Morton Fox's journal

Yesterday evening was sunny and 72°F. I did two geocaches a bit to the north from work. The first one was Just Inside Delaware. It is in the Woodlawn Wildlife Refuge straddling the state line. Based on the GPS map state boundary line, which may not be accurate, the trail was in Pennsylvania for more than half the walk but crossed into Delaware twice. The stream crossing is pretty close to the border.

After that, I went to Clayton Park, just a few miles into Pennsylvania, for Clayton Pipe Refit. It's a 4-stage multicache. I didn't think I'd have time for all 4 stages but I thought I'd give it a shot anyway and I did finish before dusk. The only real puzzle was the first stage because the second and third stages are the same kind of hide and the final is easy. I'm not sure this cache should've been approved though. ( Spoilers )

After that, I went to Quiznos in Claymont and had a "Traditional" sub. I think it's time to stop going to this Quiznos for a while. It used to be okay but has gone significantly downhill. They haven't been stocking up on some supplies, most notably paper towels in the restroom, sauces in the condiments area, and fixings for the sub. One of the employees has an attitude problem. When I asked what fixings were available, she refused to tell me and didn't open up the little covers so I could see. However, I think the real story was they had run out of most of those fixings anyway. The final problem was they kicked me out before closing time because they wanted to close the store early. Their subs are more expensive than Subway, so I expect better from them but I don't see that any more. Therefore, it's not worth going there any more.

Sunny but very windy; 37-50°F. The wind was so strong this morning that I had put the trash can back upright when I took the trash out. On the plus side, it appears that the duct tape I used to fix the loose piece of siding is holding up pretty well even though that's a very unprofessional way of doing that repair. Anyway, I went out to do two more of the Railroad History series of caches in Wilmington. I'd been chipping away at this series after work since the caches are roughly between work and home, but the two I did today weren't doable at night. After that, I did one cache in Newark before zipping over to Aston and Media for the rest of the day's caches.

Aston was pretty much snow-free after the last few days of 60-degree weather. There were still patches of ice but for the most part, it was a nice walk. I did two one-mile round trip hikes. One was for "Rails and Trails 2" along an old railbed. Of course, it was not all sunshine and roses, or whatever analogy is appropriate. There were dangerous sign-eating trees.

The last cache of the day, "Martin's Mill?", turned out to be the most difficult one of the day. That wasn't because the cache was hard to find but because it was frozen into ice. You can see the ice in this picture I took in the park. 99.99% of the park was already snow-free, so what are the odds the cache would be inside one of the few remaining patches of ice? I couldn't find the cache in any of the non-ice spots near that location so by deduction, the cache had to be in the ice and I verified that by poking at the ice. However, there was a rock on top of the cache and both rock and cache were frozen into the ice. I tried to chip at the ice with my hiking pole but that didn't work. Then I had an idea. I went down to the stream and picked up a decent-sized rock. I took the rock and used it to hammer at the ice until the cache came loose. That took a few minutes of work but it was quite effective!

Dinner (well, pre-dinner) was a Chipotle Prime Rib Sub at Quiznos in Claymont, since they've been pretty good at sending out coupons recently.

( The caches... )

Sunny and 85-90°F. I wasn't planning on going anywhere today but more new geocaches showed up in the listings. The only errand I had to do was to take the old newspapers and store circulars to the recycling center. I did that and proceeded to the rail trail for the new batch of geocaches.

"New Castle Rail Trail Cache #15" was a difficult one because coordinates were 400 feet off. The published coordinates led me to a car title loan place. After poking at the bushes there a bit, I thought "Nah! This can't be it." So I went to the rail trail parking area and had an idea. I figured why not walk the rail trail to the fence at the end since that's where it sounded like the cache was going to be. Also, I guessed that the latitude was correct. So I watched the GPS and proceeded along the paved area until the latitude matched. Then I saw a dirt path leading through the bushes. Followed it and found the cache! As is often the case for troublesome caches, I got the FTF. I let the GPS sit a while and saved the new coordinates. Later, I ran into BenamBenam3 and JohnnyWalker19 on another section of the rail trail and shared the coordinates with them. So we were the only ones to find #15 today.

There was another new geocache in Newark so I went and found "Eeek! A Mouse Ate My Nano" before dusk fell. Then I went to Quiznos in Newark because years after I stopped going to Quiznos, they were still sending me coupons. I didn't have any beef with the local Quiznos yet so I figured I might as well give them a try. I must say though that for a glorified Subway, they sure do overcharge for their subs. All the small subs are over $5! The coupon code I had turned into a $5.08 discount! I doubt I'd ever go to Quiznos if not for coupons and that is a problem. Anyway, I had a baja chicken sub.

( The caches... )

It was an unseasonably warm afternoon at 64°F. The local Dairy Queen was actually open for business and people were having ice cream outside in January. How bizarre! Not wishing to waste a fine afternoon, I went to White Plains for the Shortcut geocache. It's in a part of White Plains that's not so busy, by a walkway connecting the residential area to downtown White Plains. I'd been there some time during December but could not retrieve the cache because it was under ice. Today, obviously, there was no such problem.

I noticed that the Tappan Zee Bridge toll has gone up from $4 to $4.50. I don't know what the toll is yet if you use E-ZPass. No doubt some of the money will go towards adding yet more "Life is worth living" signs to the bridge. I noticed that there are now suicide hotline signs on the Nyack part of the highway even before entering the bridge! I'm sure that will get the jumpers to reconsider.

Second round of shopping A&P's triple-coupon week this evening. This time, I got $33.53 of groceries for $5.58! Some of the items were $0 after coupons. In particular, I got a free case of bottled water, which I'll give away if I don't use it all myself. The funny thing is most of the $5.58 was from 4 cans of soup, so I could've brought the total down to under $2 if I didn't get the soup. However, that would really be screwing with the supermarket and besides, I needed the split pea soup because it goes well with roti prata.

( Here I go again making a big deal out of things... )

Dental appointment yesterday evening. No bleeding, no cavities, no problems. Had to get some X-rays this time. I noticed that the X-rays were digital images that came up almost right away on the monitor, so I asked the dentist if he could email those to me. After all, those images have to be somewhere on his hard disk and he does somehow send out those images sometimes when he refers patients to specialists. We shall see.

This afternoon, I went to the Nyack - Old School geocache in... where else? Nyack. It was in Joseph F. Raso Park next to the hospital. Parking was on the street. This is one of the few times when I parallel-parked perfectly. I did it in one try and both front and back wheels were straight and a mere inch from the curb. I cannot count all those times I parallel-parked in Ramsey because that town actually added spacers between every pair of parking spaces to help people like me park.

I got out of the car and was heading towards the cache site when some guy asked if I had jumper cables. He happened to be parked right next to the cache site too. Well, it was his lucky day. I went back to my car, took out the portable jump-start battery system, and carried it to his car. The funny thing is ever since I got that jump-start system, I've only used it on other people's cars. But I guess it's nice to have one of those devices to help others too. So we hooked up his car to the battery. The first few attempts at starting the car were not successful. Then I figured the connection may be bad so I adjusted the clip slightly. Then his car started up nicely. He was relieved and grateful because as he told me, he had been stuck there for quite a while.

Of course, then I went and found the geocache. Really easy. After that, I went to Quiznos in Nyack (along Route 59) for a honey bourbon chicken sub. What's nice about this Quiznos is it doesn't yet have one of those stickers on the soda dispenser saying that you have to pay for drink refills. On the other hand, I noticed that only those Quiznos I frequented started having the annoying stickers, which ought to tell me something. Okay, from now on, I'll stop at the 3rd refill. :)

Yesterday afternoon, I visited the "Home" On The Range Jr. geocache. It's near the Home Depot in Riverdale. There was rain on my way there but the rain stopped long enough for me to take a walk from the Home Depot parking area to the geocache.

I would like to attend the Turn Back Time geocaching event in Philadelphia because it will be held from 1:30am to 2:30am the night we turn our clocks back an hour. So although it looks like an hour-long event, it is actually two hours long! Cool, right? The snag is I'd have to get a motel room in Northeast Philly because after 2:30am, I'll be in no condition to drive home. The cheapest motel in the area is $67.95 (before taxes) for that night and that motel is rated 1 star (which is terrible) at Expedia. Most other motels are $73 and up. (again, before taxes) So the cost makes it seem not worth doing. Too bad I can't get a deal the way I could in the Atlantic City area, where last year, I got a room for under $40 during the off-season.

Had a coupon, so I went to Quiznos in Ramsey this evening. I had a steakhouse beef dip, which was entertaining because of the dipping part. However, it ended up with all the meat falling into the dip. Hilarity ensued. Anyway, this is the first time I got to talk to the new Quiznos owner. He's not at the restaurant nearly as much as the previous owner, who was there practically every day. Funny thing is he already knew about my food photography.

The new GPS can optionally use a microSD card to store maps and tracks. I didn't have a spare microSD card, so I checked prices online at a number of websites and discovered that a 2GB microSD card was on sale at Micro Center. I just happened to have a Micro Center gift card that I got from a cache a while ago. So this evening, I went to their store in Paterson. This is a dangerous store to go to if you don't like spending money. After getting the memory card, I took a look around and saw that the memory upgrade for my desktop computer was on sale too! So I got that as well. Then I also picked up an inexpensive cigarette lighter power adapter for the GPS since it wouldn't be that much cheaper to order that from Amazon.

Dinner break at Quiznos in Paramus since I had coupons. I got a special chicken carbonara sub with egg in it. I had no idea you could request additions to a sandwich. I like egg on everything. :)

Got home and popped the memory into the computer. It's actually a bit more involved than that because I had to unplug everything and bring the computer case out to the living room where I had more space to work on it. Amazingly, that extra memory, even though it was only a bump up from 768MB to 1GB, helped a lot. I guess it was just a little short of memory before, especially when running Photoshop Elements. The rest of the evening was spent installing Garmin USB drivers, upgrading MapSource and EasyGPS, loading map data onto the GPS / microSD card, and making sure everything still works after that. I may need newer map data, however. Routing isn't very good with this data. For example, it told me to get onto the Garden State Parkway just to go to the Chinese restaurant down the street from home. Of course, I didn't expect the initial part of the route to make sense as I was doing a Go To from my bedroom (I'm amazed that it can get satellite lock in here), but still!