concerned about those problems than the twenty sick people in urgent care touching everything. After about an hour and a half, they ushered me into a room and cleaned the wound and gave me a tetanus shot. Antibiotics are only if I start to show symptoms of infection. If it had been a cat bite, they'd have given me antibiotics de facto. Cats are nasty, disease-ridden, germ bags - at least that's what I take away from the conversation with Jennifer, who processed my wounds. I told Eryn during our ride home from school that rabies was a possibility. Then I barked at her loudly. Freaked her out, although she thought it was funny after she'd recovered.

So overall, pretty harmless. Four wasted hours of my life. A $20 copay. A very sore right arm from the tetanus shot because they don't want to mask my heart attack by giving it to me in the left arm, and a sore upper ankle where I have a deep tooth scrape. Wisconsin made out less well because after I got bit I wasn't willing to eat at the local cafe or fill up the gas tank, so they lost my day of tourism dollars.

This is for Ming

...and because it's for Ming, it's also for Kyle. Courtesy of the trip Eryn and I took to Groth Music today. I think this was title of a piece of fan fiction Ming was writing.

St. Anthony Falls

St. Anthony Falls. Yes, it's just a big chunk of concrete, to keep it from wandering up river and completely disappearing, but you can appreciate the historical significance of a falls that powered Minneapolis through the lumber and grain days.

Sweaty

Got on my bike for the first time in about 14 days.  Our internet connection in the computer room has been cutting out after about 3 second with each refresh, and no matter what I did I couldn't get the connection to stay up (I was going to say "it to stay up", but that might lead one a bit of Shakespearian double meaning).  Everything else in the house accessed the internet fine, so I suspect the card was going, despite that it was lit up.  I gave up trying to get Netflix streaming going, kept my Netflix DVD account, and figured I'd just own the account for myself and get a new DVD every two days to pop in the computer.  Not bicycling generally leads to beer drinking, so it's important to get on the bike and not swing my health completely in the wrong direction.  The video came today, I hopped on the bike, and the internet connection performed flawlessly.  SOAB.  I think someone at my internet provider is seriously messing with me.

So 62 minutes watching I Am Number Four, which shouldn't be watched once, let alone twice because you didn't review your queue after renting a stupid movie in the Redbox lookalike at Kowalski's a few months ago.  But, the bicycling was done and I feel way better than having had a beer.  Mission accomplished.

Segway

On Saturday, Pooteewheet and I went on a Segway ride at St. Anthony Main.  She bought two gift certificates as a birthday present 11 months ago, and we finally got around to using them.  It was a perfect day for it as far as I was concerned.  Just a little on the cool side, but not so cold my hands hurt, and I didn't have to worry about sweating or having to strip off clothes.

You do have to wear a helmet during the ride, but for the introduction - stepping on and stepping off before the video - there's someone there to catch you. Here's Pooteewheet learning to move around in front of the Segway shop.  The little round circle by her feet gives her a shield frequency of 257.4.  Useless against polaric energy, but useful against uncloaked Romulans.
 

Jason, one of our two tour guides, and the voice over actor who did the narration for the training video, done in something of a native Chicagoan.  Perhaps one of the better training videos I've ever had to sit through.  He and Renata did all of the history bits of our tour and they did a great job.  We talked to Renata for quite a while at the back of the pack as I knew just enough history about the falls area from the  underground Twin Cities book I'd read to be able to have a conversation.  Later, when we went out to the open area by St. Anthony Main that allows you to get close to the falls, there was a plaque talking about what I'd heard about how they'd almost collapsed the falls in the past.

In the background, you can see our famous Grain Belt Beer sign.


The rail bridge between Boom Island (where they used to process lumber in the lumbering days) and Nicollet Island (home of the Grain Belt sign and DeLaSalle High School).  I hadn't realized there was a whole neighborhood out there.  Apparently it used to be the hangout for a bunch of a hippies and a pet donkey.  I remember this bridge from when I was in college and it didn't have the safety rails.  People would sit on the girders on the sides and fish.


THIS IS MY SEGWAY.  THERE ARE MANY LIKE IT, BUT THIS ONE IS MINE.  MY SEGWAY IS MY BEST FRIEND.  WITHOUT MY SEGWAY I AM USELESS.  I MUST DRIVE MY SEGWAY TRUE.  I MUST DRIVE IT SURER THAN ANY OTHER SEGWAY WHICH IS ATTEMPTING TO RUN ME OFF THE ROAD...



The Mill Museum.  We stopped here for a cookie and coffee.


Dorks on Segways!  I told Pooteewheet it's my goal to always have my picture taken in Marvin clothing from now on.  Proof I'm rapidly sliding toward retirement age.  That's the Stone Arch Bridge in the background.  Where we're at is a common place for people to smoke their weed, according to our tour guide.  We didn't smoke any weed - we were driving.


Stone Arch Bridge sans dorks.


Putting one dork back in the view.  Pooteewheet is apparently monstrously shorter than I am when I'm up on a Segway.  The ride was 2.5 hours long.  Quite the trip and we were actually sort of tired at the end.  It went across the Stone Arch Bridge, down into the ruins park, back up past the 35W Bridge Memorial and the Guthrie, into the Mill City Museum, along the riverfront to Boom Island, and back along Nicollet Island.  Eryn was incredibly jealous, as we'd dumped her with Grandpa and Grandma for the evening.  She was too young for the Segway and too young for the Haunted Basement.  We let her have our Segway drivers licenses and told her if she saved her allowance, she could buy a Segway for $6999 and then the age restriction wouldn't apply.

Snarky Reboot

Snrky.com has rebooted! You can probably see the picture/link on the right of this blog, but in case it's too small, the art is brand new.  The site is temporarily moving to five posts a week while it reposts three of the originals each week and posts two new cartoons as well.  There are even some new frames that will be showing up.  It finally looks like something that could be put on the side of a coffee cup or on a wall.

Soap Factory Haunted Basement

Last night Pooteewheet and I went to the Haunted Basement at the Soap Factory for the second time (annually). Last year was definitely more scary. Although this year, they claimed to have more "uncles", and we actually saw a woman being escorted out hyperventilating. I suspect the issues were 1.) they went to a lot of trouble to separate everyone individually (something Julie would have hated), and 2.) they put you in small boxes for a while. Scary if you give a **** about tight spaces. Irrelevant if you don't care. Most of the night I wandered in directions where they had to pull me back onto the main path, did as they requested (like sitting on a mannequin, which seemed to be an exception to the rule), wandered around the wrong side of the table of gross food, and laughed when I guy tried to use a stapler on me. Not that it wasn't a little bit creepy, but mostly it tickled. We were paired up with Julie and Alan and we used their names a lot, just to give the actors something to work with. I think the weirdest thing was the photo exhibit at the beginning which was an Asian woman in various states of bondage involving total nudity and ropes. Not part of the haunted house, but definitely a weird intro.

This has little to do with the haunted basement other than that we were walking from Aster to the basement near University.  Pedal Pub has a headquarters right along the street, so we saw all the pedal pubs finishing up for the night.  I have to do this.  Even if it means making more friends.

The bell they ring to announce you're headed into the Haunted Basement.  I asked the gentleman nearby if they tweaked the basement to make it more scary based on participant feedback.  No such luck.  That poster in the background is for the company that makes nasty smells for the haunted basement.  The smells didn't bother me until I got to the old ketchup, which they had nothing to do with.  Old ketchup makes me feel ill.
 

At the end or the haunted basement.  You can watch other folks freak out.  this was more fun last year when you could watch people wander around the maze for 30 minutes. 

Can't tell if this makes sense, but there was a fish dude who puked water.  Having to walk through a floor covered with a layer of water was pretty creepy.  Not because you felt all cthonic, but because you were worried about being electrocuted.

Miscellaneous Photos

A few pictures from the weekend that don't really fit into any other category. A nice picture of the cityscape from Riverplace. My new camera does an incredible job of gathering light. Almost too good. When I wanted to grab a picture of the city at dusk, it kept looking like just a slightly dreary day. And Eryn in the car at Riverplace. We spent both days at Riverplace over the weekend. A great time - Segway riding, having a few beers, haunted basement, trading Eryn with Grandpa. Good times.

Leaf Raking!

Don't let her fool you. She didn't fully rake the yard. There's just a small pile of wet leaves sitting in the middle of a big yard full of wet leaves. But she did rake them very stylishly in her hat and skirt. Not that I couldn't have pulled off the look.

That's some of the grass Pooteewheet is allergic to that she planted.  You can't see our new rocks from the cabin on the corner, just out of sight.  They're not huge, but to get them into my Dad's trailer, I had to roll them onto an old sled just so I could eliminate enough friction for them to slide.  Pooteewheet planted tulips next to them.  She's not allergic to tulips.


And that's the tree I pruned during my 12 hours of branch pruning and chopping up into little pieces that fit in leaf bags effort over the last three weekends.  I still have a few hours left to go to eliminate the dregs at the rental property.  I forgot my clippers last time I was there, and the chainsaw is a bit too brute forest for your fingerling branch.  Not to mention, using it to hack up bundles of thin twigs has dulled the chain to the point where it's just sort of chewing through the wood instead of cutting it.  Notice there aren't many branches hanging down where you have to look at them.  I'm going to assume no low hanging branches drives away the squirrels because they won't be able to get into the trees, eliminating my worries that they're trying to infiltrate my attic.