Morton Fox's journal

Sunny and 90°F. It's another in a series of hot days. Nevertheless, since it wasn't raining, I headed out in the evening to Long Pond Ironworks in West Milford for two geocaches. The first of the two was Sparrow Nest 1. There was a small pullout on the side of the road near the cache but it didn't look like a good place to park. Then I saw the state park police shooing away people who were parked there. Nuts to that! So I drove on and parked at a proper parking area half a mile up the road. Then I took a walk back along the road until I got close enough to cut through the woods to the cache site. This is a historic early industrial site. I saw ruins and waterwheels.

From Sparrow Nest 1, it was only about 0.1 mile to the Long Pond Ironworks geocache but that's as the crow flies. The latter was actually on the other side of the river, so I had to hike downstream a bit to get to a footbridge and then hike back upstream for a quarter of a mile to the cache site. After all that, I hiked back out to the road and took a walk along the road for half a mile to the parking area. Then I went to Paramus Park Mall to use some Sunday newspaper coupons. I had a super cheeseburger from Nathan's and two donuts from Dunkin Donuts. Not terribly healthy so I had some fruit (fresh cantaloupe) once I got home.

Columbia Sportswear sent me the replacement boots, two pairs of the same kind, and they were delivered on Monday. These are to replace a pair of boots I sent in for warranty repair back in January and another pair I sent in February with the same problem. I'm glad. I'll try these soon and I hope they last longer. I also received free samples of breakfast cereal and toothpaste in the mail. I requested the samples through links posted at Wise Bread but I didn't think I would get these because free stuff offered through the web typically runs out within a very short time. So this too is a surprise.

I'm not sure I understand the appeal of take-and-bake pizza places. I thought the whole idea of going to a pizza place was for them to make the pizza. With a take-and-bake place, all you're getting is a raw pizza that you still have to heat up in your own oven after you bring it home. Worse yet, this Wise Bread blogger had to wait 80 minutes at the store for his take-and-bake pizza! After reading that blog post though, I remembered that the local A&P supermarket has its own version of take-and-bake pizza. So this evening, I went and got one. It was $3, a store special. Of course, the downside of getting takeout from the supermarket is I got distracted by their other weekly specials and just had to stock up on soup and yogurt too. But it still didn't take 80 minutes! Anyway, this is what it looks like after baking. There's enough for a meal and a half.

Did more of my tax return. I think I only have two 1099 forms remaining. Of the two, one will be from Ameritrade, who is delaying my Form 1099 because their records "indicate [my] account holds a position(s) with a high likelihood of a dividend reclassification." Heh, okay. Even then, I think they'll end up sending one or more 1099 corrections anyway. Last year, the last 1099 correction I got from them was in mid-March. As a long-time holder of income and royalty trusts, I've come to expect things like that. However, it won't do me any good to file my taxes early anyway. After the most recent batch of forms, my tax refund meter stood at -$5,327. So I might as well use the grace period to earn a bit of interest on the tax set-aside.

Installed Motorola Phone Tools on my notebook computer. I wish I'd taken notes when I installed it on the desktop computer last year because this is a tricky process. The MPT CD didn't come with drivers recent enough to recognize my phone so I needed to install the latest handset drivers. Even then, MPT didn't recognize my phone. After a bit of experimenting, I figured out how to add my phone manually as a "RAZR V3c". It's actually a "V3m" but the driver definition for that model is still not there and the "V3c" seems to be close enough as far as command strings go.

43°F and sunny. It was such a nice day and perfect for heading out to Garrett Mountain Reservation in Paterson for two geocaches: ON THE ROCKS and GMP 2. I was familiar with the area of "On The Rocks" because there used to be another cache there. So I was a little worried that the cache would be tough to find. That location has less-than-stellar GPS reception and is full of rocks with lots of crevices to search. Fortunately, my worries were unfounded. Once I was there, I found the cache by luck rather quickly. I was first to find too, which was another surprise because I know a fellow geocacher who lives within half a mile of that spot.

Then I went to "GMP 2". The parking area for this one was a little further along the park road. This too was relatively easy, although I started looking in the wrong place so it took a bit longer. After that, I had two whoppers.

The Wise Bread Forums have begun sharing ad revenue with users. That's nice of them to do. I've been a reader of Wise Bread's personal finance blog for a while now, although I'm relatively new to their forums. I added my Google Adsense code to the forum this evening and I noticed that my Adsense has shown up there a couple of times already. The forum does not have much traffic so I don't expect to earn much there but it's an excuse to babble even more about personal finance, investing, and obsessive coupon usage. :)

And finally, I've finished scanning postcards that I received through Postcrossing. They're in this Flickr set. Most of the postcards are of scenery but there are some cute and funny ones too.