Geocaching and thoughts on retirement.

I slept in a bit this mourning.  One of the advantages of being retired is that I can finally get a full 8 hours sleep a night.  It is a great delight to wake up truely rested and ready for whatever adventures I'd like to have today.

I love to cook and eat.  So the day started with making some cream cheeze with salmon and capers.  Yum!  I'd smoked some salmon a week or so ago and saved the left overs to blend with cream cheese and capers.  It's marvelous on bagels with a nice cup of coffee (thanks to Karma Coffee of Sudbury).  It's interesting that while I'd been buying lox cheese from Sudbury Farms it was really rather trivial to make my own.  In any case we now have enough to last a few weeks or so and I'm looking forward to a steady diet of great bagels and cream cheese.

Last night BB and I watched a Netflixs video Julie and Julia.  It was a nice movie and reminded me that I've never actually read the Julia Child book.  I think I'll buy a copy with a view to actually reading it as the movie implied that the book deals in part with technique and not just recipes.  So I've gone online and ordered a copy from Amazon (beats driving over to Framingham to pick it up).

Most of the mourning was spent either fooling with the TV or geocaching setup.

On the TV front, I'd scanned channels on the Samsung cable and for reasons I'm not clear on many of the digital HD channels vanished!  I tried a number of things none of which were the least effective and finally rescanned as I'd done last night and all is restored.  Heaven knows why.

Geocaching activities were centered around Sudbury Garrison cache.  It's a virtual cache that references a historical marker to solve a puzzel to get the actual cache location.  Now on the whole I'm not especially keen on this cache type but I'd planned to go out caching today as the weather is fairly nice and decided to have a go at this one.  I did a bit of research and found what appear to be a good clue to the historical marker referenced in the puzzle at the Wayland Story of Haynes Garrison.  It seems that the marker is near Buddy Dog on Rt 20.  After the cleaners come by this afternoon, I'll see if it's there and perhaps find the cache.

It's probably appropriate to note that my interest in geocaching is driven in part by being concerned about a certain tendency to sit about reading and generally just passing the days and not getting out and about nearly enough.  That's one of the big changes that retirement brings - one no longer has work to structure life.  If you want something to happen you need to actually take the initiative to make it so.  Now I suppose at some level that's always the case even when not retired but retirement brings so much more time that it changes things.


About 1:30 after the cleaners left I dropped a book off at the library and went to find the Sudbury Garrison clue.  Took this photo.  The cache says:

From the memorial stone you will find two important numbers:
YY - is the last two digits in the year the monument was erected. For example: 1945 would mean YY=45
And:
L – is the number of letters in the word following “settlers” on the monument. For example: “the settlers ran to the garrison” would mean L=3.
Now use the following equations to generate 5 digit numbers (round and drop fractions):
NORTH = 26130.37 – 216.7895 * YY
WEST = 25901.5 – 360.25 * L
This should yield two 5 digit numbers (throw away any decimals).
The coordinates of the final cache are at:
N42 NORTH
W071 WEST filling in the 5 digit numbers you calculated above for the decimal minutes.

Well the monument was erected in 1803 so YY is 03 and there are 6 letters in sought.  Unfortunately, doing the math gives N42 25.480 W071 23.740.  This is in Concord not Sudbury and the cache description and log entries are a bit ambivalent.  I'll take a drive by at some point.

Meanwhile, while I was out I did find two caches:  Chiswick and Curtice Cache.  Chiswick was fairly quick and easy.  I'd not known this small park, such as it is, was in Sudbury but I found the stone circle and cache fairly quickly.  Here are some photos of Chiswick:

There was a fair bit of large trash in the area but since I was in a small car I wasn't able to take anything out.

I'd been by Curtice Cache once before and DNF.  I went back deciding to check other locations based on the fact that someone noted that the coordinates were wrong.  I found it OK but NOT at the specified coordinates.  Mine were N42 23.0489 W071 26.0434.  The listing is likely wrong.  I tried to send an email to the person that placed it but they are not registered so no luck there.  Here are some pictures:



These two finds bring my total to 6.  Not a lot but a fair start.

I also took a bit of time today to experiment with GPS accuracy comparing the Nuvi 255 with the Delorme PN-40.  Interestingly there isn't all that much difference.  The Nuvi is a little less accurate at about 0.01 to 0.001 decimal minutes different from the PN-40!  That said, the PN 40 has a number of other rather nice features and I'm generally happy with it.

After I got back from playing geocache, I worked a bit on my common sense blog.  I'm inclined to the view that with age comes a certain wisdom rooted in experience.  My common sense blog is my attempt to share this perspective.

Dinner was sauted shrimp and salad.  I used some Tiber Sauce and it was very good.