tiny nano, with a dime

I found my first nano cache today, and I’m very proud of it. Not only was it a nano cache, it was a very small nano. Like about halfway down to the knuckle on my little finger. And I have very small hands. That was exciting, because most folks cut their geocaching teeth looking for things the size of a breadbox. Or a shoebox. But I always have to be different.

What was even more exciting is that the cache was literally right outside my door. Obviously, this is an area I know well. I wouldn’t have found it without the GPS, though. There are a million places to hide a nano that small around here.

I am especially delighted, because there’s one cache I’ve gone after three times now, and haven’t found. But it’s a multi-stage with some figuring to do to get the correct coordinates. I think I have them now, but haven’t found it yet. The wiki for Geobeagle, the software I use, says n00bs ought to look for ammo cans or larger caches, but I think I’m going to make micros and nanos a specialty.

I managed to be one of the first in the Pacific time zone to download Firefox 3.5. I got in so fast that even though the tweet said it was live, it wasn’t quite. It went live shortly after I and probably a thousand others tweeted that it wasn’t working.

It is faster and cleaner looking than previous editions.  Now if they’d only fix some of the add-ons I lost, like Netvibes, Google buttons, and a couple of others. Oh, well, as long as Twitkit works, I guess I can’t complain too much.

And now for something completely different, I offer you a slideshow of the Seattle Pride Parade, which was also literally outside my door.

Nurse Myra noted on my last post that I’m not posting much. I am trying hard to get my house clean, and I’m exhausted a lot of days.  Too tired to read blogs, much less write them.

It takes me three times as long to do anything as it does ordinary people. And I wish it wasn’t that way. I’m taking today off, though. Just a tarot class, and maybe read a murder mystery. Or some geocaching.

Stupid things happen to me. Like doing the laundry last night, one of the machines decided I needed a “superwash” cycle. I didn’t pay for it, I didn’t want it, but I got it anyway. It’s ten minutes longer than regular, so it threw my whole schedule off. And then I ran out of laundry detergent. I remembered I had one of those little boxes like you get at the laundromat somewhere, but where? I thought it might be on the top shelf of the pantry. Where I indeed found it after climbing on a ladder, something my knees protest mightily. I also fount that something sticky had spilled up there, and half the cans were stuck to the shelf. That’s a job for another day, however. Tonight I just want to get the laundry done.

I gathered up the throw rugs and dog bed, too. Since they were out of the way, I vacuumed the bedroom. The linoleum needs to be scrubbed, but that also is a job for another day. And this is kind of how my days have been going. I do one thing, and find forty-seven others that need doing.

I have cut out a couple of times to go geocaching, without much luck. I went after the same cache three times, and can’t find it. I think it may have been muggled. Last time it was found was during a big car and boat show, with lots of people around to see and snatch. Although we try to be stealthy.

I sometimes wonder what the muggles think of us geocachers. For instance, to calibrate the compass on my phone, I have to make figure-eights in the air for a minute. So I’m sitting on a public dock waving my phone around in the air. And then I stare intently at it while chasing the elusive coordinates. When I find them, I start looking for a place to hide a microcache, as I know from the listing this is. But is it magnetic, or a capsule or a film canister or what? I suspect this one is magnetic because there is a lot of metal around to stick it to. But I can’t find it.  Frustrating. I may go out tomorrow, but I think I’ll look for a different cache.

Friday has slowed down considerably just in the last two weeks. Where she used to be able to walk about half a mile, now halfway around the block is more than she wants to do. I’ve been leaving her home when I go geocaching because I cover some pretty long distances to some of the caches. I’m somewhere between not wanting to lose her, and actually wishing for a dog that can keep up with me. I noticed the other day she’s got a cataract in one eye. I’m in grave danger of becoming a seeing eye person to a dog.

I also got stopped by the humane officers the other day, and found out Friday’s license is expired.  OOPS! I probably would have gotten a ticket if she wasn’t a service dog. But I still have to go out to the animal shelter and renew her license, even though it is free.

The Boyo went camping in Eastern Washington with his nephew this weekend. Here’s hoping they don’t step on any rattlesnakes. Actually, he’s very good in the wilderness. We are going to go camping this summer, too. But we will be in a state or federal park, preferably with an electrical hookup for my CPAP machine.  And I wish I had one of these so I could ride on the beach. Or at least sand tires for Ms Scarlette. Maybe someday.

Seattle is famous (or is that infamous?) for its June Gloom. It may be warm, but it won’t be sunny. This year was an exception, with glorious weather…until this week. We are now socked in with clouds. We actually went 29 days without rain, equaling the record, but got rained on before we could break it. But when the gloom breaks, it will be glorious until late September or early October, with any luck. Oh, wait, I’m not supposed to tell you that, people might want to move here.

So in honor of the June Gloom, the solstice or something, they had a luncheon today to honor Phil. Lots of yummy food, even a cake with his picture on it. And dammit, wouldn’t you know, I forgot my camera. Phil’s sisters were there, and after everyone had eaten, I read my blog post to them, and gave them a copy of it. Along with all your comments. The sisters were touched by what I’d said. He did a lot for all of us.

Fishy fountain

After the luncheon, since Saturday is family fun day in FLYland, Friday and I went to the waterfront to persue a couple of geocaches. I found the virtual one, found the coordinates for the other one, but couldn’t find the cache itself. Dagnabit. And I looked everywhere. It was kind of a fun cache even if I didn’t find the cache itself, because it took me to a fountain on the waterfront that I didn’t even know was there. And I thought I knew every square inch of the waterfront. It was a multiple, one in which they give you the first pair of coordinates, and you have to answer clues to find the second pair of coordinates, and so on. So I figured them, and was sitting right on top of the coordinates, looking everywhere, trying to figure out where it was. It may be gone, it’s in a high muggle area. Still fun. I still have a couple, three down that way to look for, and I may cruise back by to see if I can locate it another time. I also finally figured out how the software that is specific to geocaching works. Schweet!

I believe that’s all, folks.

This is what kept me up all night last night:

Tonight they are striping. Tommorrow the whole month-long ordeal is over.

I have been taking FLYing lessons now for a couple of weeks. No, not in a plane, at FLYlady.net. And things are changing gradually. I still have a lot of clutter, and need to do some heavy-duty cleaning, but all it would take right now to pass inspection is sweep and mop the floors. That’s a big change.
FLY stands for Finally Loving Yourself, and it’s definitely for people like me, with messy houses, too much “body clutter” (fat), and messy financials. There are aspects of the program that address all of those things. But you don’t have to tackle them all at once. The biggest saying in FLYing is “baby steps.”

Clean(er) desk

So what’s changed? Well, my bathroom is presentable. My bed is usually made (not today, I thought I might get around to washing the sheets.) The dishes get done more frequently. My refrigerator is clean. My plants are watered. My desk is clean. Compare the current photo to this. I’m working on getting rid of junk. Two boxes and four big scooter batteries left with The Boyo. There’s less dust in my bedroom, and I don’t wake up wheezing. Mount Washmore no longer resides beside my bed, but in the hamper where it belongs. And when the clothes get to the top, it’s time to wash. No Mount Vesuvius in the laundry hamper. Two loads takes a lot less time and trouble than three or four. There is still a lot of work to do, but “baby steps.”

I spent some time tonight cleaning out my closet. I noticed the other day that the rod was starting to sag. That, and the fact I could barely cram my clean clothes into it, was a clue I had too many clothes. So, I will bless somebody else with them. Now to find a box to put them in until I can get rid of them.

I’m also going to the YMCA to do water walking, which is the only

Roasted vegetables parmesan and a big green salad

walking my knees can stand. I’ve been following a diet of one of FLYlady’s proteges, Leanne Ely of Saving Dinner, and I lost two pounds last week. I’m not overly strict about it, I go by what my body is telling me. If it wants more food, or more carbs, I let it have some. While Azahar may be looking for “small and perfect”, I’m looking for large, filling, and nutrient dense.  For too long I’ve lived on sandwiches and almost no veggies, first because of the money thing, and then it just became habit.

Strawberry Fields Forever!

I even get dessert. Look at these strawberries. These are not your “grown to be shipped hundreds of miles” berries. These are soft, sweet jam berries, grown at Boxx Berry Farm up near Bellingham. Don’t you wish we had smell-o-vision and taste-o-vision on the internet? One of the biggest buyers for the many berry farms up there is Smuckers, so you know they are good. They also sell “u pick” and already picked berries. The Boyo made a foray to Bellingham Saturday, and came back with six half-flats of strawberries. OK, as long as I don’t have to hull them all and make jam.

In other news, The Boyo went to the doctor today, and they are setting him up for some financial assistance, and some tests. I went to the doctor today, and it’s time for my colonoscopy again. Damn. Now to coordinate The Boyo’s tests with mine so we can be each other’s support.

If you look at the sidebar over there—————————————-> you will see a geocaching badge that will tell you how many caches I’ve found and hidden. Click on it, and you can look at my logs and pictures from my caching trips. Sorry, no spoilers, though. I’m also trying to install the Socialvibes widget, but right now it’s not working. Other people are having the same problem with it, according to the WordPress forums, so I did send a message to support.

That’s all the news from here for all of you, and the ships at sea.

(Fark, now I’m having trouble with the Geocaching widget. I worked before I put the Socialvibes one up, but didn’t come back when I took the Socialvibes off. )

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go to one of my favorite parks in Seattle. I love it because it’s huge, out of the way, and not all that many people know some of the secret spots I go to. Discovery Park used to be part of Fort Lawton, and the city is bringing it back to natural gradually. That means culling out a lot of non-native plants like holly and ivy. I don’t see much holly there anymore, and they used to have some big, damned trees.

The part of the park that I like the best is called Third Pond. Yes, there are three ponds in a row, and Third Pond is the largest, and the only one that has much sun. The other two are deep in the forest. The best thing about Third Pond is that there are usually ducks there. Mostly mallards, but during migration season, other types of ducks will fly in.

In the past the ducks have been very friendly, and always looking for a handout. Nowadays, they are more wary. By August they will be coming out on the shore to eat the blackberries, though.

As I was rolling down to Third Pond, and an adventurous roll it was, what with steep banks and things, I spotted someone sitting at my favorite table. Damn! But as I got closer, the shape was familiar. Yes, great minds think alike, and The Boyo was there. Friday and I were happy to see him.

Since I had almost every camera I own with me, I not only have a slideshow for you, I have some video. I made the video mostly to show you how quiet the park is. Third pond is almost a mile from the parking lot, and the nearest high traffic street is another mile away. The only thing that interrupts the peace is the floatplane from Lake Union flying overhead. Or an occasional car driving up to the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. No, I’m not being politically incorrect. The Indians fought to get the park started instead of some high-priced development (Magnolia Ridge, behind the center, is a very desireable area). They built the cultural center, and even the name of the foundation has the word Indian in it. Which reminds me, I must look up when Pow-Wow will be this year. I loves me some fancy-dancers.

Yes, that’s The Boyo talking in the background, and you can hear me, too. You can even hear Friday panting at the end.

Be sure to visit Rambling Woods, and see who is also participating in
Nature Notes.

So since I have a phone with GPS on it, I decided to take up geocaching. This is where you go out and find things other people have hidden with you GPS unit. The caches can be big, in a wooded area, or tiny, I mean really tiny, in an urban area. But it’s fun to hunt.

For my first hunt, I chose a cache about half a mile from my place.  First you go to Geocaching.com and find one you want to hunt for. They are rated by how difficult they are, what kind of terrain you cover, etc. Some of them are puzzle caches, where you have to find the answers to the puzzle in order to get the coordinates. I decided to pass on them. I picked an easy one, near here that was rated wheelchair accessible. Sounds perfect, right? Well, it wasn’t quite that easy.

It wasn't quite this obvious!

So off I go, following the GPS, trying to find the coordinates. When I get close, I can’t get to the exact coordinates. There’s a parking garage in the way. So I went home. At home I looked the coordinates up on a google map, and bingo, the parking garage was the spot. Then I decipher the clue, and it says “go to the top.”

So,  the next day I went back to the garage. This thing is rated

Not the cache I was looking for

wheelchair accessible, right? So how do I get to the top? Well, the same way the cars do, up the ramps. This is fun, (not.) Some of them are really steep. But Ms. Scarlette took them with aplomb. We get to the top, get out the phone and start looking for the coordinates. Found them, and it gives you a range of within three meters. OK, it’s somewhere within 10 feet or so of me. But where would I hide something? I don’t see anything near the coordinates to stash something. But there is a fire hose cover over there that’s broken. Maybe it’s there. Nope, but I did find something else, a very nice corkscrew. How, or why it was there, I don’t know. But it came home with me. Back to the coordinates. Looking

Funny sign in elevator. Click to enbigen.

at things, all around anything, even in the small holes the rebar left. I don’t know how big this thing is, I know it’s a micro, which means about the size of a 35mm film canister. They have nano size caches, however, that are about as big as you finger. I’m looking at all the possibilites for hiding this thing, and then part of something I’m looking around at moves. So I move it some more, and look all around, but no luck.  Only after I’m heading out do I look around and find an elevator on the other side. And a bus stop half a block away. Perfect for a wheelie. I head home and register a “did not find” on the website.

I have the cache bookmarked, so every time somebody finds it, I get a

The view was worth it!

notice. Somebody finds it a couple of days later, so I know ther is a cache still there, but I  don’t know what I’m looking for. A couple days after that somebody else finds it, and in their log mentions some buzzing things, and a hive near the cache. Aha, I remember seeing that hive.

Off I go back to the cache site, looking just

Aha! The cache!

where I looked before. Only this time I looked up instead of down and around, and I spotted it. I was lucky, it was black as pitch where it was, and the cache was also black.

These micro and nano caches don’t havc anything in them but a log to write when you found it.  Too bad, it would have been fun to find a travel bug or  a geocoin that travels in a cache, and move it to another one.

Of course I have pictures. However, the uploader here is not working right at this moment. It crashed Firefox, and won’t show the image in Chrome. Check back, I may be able to get the pictures in later in the day.

I just got finished baking my brains for three days in 85-90° F temperatures, and am grateful the weather has cooled down. Lessons were learned. The new windows that keep it toasty in here in the winter also keep it really toasty in hot weather. They don’t open as wide as the old windows, and the way the windows are pitched keeps there from being much hope of air circulation unless you have your door open. Not something I’m likely to do. I’ve been invaded before when I forgot to lock the door, (or more likely, The Boyo did).  And of course, I have to change the interface for my air conditioner, too. The first week of June last year was cold, and the summer was cooler than normal, too. I don’t know if I like the way this is shaping up. The natural air conditioner that meterologists call the “marine push” switched on about 7 PM last night. At least I could sleep.

Sleep has been in short supply due to the heat, and the fact that they are tearing up the street in front of my house in order to resurface it. Since I live on a main arterial, they are doing it at night. And I couldn’t close the windows. I couldn’t sleep, and for some reason everything is covered with a layer of black dust.

It’s been crisis time around here, too. The Boyo’s mom’s domestic partner had to have a carotid endarterectomy, (that’s a roto-rooter on the arteries that supply the brain to you layfolk.) He’s been between here and Bellingham several times in the last weeks, and was scheduled for the surgery yesterday. In the meantime, Mom, as we’ll call her, had a bad gall bladder attack and had to have it out last week. The Boyo himself has had some health problems that scare the bejesus out of me because I know his family history. He lost a cousin his age last year from this stuff.  He was supposed to go to the doctor yesterday, but while his mom was waiting to for them to do her DP’s surgery, she experienced some back pain that had the hospital people rushing her downstairs to emergency. They didn’t know if it might be a heart attack, or related to her recent surgery, but decided in the end it was a severe spasm, and gave her meds for it. She was still miserable today when I went up to the hospital to see them. She gets to stay in a part of the hospital they’ve fixed up for families to stay in, on the same floor where her DP is. But the upshot of all this is The Boyo missed his doctor’s appointment. Dagnabit!

I had to go up there because the family just bought her a cell phone so she could keep in touch through all this, and she didn’t know how to get her voicemail. Her box was full. So I showed her how to get to voicemail, and to empty her box. Then she said the phone hadn’t rung all day, but these numbers for missed calls kept showing up. Sure enough, somehow she’d turned the ringer off. She’s a touch ditzy anyway, and the pain meds aren’t helping. We were standing in line in the hospital Starbucks, and I hear this phone ring. No phone in the Starbucks. I finally had to bring it to her attention that the phone was ringing. I love her and The Boyo but sometimes….

In other news, someone is interested in my sister’s “lonely” quilt, and Ernie the parvo pup may get to go home tomorrow. Yippee!

Here is a link to my sister’s Alzheimer’s quilts. One of them is very lonley, and needs some attention. Note that these are small 9X12 art quilts, and my sister has a long way to go to her $1000 pledge. She will have a couple more up sometime soon, as she has just finished them. As I mentioned last year, my mother’s mother died with Alzheimer’s. It won’t kill you, but it makes you more vulnerable to the infections, etc. that will.

So, if anyone wants to make my sister’s quilt less lonely. I would appreciate it. She is the charity queen in the family, doing everything from giving vegetables from her garden to food banks to walking in the Avon Three-day for breast cancer, (she is a survivor).  I’d buy it, but I donated to Ernie, the parvo pup. I’ve been following his story on Twitter and Tumblr since he got sick. More information here. I know, just throw a dog in, and I’m a puddle.

It has been over 70° F every day for over a week in Seattle now, and doesn’t look like it will end soon. I have been outside playing, lately I’ve been geocaching. (The things you can do with an Android phone!) I haven’t found anything yet, but I’ve had fun trying. And I’m learning a lot about reading a GPS.

It’s also the time of year for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative. The June Quilt auction is on. These are 9″x12″ art quilts, and they go to the highest bidder. Do you need some new art for your walls. Hey, they’ve got some beauties there. I would bid on a couple if I wasn’t afraid they would get to be too much for me.  The auction’s only been on since 10 PM and already a couple of pieces have bids in the triple digits. Go look at them.

Eventually, it will rain, and I will have to stay home. But not right now. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do while I’m gone. That should give all of you plenty of room.