Geocaching March 2024

After finding a cache on every calendar day of the whole year (thanks to this year being Leap Year), I snagged the Odenton challenge trail Cache #7 calendar challenge which requires a cacher to make a find on 365 days of the year. February 29 is not required but I thought I'd wait anyway. I also completed two Adventure Labs in Annapolis that got their own blog post here.

The next day was rainy, so I found a quick cache-and-dash at a rest stop on I-95. As I pulled up to ground zero, a truck was blocking the way! I waited a bit, didn't see the driver in the cab, and decided to make the try for Not a Dog. The hardest part of the find was getting the courage to sneak around the tractor trailer!

I hope this isn't in your way when you try for it

Back on the OCCT I got Cache #20: 10 Challenge Challenge Cache, which requires the signer to find ten challenge caches. This cache cannot count as the tenth, which was fine because this was my thirteenth. After another coffee meetup, I found Columbia MD: Second Five Villages Adventure Lab Cache, having finished the lab a long time ago. Now I just have to finish the first five villages...

I found two caches that were hidden on Leap Day almost a week after Leap Day. A Challenge cache for pretty much everyone was an easy find and super-easy to qualify for--all a cacher needs is one cache found! I swapped out my new Treebeard Travel Bug for the Swiss Scout Troop Travel Bug. It wants to go back to Switzerland, so I planned to drop it closer to the airport. Treebeard is looking for some forests to visit, hoping to find Entwives.

Treebeard in chains!

More challenging was the multicache Multi Leaper LBD Style. LBD refers to Little Black Dog, a cacher who used to live in this area and is fondly remembered. The first stage was not hard to find. The convoluted math was not too hard to do. The final stage was a vertical challenge for everyone. Luckily, I found some stuff to help me get the final container...

Vertical enhancers

Kid Amuck Undies was a cache I failed to find a couple of months ago. The cache owner replaced it (several other people couldn't find it either!) and I made the find before going to give blood at the Red Cross. A tree was stuck trying to go under a bridge nearby.

Big roots

Then I found a couple of mystery caches, Brood X Emergence and RWP: Henry Bumstead, along with the regular cache Bear's Way.

A lake for brooding

Bear trail?

I found another in the Stray Series 1: Cats Cat Name Jenny. Such a cute container and such an easy find!

Cute cat

To keep up the mystery cache finds, I logged OCCT #5: Mystery Month Challenge since I had found a mystery cache for every calendar day in February. The next day was the Monday morning coffee club with a related traditional cache right after the metting--One of these things.... And I made a Monday mystery find--Not So Random Wiki Puzzle--Blackburn Rovers F. C.

I finally finished out the letters of the local alphabet series with W, X, Y, and Z. X was the toughest since it involved a lot of bushwhacking through thorns. The others were all very close to trails and easy to get too. I took 45 minutes to find X and 45 more minutes to find the other three caches. On my way home, I found easy for which the main challenge was finding parking nearby. 

Dicey bridge by X

No bushes to whack!

A better bridge

Fancy house near easy

Close-up of the house

Still filling in mystery calendar days, I found previously solved caches Cootie Catcher and If You Like To Talk To Tomatoes..., both in the same parking lot. Just down the road from the shopping center's parking lot, So Long 2019..., was another easy find though not a mystery cache.

RWP: Spanish Attorney General was an easy find on an early Saturday after I dropped my daughter off for her robotics competition. Since the parking area had some other caches, I also found Be a Good SAMaritan (by a Sam's Club), Righty - Tighty, Lefty - Loosey, and Eggceptional. They all went so quickly I drove over to St. Alban's Labyrinth for a multicache find.

Sam's cache

Me and my labyrinth

Important Maryland Information is another mystery cache that was a quick find on a quiet morning. The mystery is all about Maryland crabs! The next day I found OCCT #33 Signal For President Challenge, requiring the cacher to have finds in enough states to gain a victorious number of Electoral College votes, which I have!

Old National Pike Mile Marker 12 Revisited is a two-stage cache where the first stage is by the titular marker and a historic information sign. With some numbers from the sign, I was able to determine the final location, not too far down the street (but I did have to drive).

Marker 12

With some nice weather, I did the Merriweather Post Pavilion Sculpture Walk Adventure Lab with its bonus cache. See the sculptures here. Since I was by the venue, I found The Chyrsalis, a regular cache by the stage that hosts free concerts.

Merrifield Post Pavillion

One cache that has been on my radar for a while is The Haunted Woods, which used to be the location of an abandoned cabin (if the write-up is to be believed). It's near a church that was actually busy on a Thursday morning. The people looked like they had a service project going on.

Not as creepy without the cabin?

The haunted cache was my 100th find in Anne Arundel County, qualifying me for the MD 100 Maryland Road Challenge. It took me longer to find the hide than it should have. 

All the World Is a Stage is a Shakespeare-based mystery cache that I solved a while ago and finally found. It is not at all near a stage.

No stage, but water nearby

I finally completed Deepdish23's Trivia Haunts Adventure Lab, so I found the bonus cache on a rainy day when I needed a quick find. Later that day, LePreChaun was a second discovery.

Confections was another mystery that I solved but was near my daughter's second robotics competition, so I was able to make the far distant find.

More civilization than Shakespeare's cache?!?

I finished the month out with a bunch of caches on our trip to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. See about those caches here. More on the trip soon!

Book Review: My Hero Academia Vols. 23 and 24 by Kohei Horikoshi

My Hero Academia Volume 23 by Kohei Horikoshi

The big battle between Class A and Class B finally finishes with dramatic (and expected) results. As the kids go back to their school routine, the story shifts to the villains. The band of bad guys has some potential new resources offered by a mysterious doctor. He'll let them have the stuff if they can defeat a powerful monster that he unleashes on their leader. Meanwhile another group, the Meta Liberation Army, is going public in an effort to let those with quirks do whatever they want. 

The story takes an interesting shift, showing some of the villains' plans as the heroes retreat to the background. The MLA has a lot of corporate sponsors who are ready to unleash over 100,000 followers, or so they claim

Mildly recommended--it's fun to come back to this story but readers need a lot of the backstory, this is not a good starting point.

My Hero Academia Volume 24 by Kohei Horikoshi

The next big battle is between the League of Villains and the Meta Liberation Army. The MLA is ostensibly pro-quirk, wanting those with special abilities to be treated equally. They see the League as an obstacle to their agenda, so they start a fight in their headquarters's home town. The story delves into the backgrounds of a lot of the villains with nary a hero in sight. The drama is good with the weird shift into sympathizing with, if not rooting for, the bad guys. The author does a good job showing how the bad guys wound up on the side of evil and develops some more of the bigger story of quirk development and enhancement.

Mildly recommended.

Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010)

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010) co-written and directed by Edgar Wright based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a Toronto 20-something slacker who is dating a high-school student, the 17-year old Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). His friends (i.e. his band mates) and his family are at best unimpressed with his choice, especially since it seems like he's on the rebound from a break-up a year earlier. Then Scott has a dream about a roller-skating, pink-haired girl who turns out to be an actual young woman--Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). She's just moved to Toronto from New York City and is working deliveries from amazon.ca. Scott quickly orders something just to meet her. He's smitten though he does not realize she has seven evil exes who will come fight him. He has to win all the battles in order to truly date her. The exes start showing up, causing fantastic fight sequences, as Scott deals (or doesn't) with the complications in his life.

The movie follows the visual spirit of the comics, with a lot of over-the-top visual flairs and action sequences. Wright is a brilliant director and has great command of the material, evoking a lot of laughter and wonder through his visual storytelling. The actors do a great job of keeping their characters believable in the unbelievable situations. The movie is fun to watch from the opening Universal Studios logo which is digitized and has an 8-bit music version of the Universal theme (the regular theme is used later for the entrance of one of the exes). Scott's character develops through the film, leading to the unsurprising but satisfying happy ending.

Recommended--highly if you are a fan of Edgar Wright or the comics.

Geocaching on March 2024 Trip

We used the spring break school vacation to go visit Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. I did a bunch of geocaching during our travels.

On the way down, we stayed just south of Richmond, Virginia. The area had a ton of easy caches, I found just two of those, Step Right Up, Get Your Numbers Here #18 and #19, in the parking lot of our hotel. I also found Souvenir Collecting Challenge - Newbie, which only requires two souvenirs to qualify. 

Surveillance photo of me getting my numbers there

An easy path, can't you see it?

Later on the drive, we took a break at Miracle Park, Nash County, North Carolina. I found Nuts and Bolt #1 which I was unable to sign because the log was stuck in the container.

Even tweezers probably wouldn't have helped

The next day we were in Hilton Head. My first caches were Coligny Circle, a traffic circle with a lot of vegetation inside, and  A View of the Cove with a view of Shelter Cove.

Hard to see traffic from inside the circle

Could be a jigsaw puzzle?

In Savannah, Georgia, I found a bunch of Adventure Lab locations but not all of any one Adventure Lab. Down by the river, I found X Marks the Spot which is a virtual cache where one can shout and hear an echo. There's plenty of other tourists around to make it embarrassing. I wimped out and just clapped loudly. The echo effect was not that impressive. I took a picture to prove I was there.

Me and the X

Back on Hilton Head Island, we (i.e. the whole family) found A door makes a difference at one of the local fire departments. We also went nearby to find Puzzle In the Park at Jarvis Creek Park. 

Puzzle final location back in there

In the Sea Pines Resort, I found the virtual cache Voo-doo, Indians, and Tabby which took my family to several sites, including a shell ring in the Sea Pines Forest Preserve.

The shell ring is covered in leaves!

The Salty Dog Cafe has a webcam for visitors that is an official webcam cache, so I got my picture there when we had lunch!

Web cam image

Veterans' Park is a sombre memorial to those who served and died in the United States military. This was a cache of opportunity and I didn't have a pen, so I took a selfie with the log.

The memorial

The log and me

My final two caches on Hilton Head Island were Nature in the Interstices - my first lamppost hide and A little help please... , both of which had their challenges. The lamppost hide was not a traditional "lift the skirt" so it required a little more searching. As a multicache, the lamppost led me to another spot for the ultimate find. The second was at another fire station, so I had to search the grounds on my own (i.e. no family along), making the search longer but still successful.

Fire department

Swag from the fire department--post-it notes!

The final find was on the way home in Virginia, somewhere on I-95. GeoTruckers #3 Micro was a fast find though I was spotted by someone charging their Tesla near GZ. No pictures of the finale, sorry!

More on the trip in subsequent blog posts!

Book Review: God or Nothing by Robert Cardinal Sarah

God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith with Nicolas Diat by Robert Cardinal Sarah

Robert Cardinal Sarah, a high official in the Vatican, started his life in an obscure village in Guinea, Africa. His town has a Holy Ghost Fathers mission from the turn of the twentieth century; Sarah is only a third generation Catholic. He was very impressed with the fathers and discerned a vocation to the priesthood, not an easy thing in a country run by communist dictators and awash in poverty. His life took many dramatic turns, eventually leading him to Rome as a seminarian. He was ordained in 1969 and became bishop of Conakry (Guinea's capital) in 1979. He was reluctant to take on the duty, thinking of himself as unworthy and unprepared. Also, his predecessor was jailed by the communist dictator Sekoue Toure. Sarah excelled, reforming the local seminary and eventually being called to Rome to another service for which he was unsure, secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. He trusted in Pope John Paul II and in the Lord that he would be successful. The story of his life is fascinating and well told by the cardinal through the book's interview format.

But his history only covers the first third of the book. The rest provides reflections and insights Cardinal Sarah has gathered over his years of service. He is forthright in his support of the Catholic faith, especially related to family and social issues. The heart of the faith is the love found in the Holy Trinity; we are meant to reflect and express that love in our lives, no matter what our station in life. He combines a wide knowledge of Scriptures and Church teachings with his experiences in Africa. This book is a delight to read and gives an interesting perspective that is both familiar and original.

Highly recommended.

SAMPLE QUOTE:

The ideological spirit is the opposite of the Gospel spirit. That is why priests who choose to follow or to propagate political ideas are necessarily on the wrong path, since they make sacred something that is not supposed to be. Ideology is by nature disconnected from reality, and it is necessarily a source of division, since it cannot win the lasting allegiance of people who are still anchored in reality, in good times and bad. [p. 130]

Cute Kid Pix March 2024

More photos that didn't get their own post...

Spring must be here, the flowers are starting to bloom!

Front yard flowers

Our dance studio, That's Dancing, had a masquerade ball which we enjoyed very much.

Our outfits

By the sign

My daughter made some totally awesome caramel in a sheet pan. I was not able to get a picture before someone sampled the bottom right-hand corner.

So yummy!

I was impressed by the game selection at a local independent coffee/tea shop called Sidamo.

Great game selection!

My son had his Spring concert which was delightful. All I took was a picture of the performance.

Spring concert

My daughter's high school had a fundraiser with a county fair theme. I took a shot of our winnings (and funnel cake!). A mechanical bull was available to ride but we did not try it out.

Winnings!

My daughter is a member of the robotics team at her high school. They had their competitions in March. Grandpa was around for the first weekend, which did not go so well for her team. They had some good concessions at the cafeteria.

Relaxing in the cafeteria

I tried to take her for a consolation treat at Pepperjacks in Annapolis Junction but they were closed. The neighboring place, Notch 8 Brewery, had the leftovers of their Saint Patrick Day party.

What was it that killed the dinosaurs?

The cub scout pack meeting including stacking cups as high as possible.

Webelos working well

Don't knock it over!

We also visited a local playground and hung out.

Good times!

Book Review: Scott Pilgrim Color Ed. Vol. 4 by B. L. O'Malley et al.

Scott Pilgrim Color Edition Volume 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together written and drawn by Bryan Lee O'Malley and colors by Nathan Fairbairn

See my review of Volumes 1 here, 2 here, and 3 here.

Things get more dramatic in the summertime as Ramona asks Scott about his lack of a job (he actually gets one!) and the band finds a way to record an album. Scott faces his next in the line of Ramona's evil exes--a roommate from college. Also, a guy wielding a Japanese sword is after Scott, which at first Scott thinks is an evil ex but is really Knives Chau's dad. The dad wants revenge for her daughter which is kinda sweet but high peril for Scott. Finally, the lease on Scott's apartment is up so he needs to find a new place to live. Can he move in, at least temporarily, with Ramona? Will there relationship advance like they are becoming adults, getting beyond their arrested adolescences? 

This volume has a lot of different things going on, which gives it a lack of focus, almost like it is trying to imitate life too realistically, which is atypical for Scott Pilgrim storytelling. The storytelling still has the cute self-awareness and video-game aesthetic but is a little less endearing. The evil ex-roomate/lover is underdeveloped and not as interesting as previous exes.

Mildly recommended--this is mediocre but not bad enough to stop me from reading the next volume.