Morton Fox's journal

In this lazy summer, if it were not for geocaching, I wouldn't have gone out anywhere this evening. Shopping would be left undone. Local economies would languish. (Well, not really.) A new geocache provided the perfect excuse. I went to Mills Reservation in Montclair for Old Entrance to Mills. The old entrance is a walk-in entrance flanked by stone walls and stone pillars. It's no longer in use because there is now a new entrance 400 feet down the road with a parking area. The park must cater to the motoring public, after all. Anyway, this was an easy cache with a minimal amount of climbing. (This cache hider is notorious for placing geocaches that require either rock or tree climbing.) I got FTF and signed the first page in the log.

On my way back, I stopped at Micro Center in Paterson. I've been looking for two accessories for the netbook. It doesn't have a built-in CD drive so it would be nice to have an external USB DVD/CD drive. Also, the netbook has bluetooth capability so it would be good to have a bluetooth mouse to free up one of the USB ports. Well, I found both items on sale today. There was a special on the external drive and I came across a bluetooth mouse while rummaging through a pile of mice on the clearance rack. Spent a little more than I'd planned but those were good finds.

I was running a little late after that, so I settled for a spicy Italian footlong dinner from Subway in Paramus Park Mall. The food court was shutting down for the night at the time so I took what I could get.

Had the day off for President's Day. Sunny. 34-42°F during the day. Down below 25°F in the evening. By now, I'm used to 40-degree temperatures during the day so it was a nice day to be outside. I'd planned on going to Lehigh Valley but I got distracted by Western NJ along the way and by sunset, I had covered a good portion of Hunterdon County and bagged a bunch of geocaches. So I'll save Lehigh Valley for another weekend. Most of those geocaches were easy but two of them were up on hills. I was surprised that I didn't have a problem with the hilly terrain considering that yesterday, the right side of my hip started getting sore after the 15th cache. I think it just needed a little rest.

Dinner was at Burger King in Hackettstown. I saw that on the way home and decided to use a coupon from the coupon booklet. Since I was using I-80 to get home, I stopped at Micro Center in Paterson along the way to shop for a memory upgrade for my notebook computer. I figured it was a good time to buy because I'd noticed an uptick in DRAM prices. That store is dangerous to the wallet because of the sheer variety of computer upgrades and accessories they stock, but I just got the two SO-DIMMs and left. Installed those when I got home and yes, there's now a ton of free memory.

Geocachers shouldn't be reading this journal if they don't want spoilers so I'll just describe this one straight. The cache container for "Welcome to Ringwood!" is an electrical box attached to a lamp post. There are no wires inside, of course. It's only there to hold the log sheet. However, what made me uncomfortable with this hide is the cache finder has to use a screwdriver to unscrew two screws in order to remove the cover to get the log sheet out. If we start doing this, how long before someone opens a live electrical box and gets a shock? Worse yet, unless you look like a municipal maintenance worker, you'd look rather suspicious dismantling something that appears to be part of the lamp post. I don't know if Groundspeak already has policy about this kind of cache hide but I emailed the cache approver to let him/her know my concerns.

( The caches... )