Category Archives: Geocaching

Day Off and Blessings

I’m a blessed guy. I don’t know know why. I certainly haven’t done anything to deserve it. But its true. Not only am I married to the best Wife a man could have and am honored to be the Father to a Son that is the best Son in the world, but I get great parking spots. Ask Sweetie, I have parking place mojo. When I pull up to the front, somebody just pulled out, We almost always park near the front door. Legally; Not always, but often enough.

I’m blessed in other ways also. My employer in the last year decided to give everybody vacation commensurate with their years of experience in the energy industry, not just years with the company. Wow, I have 32 years in the energy industry so they handed me 5 weeks of vacation. It has just floored me. I don’t take it for granted. It is going to go mainly toward spending more time with the family, but who knows what else. Our church, like a great many others, has mission trips availble year round. You can do them here in Oklahoma, or the States, or elsewhere from Mexico, to Lithuania, to Tanzania. Who knows? I have been handed a gift I didn’t deserve,I have to figure out how to give something back.

The other thing my employer did was give us the option of a 9/80 work schedule. In other words we can work our 80 hour two week schedule in 9 days and get every other Friday off. That was just handed to us. It makes for long days for nine days, but it is worth it. Yesterday I had one of those days off. We dropped SuperPizzaBoy off at school, ate breakfast together, ran a couple errands and then loaded up the bikes to Tulsa’s Mohawk Park.

Mohawk Park is on the north side of town next to the airport. We parked at the Mary K. Oxley Nature Center in Mowhawk Park.

We rode down to Lake Yahola where I took a picture of Sweetie. Note the golf course in the background.

Some of the waterfowl on Lake Yahola. We didn’t ride there too long. Too darn windy!! Plus the geocaches I thought we could get were not reachable from the dam.

We got off the dam and went meandering around the park. We came upon an area where beavers had been active.

Oh, oh, the dweeb himself.

Stylistically a disaster right? You know what drives Sweetie crazy? The little bell near his right hand. That’s what. He comes upon people, he goes ding, ding with the bell. If he yells, “On your left!” then they move to the left. The ding dong likes the bell, what do you think is best? I listen to my readers. Especially those who leave comments!

Here you go, here is Sweetie again. It has finally dawned her the last few years that Yogi got a far better deal in this marriage than she did. You agree? – Hey, its a rhetorical question. You don’t need to answer!

We got off into some wild and wooly parts of Mowhawk. I hadn’t been here since the middle 1990’s during a Corporate Challenge Marathon Relay. Narrow roads. Abandoned roads.

The course went down this way and back. I was a little cranky because they didn’t have any water stops. I had a little “attitude.” Hey if you are going to put on a race then do it right!!!!! There was a race crew out there putting up barricades early in the morning and they got behind me in their truck. I was running down the center of the road and they were following me and I knew they wanted around me so I stayed in the center. They followed me at my extremely slow pace and after a while couldn’t stand it any more so they gave me a little honk of the horn. I guess to tell me that I was doing a good job. So I gave them a middle fingered salute without looking back to let them know I appreciated their hard work.

They gave me a long loud blast of the horn to encourage me even more, so I gave them a a two handed salute in appreciation. This went on for some time. Turkeys!

Hey, can you tell I have issues? Got any advice? Sweetie does, its along the lines of “Get over yourself. You have been talking about that for years.”

Hey, we got to the end of our ride. I saw a tree with leaves on it where I thought the sunlight reflecting on the leavds would really pop out.

The leaves reflect fine and I could enhance it in Corel but I think the best pictures are the ones right out of the camera. What I liked about the ppic looking at it now is the tree’s shadows on the road. I didn;t even notice it before.

Anyway, that was our ride Friday and some of my blessings. Tell me a blessing you had.

“Splinterheads” the Geocaching Movie

Splinterheads is a new movie coming, maybe. It might be the fifth best movie ever made. I’m pretty sure of that even though I’ve never seen it. (Chinatown, Cars, Down With Love, and Dr. Zhivago hold down the 1 through 4 spots, forever.)

I am not even sure this movie will even make it to Tulsa.

I don’t care, its going to be great, trust me.

You know how I know?

Because it involves Geocaching.

Here is a Teaser.

It is about more than geocaching. Here is the trailer.

The secret is out now. The reason I love geocaching has nothing to do with being outside and using gadgets that get satellite signals to find stuff. Its all about the women taking their clothes off in their lust to find caches. Its all ruined now. I’ll have to take up scrap booking or something like that. Do they still have lessons on that.

Check out the web site. Who knows what the distribution plans are?

Sunday Afternoon Running with The Eagles – Turkey Mountain

I went out for a run Sunday afternon. I was looking for something a little different so I went to the west side of the Arkansas River and started from the Turkey Mountain parking lot. I took my Garmin running GPS watch, my Ipod, Palm Treo PDA Cell Phone, and a Garmin Nuvi 500 crossover GPS to hunt geoaches with, as well as my digital camera. You could say I was fully instrumented. Hey, you wouldn’t take a Ferrari out on the track without a few instruments would you?

Also, its pretty risky to leave the house with just one GPSr is what I say.

I found two geocaches during the run. One was just 8 feet off the trail. The second was a couple hundred feet of the trail and involved a climb up a dry waterfall.

It was kind of ugly going up all those d*** rocks and double ugly coming down but at least I found it. I didn’t fall and get cuts, scratches and stuff such as that.

The rest of the run was a dream. I was running three light poles and walking one since it was so warm and there are no water fountains on this side of the river. My running friends tell me that that is “not real running.” I tell them to “jump in the lake.” Its movement and I kept it up for 5 miles. Its a nice trail, not much traffic so I just lose all sense of time and am totally in the present. I stopped and took a few pictures but it all just kind of morphs together in my head.

I wasn’t playing Metallica since I wasn’t pushing myself so hard. I was playing the Eagles. Their more laid back stuff like “No More Walks in the Wood.” (Terrible news for a geocacher.)

What do you do to “Zone Out.” Tell me.

Suicide by Bird Poop

Part of Geocaching is monitoring your caches. This is done mainly by monitoring the logs that people write when they find your cache. SuperPizzaBoy and I have a cache downtown “One Degree of Separation: Boys Night Out” between the Doubltree Hotel and the Convention Center. Lots of out of towners staying at the hotel or attending the convention have found it.

I got concerned when I noticed the last two logs.

I know that they are kind of hard to read but basically they are not very complimentary about the condition of the cache. So I temporarily disabled the cache and went out at lunch today to check it out.

What I found was my cache totally covered in white bird poop. Normally I would “plug and abandon” as we oilfield trash say but hey I paid $5.79 for the container at Walmart. I need to salvage it. So I pull it out and carry it back to the office. The office is about 4 blocks away and the more I walked the more the container stank. I got to wondering just how I was going to do this. If I got on the elevator with the thing it would stink things up. I didn’t take a picture of the cache because I didn’t want my hands to touch any part of me by this time but the last log included the picture below. It doesn’t really do it justice:

I developed a plan so I went to the office and went downstairs to a large public restroom. I went and started washing the thing off. It stank up the whole room, but you know, $5.79 is a lot of money, especially with natural gas prices the way they are. I finally decided to take the camo duck tape off. It wouldn’t tear off so I pulled out my trusty swiss army knife and was working on it when the blade slipped on the bird poop and I stabbed by left index finger.

How embarrassing. Especially as a former assistant Cub Scout Den Leader. The shame, the humiliation, and oh, the blood. The blood was going everywhere. I also realized that the blade was soaked in bird poop. Not exactly an aboriginal antiseptic, I don’t think. So I cleaned the wound out as best I could and packed it with paper towels held in place by my thumb. And then I finished cleaning up the container because you know $5.79 is a lot of money.

So I finally got the duck tape off and tossed it in the trash and by now the restroom really stunk, bad, (caused by the same stuff that got injected in my finger) and the people coming and going were looking at me as I was cleaning the blood, bird poop, and bits of camo duck tape out of the sink.

So I took everything upstairs. I went over to our first aid cabinet and collected some disinfectant wipes, neosporin, and a couple bandages and went to a coworker and he doctored me up.

Here is some more photos. First, the cleaned up, duck taped removed, still fragrant, $5.79 cache container.

The not so sharp instrument.

The finger.

Hey, does anybody know if birdpoop can kill you?

PS – I archived the cache. I’m not going through this again. But I’m going to reuse the container. Save me $5.79 and tax.

GPSr RIP, Contests, 666, and WTF?

Lowrance IFinder Hunt H2O GPS receiver. Missing early August 2009, presumed gone.
I probably found 600 caches with this. I guess I left it somewhere. Been using my Garmin Nuvi 5000. It works pretty well but it is not the same besides for going into the woods I need something waterproof. They don’t make these anymore and it looks like I’m going to get a replacement pretty reasonably on ebay.

Speaking of replacement this very nice sweet lady, fellow blogger Baloney, (so named because she is full of it) is both in a contest and is running a contest. She and I both need your help.

You can help her by going to Irritated Tulsan’s “Tulsan of the Month” contest and vote for Baloney. If she wins then she and my friend 666BOI will face off for the Tulsan of the Year. Baloney is very sweet but don’t pay attention to the lies she tells about me or 666BOI.

You can help me by going to a contest that Baloney is running on her blog. Its a “poop hat” award and vote for my buddy 666BOI. He really really wants that Poop Hat Award.

Speaking of 666. I drove by my favorite liquor store the other day and I saw this car parked out front.

So there is another Satan in town? Is this town big enough for two Satan’s. Is the future of mankind going to be decided here in Tulsa, Oklahoma? Are 666BOI and 666FMY teaming up or fighting it out? He doesn’t tell me these things.

Been wondering WTF? It means “What the Flip?” Sweetie has borrowed a Flip Video Cam from a teacher at SuperPizzaBoy’s school for use in a project. I saw it and grabbed it. Sorry everybody, its mine now, at least until Sweetie tells me the third time to give it back. These little gadgets are low tech, low fi, low D but fun to use.

You press a button to shoot video, it has 60 minutes recording time, it uploads itself to YouTube. Its great. The lower tech models cost about $150 new. You can get them for about $70 used on ebay. I’m tracking the bidding patterns to see what’s what and then I may be getting one for myself.

I tried it out on my favorite subject. SuperPizzaBoy, for once he was stumped for something to say but he recovered.

I tell you thing. That Boy puts up with a lot. So does his Mother.

Pancakes, more pancakes, bike riding, getting stalked, and puppy love

A lot has been going on lately. It is hard to keep up with it all.

First up is it is United Way season. The Yogi’s are big supporters of United Way and so is my employer. Thursday they had their Pancake Breakfast. I’m always up for pancakes! Here is the lineup of this year’s cooks.

What a fine looking crew, left to right, there is Dave (my boss) his pancakes were great, his boss Bob (his pancakes were even better), Steve (Co-worker), and Mike. The lady at the end is fellow geocacher Teresa (“Mommakiss”). $5 for all you can eat. The place was packed. I think they made a lot of money. The event was organized by another fellow geocacher Linda. Great job Linda!

I converted both Linda and Teresa to geocaching. I witnessed to them and gave my testimony and they saw the light. I walked them right up to the altar of their first geocache and they have been faithful witnesses to the Department of Defense Satellites encircling the globe emitting their steady dependable signals that enable us to find old M&M tubes hidden in the shrubbery of abandoned Wendy’s restaurants.

Friday was the start of a three day weekend. My employer has gone to an optional 9-80 work week so Sweetie and I had a big day planned. We dropped her car off to get fixed, then we dropped the kid off at school. We drove downtown to meet with our attorney. No we are not suing you, yet. Don’t make me mad though, our attorney is a mad dog.

We were hungry after all that legal stuff so Sweetie and I hoofed it over to the Blue Dome Diner. Tulsa blogger Bill Miller posted about it recently and I had to go try it. Sweetie and I each had the blueberry walnut pancakes. I ordered three, Sweetie, one. I followed Bill’s example though and ate only half and took the other half home. The pancakes are wonderful! (Sorry for the out of focus photograph.)

We waddled back to the car, went home and changed out of lawyering clothes and into our biking clothes and drove out to the river and rode a short ride of about 12 miles or so. I only got one photograph. (Sweetie will leave me if I don’t keep up!) It is of downtown Tulsa where I work. I had to wave at my coworkers still working. Don’t worry, next week they will have Friday off and they will be waving at me from the river.

Look at those big old fat fluffy clouds.I love them. They day was perfect. Temperature in the mid 80’s, a little breeze, and low humidity. I was in heaven! The sun was straight overhead so all the trees had perfect little round shadows underneath them. What a day off!

It came time to go to Quik Trip get something to drink and then pick up the kid from school, the car from the shop, and go home. This is where I found out I’m getting stalked.

There was this waiting for me in the mailbox at home.

I think it is a little ominous, don’t you? Anybody have any ideas who this could be. Sweetie says it is my fellow blogger Baloney. Couldn’t be, could it? She’s my friend. We went dancing last week! Go check her out, let me know what you think. Is she the one or not? I sent her something earlier this week. It was real nice.

Don’t laugh. It’s a poop cache. They are very rare.

Then it was time to go check on Nana. She is recovering nicely from her broken leg and will be and running around Dress Barn again in no time. We took our two mutts Ginger and Abby because they like to play with Nana’s Fiona. After the playing it was cuddling time.

Ginger is on the right, Fiona on the left, Abby is the white blur behind Fiona. We couldn’t get all their faces in the picture. They are friends but not that good of friends.

By then I was worn out. I made the most of my day off don’t you think. And I’ve got two whole days to go this weekend!

Another Boys Night Out

Wow, another Boys Night Out already. Sweetie has another Book Group Meeting, this time Nana is hosting. School has started though so we have to tone it down to be home at a reasonable time.

So first we loaded up and went to eat. At Hideaway Pizza in Bixby on Memorial. Hideaway Pizza is something of an institution. It started in Stillwater, Oklahoma, home of Oklahoma State University. Tulsa is a big OSU town so they have a natural following. The pizza being excellent helps as you might expect.

I brought my camera of course but we were so hungry that I forgot to photograph it before we started. So the consolation prize is this picture after we were done.

Nothing to take home!

Afterwards we decided to plant another geocache. We placed the last one near Cedar Ridge Golf Course and we named the cache “Boys Night Out – Cedar Ridge”. This time we decided to place one near another Golf Course. So this one is “Boys Night Out – Meadowbrook.”

First we went to Walmart to get the stuff for the cache. A medium size plastic, water tight, container, a notebook for geocachers to write their log in, a pencil, and some small trade items for the kids, a small rain poncho and a couple of matchbox cars. Oh, yes, camo duck tape.

We drove out to the cache site, and pimped up the cache container, including camoflaging it with the camo duck tape, found a suitable spot, and then spent forever making sure the coordinates are right. I lost my Lowrance IFinder Hunt GPSr that could take 100 readings in a spot and average them in one minute so I have to use my navigation GPSr which is great for getting me over to Aunt Bessies house but I have to average my readings the old fashioned way.

We finally finished, and it was time to go home so that son could go to bed because it is a school night. It was late. I had to hide it in the dark.

So, do you do anything on a regular basis with family members or friends? I want to know all about it!

Weekend Roundup and Statistics

A lot happened this weekend. Yesterday I took out SuperPizzaBoy’s swing set. He is now 11 I put it up for his third birthday so it was kind of sad, but hey he’s growing up so that is great. Then we gathered up Nana and her friend Patty and went to eat Mexican food!

Patty and Sweetie had Margariata’s.

Afterwards Sweetie and I went some friends, including fellow bloggers Baloney, Dawn, and Michelle ( I had never met Michelle before but we have been blogging friends for quite a while. ) to a comedy club. It was an improv sort of thing and it was hilarious. Sweetie and I don’t get out too much. Lots of young women were running around with too much makeup and not enough clothes. Sorry no pictures. We had a great time.

We all stumbled out of bed way too late to go to church but we made it to Sunday School. Afterward Sweetie went to a wedding shower and SuperPizzaBoy and I went geocaching. We looked for five and found five which is a good outing. We find a little different kind of cache. Instead of hidden box it was a wanted poster hanging on a pole. Can’t tell you what cache. Cachers go to all sorts of trouble to hide them for me to just blab which one this is. Sorry, that’s the way it is.

Speaking of geocaching I have recompiled my numbers using my special GSAK (“Geocaching Swiss Army Knife”) software. Scroll way on down to the bottom of the main blog page, past my old blogs and the crap I put on the side bar. You will find a Niagra Falls of numbers and graphs, and that is the summary report. Go take a look but come back. I tried to put it on a daily post but it was a mess.

Of course gecocaching is not about numbers. No, not at all!! Who would think of such a thing. Nobody I know that caches pays the slightest bit of attention to their numbers. Talking about your numbers is like talking about how much money you make. So nobody cares about their numbers, not the slightest bit.

So, here are a few of mine:

834 geocaches found. 382 of them within 10 miles of home! Tulsa has a lots of caches!
654 caches found in Oklahoma.

43,522 total miles between caches. That is lots of driving (and a lot of gasoline!), and a little flying.

Caches found that are no longer active 286. Many caches last just a year or two.

At my historic rate of caching (about 0.4 finds per calendar day) I am scheduled to reach 1000 on Dec 10, 2010. Actuall, I think that I will get to a thousand by late Spring 2010.

Do you have a hobby that you are passionate about? Lets hear it. I promise not to tell.

Kansas Trip

Just got back from Kansas. I attended the Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association Meeting in Wichita. My employer had a booth, I talked to customers, competitors, and all sorts of other people. I also attended some really good talks and discussions.

The short story? Natural gas prices are going to stay down, oil prices are going to stay up. What does that mean? The producers are drilling more oil wells, less gas wells. Darn it! I’m a gas guy. Oh well.

The political take. They are resigned to Obama’s changed tax laws in regard to oil and gas drilling. What does it mean? Drilling wells will be less profitable, so less drilling will occur, so look out, increased oil imports are going to happen.

What about me? I had a great time. My sister Ellen was in town on business from Colorado. She is a geocacher (“eoripolyard” is her geocaching handle.) So guess what? We went geocaching. We found seven in downtown Wichita including a webcam cache. Sweetie helped us with that by remotely operating a webcam in Wichita, Kansas from Tulsa, Oklahoma. (You want to do that?, stay tuned to the end of this broadcast!)

So, who cares about our energy concerns. The big news is that I found 19 caches over three days of my trip, Woo hoo!! Lets have a party! I’m up to 829 total caches found. Below is a partial screenshot of my logs.

Thank you my fellow American taxpayers. Your spending billions of dollars on supersecret GPS satellite technology not only helps keeps our troops, sailors, and airmen safe, it allows me to find Tupperware containers in our city parks and highway rest stops!!! Isn’t this country great or what? Who cares about Obama taking our guns? I don’t want him scrambling the GPS signals again.

For those of you who are patient. Do you want to operate a web cam? Here is the link!

You can take control of this camera mounted high atop a building in downtown Wichita and move it left and right, up and down, and zoom in. Its fun during the day to track people as they walk. You can even take still images of what you see!! You can stalk people in downtown Wichita from anywhere on the planet!

To find out about webcam geocaches. Check out this link to the webcam cache my sister and I found using the same webcam.

Geocaching – the Dark Side

Saturday afternoon I went geocaching. I wanted to find five. The first one was a mystery cache named “That’s Just Rid(dle)iculous!!!” by M 5. A mystery cache is one where you have to figure out what the coordinates are. I have a few that I’ve put out myself. This one is a devilish little puzzle. The riddle is as follows (With apologies to M 5, I hope that you don’t sue me for copyright infringement.”

Joe and Bob are having a conversation. Joe asks Bob how old his kids are. Bob says “I have 3 kids and the product of their ages is 36.” Joe thinks about it a minute and says, “That is not enough information.” Bob then exclaims “The sum of their ages is the same number as the number of caches you and I found today.” “That is still not enough information” Joe replies. “My oldest is a muggle” Bob shamefully adds. Joe now knows the ages of all 3 of Bob’s kids. You will have to figure them out as well to complete this cache. Although you will have to use some math, this is more of a problem solving/reading comprehension puzzle.

Assumptions

All ages are rounded to the nearest year, no months, weeks, days, hours or minutes are used in this puzzle.

When you figure out the ages plug them into these coordsN 36 0A.BC1W 095 51.6C8Place them from youngest to oldest A then B then C

I’ll be honest with you, I could not make heads nor tales out of this, but I thought that I had it figured out due to the numerial requirements of the result. So off I went.

Where I parked was about a 1000 feet from where I thought the cache was. I took off, little did I know what I was in for. I doused myself with deet so I had no insect problems but I found lots of scrubby brush and cover. I got within 2 feet of where I thought the cache was but I couldn’t find it. I went under, through, and over the brush, around the trees and under the trees and and tramped around all over the place. I was handicapped because I misplaced my trusty Lowrance Ifinder Hunt GPSr and all I had was my Garmin Nuvi 500 crossover cache which is basically a highway GPSr and didn’t work too well in the heavy tree cover.

I spent almost two hours looking for the darn thing before I gave up. I wasn’t sure whether I had the right coordinates and I didn’t have faith in my GPSr either.

Believe it or not I did have fun though. For two hours I completely forgot the cares of the world and was totally focused on something. I didn’t get it this time but I’ll find it eventually. I’ll probably wait until after the first frost when the undergrowth will die back. In the meantime I’ll either find my regular GPSr or get another. I’ll email M5 and ask him to confirm the coordinates (I will never ask for the coordinates if I had them wrong). I’ll study the riddle some more and look again and I’ll find it.

In the meantime I have some souvenirs of my outing.

Anybody out there up for a cache run?

YogisDen.us

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