Morton Fox's journal

Rainy day. However, I noticed that in my absence, 6 new geocaches had been listed nearby. So I went out after breakfast to do those. 2 were in Chestnut Ridge, 1 was in Suffern, and 3 were in Paramus. Since I was near Paramus Park Mall after the last 3 caches, I went in for lunch and had a Super Cheeseburger from Nathan's. The mall crowd was a lot lighter than I expected for a Saturday but the rain tends to keep people home.

After lunch, I went home and started writing online logs for those geocaches. Then I noticed that there was another new one near home. So I headed out again for "Ashisgol" at Campgaw Mountain. Unlike the other 6, which were basically park and grabs, this one is a 1-mile round trip hike in the woods. Not much of an elevation change on the silver trail though, so it was fairly easy.

I spent the rest of the day packing, both for tomorrow's mascot gig and for the next batch of stuff I'm bringing to the house when I go there next week to deal with broadband and trash haulers.

( The caches... )

Yesterday evening, I visited Parking Erratically in Suffern. It is an erratic, apparently a local landmark, in the parking lot of the Indian Rock Shopping Center. The cache owner has archived the geocache for an undisclosed reason. However, I didn't know that until I got there and started reading the online logs on my cell phone. Once I found out, I didn't bother checking the bushes for the cache but I took some pictures of the boulder anyway.

After that, I got a spicy Italian footlong at Subway in Ramsey. I got a Subway Scrabble game piece from the sub wrapper. I think it'll be similar to McDonald's Monopoly in that certain letters that you need to complete the words will be very rare. The Subway Scrabble website was very slow yesterday evening, so they might not have anticipated the rush to enter game piece codes at the start of the game.

I've uploaded my FurFright 2007 photos to Flickr. Funny thing is I actually have more photos of scenery and food from that weekend than con photos. My priorities are screwed up. :) Anyway, enjoy.

What's wrong with Rockland County? Geocache GC14J5Z has been waiting for a county park permit for over 3 months now. And I still haven't heard from Haverstraw PD after leaving them 3 messages a few weeks ago. Is it customary with officials in that county to just sit on requests and not respond to anything? While contemplating those issues, I went for the Seek & You Shall Find geocache this afternoon. It is behind the Suffern Free Library. It is actually a rather clever cache hide. However, when I pulled into the parking space, I noticed that someone from the library was checking on the geocache. Ha! Gotcha! So that was a dead giveaway. However, I've seen this kind of cache hiding technique before so I'd have found it quickly anyway, giveaway or no giveaway.

After the geocache, I needed to grab some lunch. Since I was passing by the Ramsey Pathmark on my way back, I decided to take a look at their salad bar. I'd never done that before because I usually go to Pathmark at night when they've put away their salad bar. Turns out, Pathmark's salad bar is cheaper than A&P's salad bar. No surprise there because Pathmark beats A&P on pricing in many items. What's amusing is the following: I noticed that the egg salad in Pathmark's deli case is $4.99/lb, but that same egg salad is also available in their salad bar for $3.99/lb. So why would anyone get the egg salad at the Pathmark deli? (The opposite is true at A&P where the egg salad in A&P's salad bar is more expensive than the same egg salad in A&P's deli. There, I usually get it at the deli.) Anyway, I just thought it was an odd pricing discrepancy. Now, if only I could buy egg salad at the salad bar and sell it to the deli. It'd be a neat arbitrage trade. :)