mortonfox: (morton blvd)
On Saturday, I returned to the Henry Hudson Trail in Monmouth County to finish the remainder of the animals series. This time, I started at the other end in Leonardo and did geocaches "Anaconda" thru "Chipmunk". On this part of the trail though, they weren't strictly in alphabetical order. I still had plenty of time after that, so I went around Atlantic Highlands, Keansburg, Middletown, and Keyport to do more geocaches in the area. I was amazed at how much money these beach towns have spent on their waterfronts. Keyport, in particular, had the most well-lit gazebo I've ever seen. However, that made finding the geocache easy, even at night. The boardwalk in Laurence Harbor was a pretty nice walk at night too.

Sunday was a rainy day, so I woke up late and had breakfast out at the local IHOP. (I had a coupon for a free Rooty Tooty.) My plan was to do just a few geocaches in the afternoon between rain showers. So I headed out to West Chester and Exton after breakfast. Most of the geocaches I did were pretty quick. The exception, "WO-10 - Station Hillside Hollow", required a climb up a steep hillside. I apparently saved the best one for last though. "Mon Sheree Arbor" was a rather tricky geocache. I actually saw it pretty early in my search but didn't think it was the cache. Still, something about the way it was sitting bothered me enough that I had to go back and take a closer look, and that's how I found the hidden tube. Sometimes, I've got to pay more attention to a hunch.

The caches... )
mortonfox: (chicken fries)
It's that time of the year again when I get birthday coupons from nearly every restaurant mailing list to which I've signed up. So I picked the best ones of the lot and planned this weekend's trips around those.

On Saturday, I started the day with breakfast at the local IHOP. Then I went geocaching in Maryland because of the Greene Turtle coupon. This coupon was specifically for their Owings Mills location so I traveled around the north of Baltimore, through Churchville, Bel Air, Timonium, and Hunt Valley. Nothing too unusual, except for two geocaches that were quite challenging. "Don't Stonewall Me" was difficult because it was hidden on the wall of a strip mall building that didn't appear to have any good places to place a cache. But once I found it, I saw that there was indeed a way to make it stay. (one of the crevices had just enough room to sit the tiny tube) "Nano In The Heart of The Valley" on the other hand was difficult because of awkwardness. It turned out to be in the under-skirt area of a bronze statue of a little girl in the middle of a busy shopping center. Really! Luckily, no one was around when I made the grab or it would've looked strange when I picked it out from there. Finally, dinner was a crabby melt at Greene Turtle.

Sunday began with breakfast at Perkins in Avondale. The plan for the day was to do some of the recent geocaches in Southern Lancaster County and pick from a few possibilities depending on where I was at the end of the day.
Hubcap Hoarder was the neatest geocache of the day. It's made of hubcaps! It's good to see some creativity now and then. Later in the day, I was surprised by giant Greek letters in the woods near "The Old Bridge". This cache site is near Millersville University and apparently, the Sigma Tau Gamma fraternity has been busy decorating some of the abandoned structures. Dinner was an avocado turkey burger at Ruby Tuesday in Lancaster. My choices were between a birthday burger at Ruby Tuesday or one at Red Robin and Red Robin was a bit further from that side of Lancaster, so I saved the latter for another evening.

The caches... )
mortonfox: (chestnut ramune)
The actual purpose of this trip to Long Island was to do a mascot gig with Hi-4 at the Jones Beach Autism Walk, but I treated it as a weekend away from home. A mini-vacation, if you will. I started driving off from home Friday evening after loading the fursuit and some overnight items into the car. It was raining that night and I hoped the rain would stop before my first geocache stop of the night, but that didn't happen. Oh well. Dinner was at Chevys in Lawrenceville to use the coupon I got on the receipt from using my birthday coupon there the previous weekend. (Would have been interesting if it was recursive but that wasn't the case.) I had a nachos grande. This is incidentally one restaurant that I think is okay, even though lots of Yelp reviewers panned it.

After that, I continued up the NJ Turnpike. I found the first cache of the night, "Kilmer Bunker", in the rain at the stroke of midnight. So it was technically my first cache of October. I stopped for more geocaches in the Perth Amboy area when I left the turnpike to switch to Route 440. I also did some easy caches in Woodbridge and Linden before deciding that it was time to cross over to New York. I got a few geocaches in Brooklyn and Queens, and arrived in Nassau County just before daybreak. Breakfast was a free Rooty Tooty at IHOP in West Hempstead. This was for the anniversary of my joining the IHOP mailing list. (Same freebie as the birthday coupon.) I suppose I can't really complain because I got free food but service wasn't that great and this restaurant has some rather foul-mouthed clientele. I didn't notice this as much back when I lived in North Jersey and visited Long Island frequently, but I guess I got spoiled when I moved out of the NYC area. I also saw a lot of bad driving behavior on the streets in that part of Nassau County. In particular, someone cornered too fast, swung around really wide and nearly knocked me over when I was just starting to cross the street.

Anyway, it was a super-productive day of geocaching. I found 48 geocaches on Saturday. The Long Island batch was mostly from Elmont to North Hempstead. I went around in a big curve, ending back at the Nassau/Queens border. I encountered one Nassau County police officer who was curious about what someone from out of state was doing in the corner of an office lot on Saturday, but he already knew about the geocache! In the evening, I went to [livejournal.com profile] jbadger's house to meet up for dinner. (also, I was staying at his place overnight) After checking out several restaurants on Smithtown's Main Street, we settled on Luso, a Portuguese BBQ. It's a rather expensive restaurant (then again, I seem to think anything that costs more than Old Country Buffet is expensive :) ) so you'd think there'd be something special there, but that was not the case. They don't have exotic meats, for one thing. It was just ordinary beef, chicken, or pork. Service wasn't that great either but then again, maybe I'm spoiled. For all I know, it could be normal to have to ask servers at fine restaurants multiple times for stuff before you get it. Maybe we shouldn't have expected better service than say, Denny's, even when the meal costs an order of magnitude more.

Sunday... )

The caches... )
mortonfox: (buggy)
Cloudy, 55-65°F. It was the day before my birthday and since I'm on lots of restaurant mailing lists, it's time to use some birthday coupons. So I started the day with a free Rooty Tooty at the nearby IHOP. The morning started off a bit rainy, so I went to southwestern Lancaster County and focused on geocaches from the Battleship series and a few others that are roadside or close to parking.

The sun came out in the late afternoon, so hit the Enola Low-Grade Trail starting at the Martic Township trailhead and did a 4-mile walk for 19 geocaches. By the time I was done with that, it was approaching dusk. So I headed towards Lancaster City and did a few quick geocaches along the way. Dinner was at Fuddruckers in Lancaster to use a birthday coupon for the free 1/3-lb burger.

In summary, a 38-geocache marathon and a decent evening out (and free food!) made for another good Lancaster trip. What's neat is even with all those recent trips to Lancaster, I'm still not close to completing either the Battleship or the rail trail series of geocaches. Lancaster, I'll be back!

The caches... )
mortonfox: (words)
It was Chinese New Year, so I went to IHOP in New Castle. It's not as weird as it seems. Firstly, everyone else would be thinking of going to Chinese restaurants, so those places would be packed. Secondly, I still had the free pancakes coupon that I got for completing a customer survey after my visit last month. I also had a Double BLT.

I learnt about the Foursquare v2 API recently so I've been busy rewriting 4sqNoGPS to use it. The result is PlainSquare. In contrast to 4sqNoGPS, which was an attempt to write an app in one day, PlainSquare took 5 days, but I was busy and I was also aiming for completeness instead of just something minimally functional.

PlainSquare is the same idea as 4sqNoGPS. It is meant for older phones with limited web browsers, so there is nothing too fancy in the HTML and no Javascript at all, except for the experimental geolocation page. Where PlainSquare goes beyond 4sqNoGPS is in certain v2 API features that aren't in the v1 API, chiefly support for comments and photos. Foursquare check-in pages are friends-only so a screenshot will have to do. The corresponding page in PlainSquare is formatted in a narrow style for my phone and has input forms for adding comments and photos. The use case here should be fairly obvious. I check in at a restaurant and then I use the app to add food photos to the check-in record to make it more like a show and tell.
mortonfox: (morton blvd)
Sunny, 28-34°F. After having breakfast at the local IHOP (on their menu, that's the "Split Decision"), I headed down to Cape Henlopen and Bethany Beach in Sussex County to finish off the remaining Delaware Geotrail caches in that area. Of course, I'd already qualified for the geocoin a week ago but I thought it would be fun to do the rest of the caches in that series too. And those were interesting locations. In particular, "DGT Bethany Beach" has a good view across the bay to Ocean City, Maryland. I was inspired by that view to cross the state line and find a bunch of geocaches in O.C. This beach resort town has plenty of parking during the off-season when all the beach house areas are practically deserted. So I had no issues parking near each geocache site. Better yet, no one was around to interfere with the search.

The sun set but there was still plenty of time before dinner, so I went back north to Dewey Beach and Rehoboth Beach to find some geocaches at night. "Shelter Me" is an interesting navigation challenge. For some reason, the automotive GPS told me to go there by driving on the boardwalk! I had to adjust the destination a bit to get directions to the nearest dead-end street instead. This area too seems rather quiet during the off-season, especially at night, but I didn't linger because it was already getting rather cold.

Dinner was at Hardee's in Middletown. I had BBQ and Ranch chicken tender wraps. I was the last customer of the night but I did finish shortly before closing time.

The caches... )
mortonfox: (otter)
My router, a Linksys WRT54GC, is getting a little outdated and I was interested in getting a newer model that can run the DD-WRT firmware. It's something I'd wanted to do for a while and reading this Coding Horror blog entry reminded me about it. CompUSA has a special on the E2000 this week, so while I was out today to get a few things, I made a stop there to check it out. As always, I used one of the internet terminals in CompUSA to read Amazon reviews. As I've mentioned before, CompUSA's providing access to Amazon is a double-edged sword, not because it's cheaper at Amazon but because customer reviews often reveal product flaws. It appears that this router has potential overheating problems. It's a low-profile device with insufficient air circulation. My WRT54GC, on the other hand, is positioned vertically, like a book standing on its edge, so that was never a problem. So the search continues.

The last few days were rainy, so I stayed home except for supply runs and breakfast coupon usage. I took the opportunity to work on a fursuit that I recently acquired inexpensively. No Name the Otter was built for someone taller (but not that much wider) than I so the arms and legs are a little long. One big plus: the head is roomy enough for me to wear glasses inside, which is useful. On Sunday, I made some measurements and hemmed the arms and legs to more appropriate lengths. It was pretty simple: fold, pin, and sew. It took pretty much all night because I was handstitching but the end result doesn't look as messy as I thought it would.

That wasn't not the only problem though. I noticed that the fursuit feet are indoor-only (felt and fur soles) and probably won't survive much wear. So on Monday, I made fursuit sandals. I got the anti-fatigue flooring from Lowe's and the nylon straps and buckles from Jo-Ann Fabrics, and got to work that evening. This too took all night until 4:30am because I was unpracticed. Knowing what I know now, there are definitely some things I would do differently or in a different order. Anyway, he should be ready. I'll do a few more wear tests at home to check for problems and see if there's a chance to debut him soon.

And finally, all the rain from the last few days is helping the grass seed patches. The first patch, which germinated mid-September, now looks much thicker. The second patch, which was slow in germinating, did spring up at last. So they join the other half-dozen or so species of grass in the backyard land grab. Personally, I'm rooting for the grass species that looks like tufts of hair, the biggest clump of which is growing out from under the heating oil tank. Not sure exactly what type it is, so I'll call it hair fescue.
mortonfox: (chicken fries)
Easton Tower

I got an estimate from Ramsey Auto Body. The bumper will cost $630 to replace and it'll take two days. My appointment with them is for March 9. Encompass Insurance will also be paying for a rental car for that duration so I'll call the agent to find out how to arrange it.

I was planning to go to IHOP in Ramsey for Free Pancake Day at lunchtime but the opportunity never arose so instead, I went there at night, just an hour before closing time. The restaurant was packed! People really like free food. I got my name on the waiting list and waited for some time. Then they opened up a bunch of new tables and sat everyone on the waiting list at once. I had the free short stack, of course. Here are pictures before and after adding all the syrups. I also got a salad to accompany the pancakes.

The final event of the evening was my car reached 100,000 miles on the odometer. Actually, it was at 99,999 miles when I got home but a bit of driving up and down my street was enough to push the odometer over.
mortonfox: (chicken fries)
Tracks in the snow

It was 25°F and snowing lightly this afternoon but I went to IHOP in Ramsey for IHOP Free Pancakes Day. Of course, I got the pancakes, but I also added a salad to round out the meal. It was a fine time. Only snag was I couldn't connect to wi-fi internet from there but that's not important.

I'm glad I did the pancake run at lunchtime because later in the day, the snow came down heavier and thicker. The roads were treacherous. I just picked up a few items at the supermarket and went home.

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Morton Fox

May 2020

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