New Year's Eve Geocaching

I did little geocaching today. It was in the 20s today so the ground is frozen, but most of the snow has melted. This made for some decent geocaching conditions, but I did get a little chilly so I quit after doing a couple of them.

One of the caches didn't give me parking coordinates so I found a place to park and walked in on a trail. Then the trail stopped because there was a good sized stream in the way. At this point I should have remembered the time when there was swamp in my way since that time I ended up swimming through a swap and destroyed a cell phone and camera in the process. However with my one track mind I didn't think about that. I only thought about getting to the cache. So I walked down stream a little ways and found a small tree that had fallen across the stream. Amazingly enough I didn't fall into the stream going either direction.
So it all worked out, but it could have turned out with me falling in and getting my phone and camera wet. I really need to remember to at least set those things on the ground if I'm going to do stupid stuff like this. And of course while I was grabbing the cache I saw if I had just parked on the other side of the park it would have been much easier.

Holiday Letter 2005

Many of you who read this blog already recieved my holiday letter for 2005 in paper form, but for those who didn't I thought I'd put it on the web. Here it is.

Xmas Trip to Huston Texas

This trip started out a little crazy. I've been working on an important time critical project at work and our testing group found a bug in my software just a few hours before my trip. I worked feverishly trying to fix it and missed my flight. Then my boss got me a first class ticket down to Texas the next day. However I didn't get the problem fixed so I came back from Texas early and am working on it some more. The good news is I'm pretty sure I've got a fix for it now and it just needs to pass testing. Anyways let’s get on with the trip.

I've been to Texas before so when I got off the plane I shouldn't have been so surprise, but I was. Everything is bigger in Texas. Well, maybe not everything but they sure seem to try and make it that way. The whole city is sprawled out over ten times as much space as they need. Don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with rural living, but when you try to spread out your cities until they become rural then you don't have much of a city.

About when I got done discussing the issue of city sprawl with my folks on the car ride from the airport we got to my aunt's house. First I was greeted by the puppies, then my sister and her husband, then by the puppies again, then by my grandma, and then by the puppies yet again. During the two days I was there I suspect the puppies greeted me somewhere between one and two bazillion times.

It was nice getting out of the cold for a few days. The difference between the 20s and the 70s is huge. I spent about as much time as I could outside (usually walking the puppies). I wore the poor puppies out. On one of my walks with (I forgot the puppy’s real names so let’s call this one...) Biscuit we got a little lost and I had to call home to get directions back. My sense of direction isn't the greatest, but those suburbs in Texas are darn confusing so let us blame this incident on that.

Since I only spent two days in Texas I didn't get too much done (beyond tiring the puppies out of course). We did go to this sort of cool church. It was one that broadcasts it's services on the radio. They had a fairly impressive choir. But what I remember most about the service was that the preacher could sing. I never heard an old preacher with such a good voice.

On Christmas we opened presents. My favorite two gifts were a certificate to the performing arts theater in Providence, and a potato bonsai. Once I get some time I'm going to grow that potato bonsai and post some pictures for you all.

Overall the trip was a little short, but it was still a great trip.

Merry Christmas

Or Navidad, or Las Posadas, or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or Diwali, or Ramadan, or however you choose to celebrate this time of year.

I know it's a little early, but I'm traveling to Texas for the holidays this year and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to update my blog while on the road. Rest assured when I get back I'll give you the details of what I'm sure will be a great trip.

Peace!

Robot Website

For those interested I've been dabbling in homebrew robots recently. It's refreshing to deal with the hardware aspect of computers rather than just the software like I do at work. So far I've only done a little bit of simple circuit design and some programming, but now that I'm rolling I suspect I'll step up the difficulty quite a bit. I probably won't be progressing too fast though since I don't have too much time to spend on this hobby. Slow and steady wins the race.

http://robots.glacialwanderer.com/

Moving

I forgot just how much moving sucks. Even though it wasn’t me moving and I was just helping Carolyn it sucked. Moving is a terrible thing. And of course the most memorable object is always going to be something big. In this case it’s an 800 freaking pound fold out sofa. If I ever find out who invented the sofa I’ll kill him.

Only a small amount of blood was spilled, a dented wall, and a single broken light resulted from this move. Overall it was a very smooth move by my standards. And the best thing is that we’re done!!!

Ice storm

We had an ice storm last night. As much as I like snow storms is about how much I hate ice storms. Nothing good comes from ice (like say snowboarding). Anyways in the spirit of the holidays I just wanted to say bah humbug to the ice storm.

In other news I'm going to help Carolyn move to her new apartment this weekend. Part of me thinks this will be fun, but I've never had any fun moving before so we'll see how it goes.

8 Inches of the White Stuff

We got our first real snowstorm of the year today. Now what's the best way to celebrate 8 inches of fresh new snow? Go Snowboarding!

The Chronicles of Narnia

Every once in awhile work rents out a theater for us to go and see a movie. They did this for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I thought it's a pretty good movie, but nothing great. Some of the special effects and acting was a little painful at times, but overall an entertaining movie. It's sort of a cross between the Harry Potter movies and the Lord of the Ring movies.

I did read the books when I was younger, but I can't remember much from them so I can't say how closely the movie followed the book. Perhaps it's time to read them again...

First Snow

I'm glad Eric and I went hiking yesterday, because it looks like there might not be any more snow free hiking for awhile. We got our first snowstorm where I live last night. We only got around 3 inches but it looks like there is a bigger storm coming our way for this Tuesday.

To celebrate this first snow, Eric and I went snowboarding at Wachusett Mountain. It's about a 30 minute drive from where I live and we both have season passes. I didn't take my camera this first day because I was afraid I might fall on it. Good thing I didn't take it because I did have a couple nice falls. Even with the falls it was great to get back out for my first snowboarding trip of the year.