Morton Fox's journal

It was very Spring-like this evening. Temperature was over 70°F and so after work, I went to the familiar utility right of way area in Bear to find Power Lines Trail Spur Road by #8. This is actually the second time I tried going for this geocache. I intended to do this one yesterday but traffic on I-95 was so bad that I figured I would get there only after dusk, if at all. This evening, the traffic delay was only half as long and so I got there in plenty of time. It looked like I wasn't the only one out in the warmer weather either. There were other walkers on the trail. There were also a bunch of kids playing paintball in the woods. Fortunately, they were off the trail enough to not shoot at the walkers.

After that, I did some banking (bank is open until 8pm on Friday) and went to Ruby Tuesday for dinner. This time, I only had salad bar. No mini burgers or anything else to get in the way.

Sunny, 60-65°F. I found my tube of silver rounds in the closet. Given the price of silver these days, I figured I ought to keep that in the safe deposit box instead. So a quick stop at the bank was the first thing on the agenda this morning.

I went to Glassboro WMA today. This is the best time of the year to visit that forest. It's fall so the brush has subsided enough to make it not too painful to bushwhack to all those geocaches. More importantly, the gates are open during the fall (for hunting access) so I could drive in on the dirt road and park a lot closer to each geocache. My main goal was to find "413: Requested Entity Too Large" and I did that as the first cache of the day. True to its name, it's a big geocache. It's a 20-gallon tub, big enough to hold a couple of bowling balls and a bucket. Of course, such a large cache could not be hidden, but the dense thicket surrounding the cache would make accidental discovery unlikely. After that, I figured I might as well drive around the WMA and find the other caches there. There was another HTTP error cache, "505: Version Not Supported". The last cache was a 2-mile hike and I figured that was enough exercise for the day.

It was a very early dinner at Long John Silver's/Taco Bell in Mantua since I actually left the WMA a bit before dusk. I had Fish & More with Taco Bell sauces. I brought my netbook into the restaurant. I've probably been to this LJS enough times to be a regular but people were still asking me if there was wireless internet there. I guess the Comcast wifi hotspot in the Mantua shopping area is not common knowledge.

( The caches... )

There was another snowstorm today. It snowed all day so I'm not going to shovel out the driveway until tomorrow morning. Garbage collection has been postponed too but I don't suppose that's a problem as long as it remains frozen out there.

On the whole, it didn't seem like a day when I accomplished very much. Google Buzz landed in my Gmail account this morning so I checked it out. It's pretty much a clone of FriendFeed, except that it has a messier interface and brings in your Gmail contacts list by default. (What happened to opt-in?) The feed aggregation and comment/like features in Buzz aren't anything new to me as I've used those on FriendFeed for almost 2 years now. The sad part is Buzz, warts and all, will likely kill FriendFeed simply because it's from Google, while the latter is comparatively unknown. And so it goes.

Two ideas that didn't work after all: First, although the daily weigh-ins script worked perfectly, I found that after I imported my weight data from DailyDiary to Google Spreadsheet, the spreadsheet was so unbearably slow that it was unusable. I don't think Google Spreadsheet was really built to handle a spreadsheet with 1500 rows. So I'm sticking with DailyDiary for now.

Second, the TD Bank debit card promotion was a no-go when I tried it at Pathmark. It seems the self-checkout machine recognizes the bank card as a debit card and makes it a PIN-based transaction even if I select "credit" when paying for the groceries. I understand why Pathmark would do this -- merchant fees are higher on signature-based transactions than on PIN-based transactions -- but that disqualifies my purchase because the TD Bank cashback promotion applies only to signature-based transactions. Oh well.

The way errands work around here now is I think of something I need to do. Then I add something else that's along the way, and something else, and something else, until it's practically a full day. The initial errand was a recycling run, which I decided to do at the Route 1 & 273 Park and Ride because it's Tuesday and I could add a late Taco Tuesday lunch at Don Pablos near the Christiana Mall. Then I had a MySurvey check to deposit. Then I also had a 10%-off Staples coupon to use. And then there was also a geocache I could visit between the bank and shopping. So you can see how my itinerary formed.

The geocache in question was Cursed of the FTF #4 (DE Edition). It's at a boat ramp on the Christina River. The boat ramp was covered in snow and ice. The parking area wasn't much better but I didn't have too much of a problem driving on the snow. I've been to this location before but couldn't do the cache because the police was right there. Well, guess what? The county police was parked there this afternoon too. May even be the same fellow. We went ahead and grabbed the cache anyway, figuring that it'd be easier to explain what we were doing than to come again yet another time. Police officer didn't say anything. He wasn't even watching. So that was fine. It has occurred to me that I don't really know what police in this area think of this activity. I've read lots of geocaching logs for caches in this area and I can only recall one bad confrontation and that happened because the ice cream store had a robbery shortly before someone went to look for the cache in the woods behind it.

After the geocache and some shopping (had to deal with some shopping traffic, especially in the last half mile to the mall), it was time for Taco Tuesday. I had 14 tacos this time, 2 more than my previous record. I could finish those tacos comfortably but that 14th taco did prevent me from finishing the rice and refried beans. Next time, I'll stop at 13.

One major disadvantage of not having internet at my new place is there is so much to catch up on when I get back to NJ.

Wednesday: Took another load of stuff down to the house. This time, I packed furniture, some books, a radio, a toaster, and more necessities. Did some geocaching along the way. I got as far as "WCW and the Mysterious Columbus Park" before realizing that I'd forgotten something rather critical so I turned back. Since I was turning back anyway, I decided to do the two new geocaches at Campgaw Mountain, Finding P' Bear 1 and 2, before getting out on the highway again. Yes, having furniture makes a lot of difference. Having to eat standing up was the worst part of my previous trip.

Thursday: Checked the DSL and it didn't work. Verizon guys in trucks (2 guys and 2 trucks! Geez.) came over to look at the hookup and concluded that I needed a new phone jack. A bit mad at them because they couldn't install that right there and then even though they spent the next hour outside idly chit-chatting. No, I had to place a new order for a different day. That is the procedure. Hrm. On the plus side, I was able to get a safe deposit box at TD Bank now that their system integration problems have cleared up. Then, since I couldn't do much more, I went geocaching. Found a bunch of Delaware Geotrail geocaches. It's a nice series of caches placed by the DE Tourism Office. All of those are pretty simple ammo box hides. Some are at museums I didn't know about and may be worth revisiting.

Friday: Time to go back to NJ again. Found some geocaches to the north of Wilmington. Then I actually went back to the house for lunch since I was still less than 3 miles away. Then I went to Northeast Philly and found many more geocaches before finally heading back into NJ.

( The caches... )

Had the loaner car from yesterday morning until yesterday afternoon. What good is a loaner car if you can't use it for geocaching, even if the geocache is a park and grab? So I went out for B.A.H.'s Potash Lake Muggle Cache. It was at Potash Lake in Oakland. The geocache was actually closer to the parking area than the lake, but I did go to the lake shore afterwards to take a few pictures of the area.

Consumerist weighed in on TD Bank's Commerce Bank acquisition. In their typically irreverent style, they wrote about the coin-counting machines, "People love that sh*t." :) Opinions on TD Bank from Consumerist commenters vary. According to them, TD Bank service is good in most places, except in Massachusetts where it is not as good. One commenter mentioned Commerce Bank's low $100 minimum for checking accounts. However, in New Jersey, that's a moot point. Since 1991, state law has already required banks to provide a low-minimum low-cost checking account.

One lesson to take from this is to not be afraid of change. I knew from the outset that this arrangement would not last forever. Before I switched to Commerce Bank, I had a checking account at United Jersey Bank. Through a series of mergers, that bank turned into Summit Bank, and then Fleet Bank, and then Bank of America. (I got out some time between Summit and Fleet because that's when Commerce Bank came to town.) If TD BankNorth turns out to be sub-par in this area, then I'd say that'll be a kick in the butt to go take a look at the local credit union.