[Trekkin and Birdin]

This is a local uke club.  My instrument is still the dulcimer (and we now have a group for that locally, too) but as long as the grands are going, I might as well get some musical learning, too!

[Trekkin and Birdin]

As of yesterday after school, Pooh’s Pal is staying with us while his parents are vacationing on the northwest coast.  Tomorrow I will go with him to the ukulele club.  We got him one for Christmas and I figure I might as well learn a thing or two as well, since I’m taking him there.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

Happy New Year!

[Trekkin and Birdin]

Hard to believe how much stuff we’re going through to help Mom pack for her move.  We just went through this seven years ago when they moved out of their house to this apartment.  Another day of packing today, as well as going to the place where she’ll be moving into to see how big that apartment is.  She says this is the last move.  Probably.  She’s 94 and living unassisted!

[Trekkin and Birdin]

The trackable souvenir is one we might not get.  We haven’t found a cache in almost a month.  I did drop a trackable on my way home from yoga/dulcimer last week, so we’re on the board.  If I have time in the Twin Cities between family stuff next week, maybe I can find a few caches, but I don’t think we’ll be finding enough.

We’d have to do a road trip to get a day with enough finds, and we maybe have reached the point…at last…where that just seems silly.

But who knows?

[Trekkin and Birdin]

I tend to agree with the last two posts….certain areas see tons of traffic.  Most of the caches in the state that make our own favorite list are the ones in the lower traffic areas, actually. Often they’re also caches that have been around quite awhile, so they weren’t being found when the whole “favorite” thing was rolled out. So if a variety of folks were willing to share up a little about one of those favorites, maybe we could get a little bit more well rounded cross section of things.  Plus, we all have different kinds of caches we enjoy, so that would get different points of view as well.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

We were saddened to hear of Wayne’s passing as well.  He did a lot to pump up the game in his Green County area.  Hopefully there are others who can carry on his legacy there.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

You could see if that’s a possibility, or maybe just throw out a request for people around the state to submit a short feature on any cache they really enjoyed somewhere.  Put some of the work back onto the membership…it’s a simple way to get some engagement and give the BOD a break from doing everything.  There are caches we’ve really enjoyed that probably don’t have tons of favorite points because they aren’t near a big event or a busy caching area, for example.  Members could look at their own “favorited” caches and go from there, for instance.

Disclaimer….we ourselves wouldn’t be offering up gadget caches.  It seems these days, caches like that get tons and tons of favorites and I appreciate the engineering that goes into creating one, but they just aren’t our favorite kind to find.  I’m sure we’re in the minority here, but there you have it.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

I know it’s sort of human nature, but why does everything become a contest of sorts?  I would agree, prizes not needed.  We have some COTMs that couldn’t get the banner, but no big deal….

I do think with the advent of the favorite points, the whole program is kind of redundant, maybe, and adds a job for someone on the Board and the webmaster with not a lot of ‘return value’.  Favorite points don’t always match up with our own personal preferences, but they are a starting point.  Maybe there could simply be a cache featured in different areas of the state each month, similar to the way HQ does things?

[Trekkin and Birdin]

We’ve saved a couple local ones for those, but if we don’t get them….cie la vie.  We may not get this last one in the promotion, either.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

We saw plenty of cars and trucks pulled off the road while traveling the North Shore.  We had a few deer run in front of us along the way.  But we saw not one vehicle with a deer tied on.  I wonder how the harvest has gone there.  Be safe, everyone out today.   Trekkin’ has somewhat lost interest, since he lost his hunting spot (new landowner) and all the reports of chronic wasting.  He hunts with muzzleloader, anyway, so he could still go out during that season if he changes his mind.  He thinks it’s been three years since he went out.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

Thanks for the heads up.  We’ve kept some local stuff for this kind of thing.  Last year was an ordeal.  It was dangerously cold, plus I was in the Twin Cities with both my parents hospitalized for influenza.  Thank goodness for a couple p/gs.  Even those were miserable!

We have our usual unplanned, sort of, caching snafu.  We were holding out for low season rates to go up to the North Shore.  We got the low season rates, but three of the nine state parks we’d hoped to visit will not be available….gun deer hunting.  We always forget they’re a couple weeks ahead of us!  No big deal.  We don’t need much excuse to wander up that way later.  Next time maybe I’ll have renewed my passport and we can just keep going, too.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

So this was cool…..I’ve had this particular book on my wishlist for some time now.

Well, looking at our list of caches we want to seek when we head to the North Shore, hopefully, I was re-reading logs on one we’d DNFed a few years back.  There was a log from “thekayaklady.”  I looked at her profile and it seemed to fit, so I contacted her.  Yup, the author of this book is a geocacher!  Cool.

[Trekkin and Birdin]

So yet ANOTHER of our ammo can hides….gone.  Those things aren’t cheap.  Why in the world can’t people leave things alone?  So tired of hearing about caches being stolen, gorilla glued, vandalized and all the rest.  That brings our total to something like 8 or 9 taken or destroyed.  Sigh.  Not to mention many other non-can hides that have been taken or trashed.  Not all of this is the result of angry raccoons.  *eye roll*

[Trekkin and Birdin]

There sure is that assumption that “everyone” has this technology now.  The phone isn’t mine, but Trekkin’s, and he doesn’t want all kinds of apps on the thing.  Yet everywhere we go, they try to get him to sign up for them.  Subway? Really?  We can’t just walk in, tell them what we want and pay at the other end?

I now understand my dad, the engineer, being resistant to that snazzy electronic calculator I got when I was in college.  He was just fine and dandy with his slide rule, which was in his pocket protectors almost until he moved on to better places this past spring.  Progress stops for no person, LOL

[Author]

Posts