I woke up this morning without any definite plans for the day. Recently it's either been flying if the weather is good, or something else planned for the day. But today the weather was overcast with scattered showers, so flying was cancelled. I talked with dbaker briefly this morning about taking a short flight later in the day in a Cessna, but the weather forecast didn't show that it would get any better (it didn't).

So this morning I watched Tomb Raider which I'd picked up at the video store the other day. Mostly because it has Angelina Jolie in it. Then I headed out to return it, and to find some food (since I have almost nothing in the fridge).


On my way to the video store, I noticed I was passing close by a geocache (which the careful reader will note that I optimistically loaded into my gps a couple of weeks ago). Finally, some free time when it's not dark and I'm not rushing off to work or somewhere, that I can find some caches!

All I had to work with was the geocache location and the short fragment of description that the gps waypoint record can hold, "WHAT'S UP DOWN T", since I hadn't looked at the full cache description before leaving. So I pulled into a nearby parking lot behind a fire station and found a nice set of walk/bike/exercise trails. It was easy enough to find the cache location, especially with my new GPS that has a built-in electronic compass. When you're standing still 60 feet from the cache location, it's great to be able to know which way to go!

I didn't know what kind of cache this was (it could have been a traditional cache with a container of items, or a virtual cache that is an interesting location, or less likely, some other type of cache). But it became clear once I found the entrance to Beck Ranch Cave with a sturdy fence around it. Apparently this cave is an important water inflow location for the Edwards Aquifer. A sign above the fence says endangered species live in the area (perhaps bats? I don't know). I took a couple of pictures, poked around a bit to make sure I wasn't missing a traditional cache container, and headed back out.

While stuck in traffic on 183, I got a call from luckman who was working on some Delphi+DLL+Oracle programming problem. I wasn't really familiar with the Delphi-specific issues he was having, but tried to help anyway. Then I popped into Half Price Books to see if they had anything of interest, but didn't find anything today. Last week I found a copy of Wolfram's A New Kind of Science for $20, which I'd been curious about but didn't want to pay $75 for (I guess the retail price has come down a bit, Amazon now has it for $45).

Then since I was in the neighborhood, I dropped by to see the house nugget is in the process of buying. It was locked, so I could only peer through the windows, but it looks neat. Lots of tile, open areas, small bedrooms. Nugget will of course need a new fridge, and the current appliances are stainless steel, so I suggest this one. :)

I didn't really have anything else to do, so I picked up some fast food and stopped by the office. shyape was there diligently crafting documentation, whereas I just ate and slacked. I found on geocaching.com that to properly log the cache I'd visited earlier, I needed a word fragment from one of the signs that I didn't take a picture of. So I'd have to go back. After a while I headed back, and although it was getting dark and raining a bit, I went back to the cave entrance and found the word I'd need to properly log the cache.

Once I got home I thought I'd catch up on a couple of nearby caches. I hopped on my bike and rode to the Duck Pond first, and got a picture of the sign. Then I rode down the bike path to Rememberance of Connemara #3, which is a microcache in a small grove of trees.

I got to the grove and realized I'd forgotten to bring a flashlight, and it was now well past sunset. No matter, I just poked around in the dark looking for the cache. Suddenly my cell phone rang and it was my friend Susanne whose uncle was coming into town, and she was looking for a nice place to take him to eat dinner. I didn't really have any great ideas, but we settled on the Spaghetti Warehouse downtown (hope it was good). I felt like such a dork standing in a grove of trees by a bike trail in the dark talking on a cell phone for 20 minutes! On my way back I played on the swings in a nearby playground.

When I checked the geocaching web site, I found the Connemara cache is listed as unavailable because apparently the cache itself has been removed. Oh well, no wonder I couldn't find it. Geocaching is even more fun when you don't know anything about what you're looking for except the location!


Well I thought it was a lazy day. Maybe it was and I'm just being longwinded.