Night Shots

I was watching a show tonight when one of the characters started taking pictures with a camera similar to mine. Well, that inspired me. I decided to pull the Nikon D60 out and try a couple shots of the night sky glow of Kingston.

I have never successfully done this before, so this was a complete experiment. When I saw the results, I was shocked. They may not be perfect, but I love them.

A truck drove by as the shutter was open. I really loved this effect. Unfortunately, the lights from the town were fuzzy, so I wanted to try again.

It's a little darker, but I didn't have a passing car to add lighting effects. It seems a little more in focus - which I attribute to using the remote shutter. They are beautiful shots, but definitely a testament against light pollution.

Filling in the Gaps

As promised, this is the second part of my post. When I last posted, our geocache count was at 1990. I don't need to say we passed our 2000 benchmark.

A week and a half ago, we went to Ottawa for GAG14. We got off to a late start because of ferry rides and stopping for dinner, but we still had a good count. We averaged 15 a day over three days (we stuck around and cached on Sunday too). Friday, we cleaned out the event caches in the West end for a total of 13 finds. This included our 2000th find which was on a trail. It wasn't an amazing cache, but it was a fun one. The cache owner had made a little doll out of squashes and made it a "guardian" called Sasquash! The trail was really wet too, which was strange since there wasn't a lot of rain lately. At one point, I hopped over a puddle on the trail because I ran out of dry ground to walk on. The other side was muddy and I slid. As I put my arms out for balance, I caught a tree and literally swung around it like Gene Kelly in "Singing in the Rain". In the end, all I did was briefly touch my knee to the ground. Safe!

We did a lot of trails on Saturday. So many, you could say our count suffered. Including a couple caches after the event gathering, we had a total of 17 finds. I'm not complaining, mind you. We still had an excellent time and the weather couldn't have been more beautiful. It did leave us utterly exhausted, though.

On Sunday, we picked up a few more we didn't get to during the event. We took a relaxing pace and even brought Kurt out to Stittsville to grab the trail caches we had started with. We got home later than we wanted to, but 15 finds for the trip home was a respectable count.

This past weekend was KACHE 2. An incredible 115 caches were published including six offerings from us. Kurt came down on Thursday night and spend Friday finding non-event caches (warming up I guess). On Friday, Jen and I left work and had a rough plan of how we were going to approach the start of the event. There was a wrinkle.

At about 4:45, we got a call from Kurt. He was way out in the West end and wanted us to pick him up. This did not make us happy. In the end we compromised. We went to the West end, but Kurt did not join us for our first find.

Ultimately, we had a rough night on Friday. It started well. We had five consecutive first-to-finds (FTF). Then it all fell apart on us. We got to one that had disappeared which marked our first DNF (did not find) of the night. Over the next seven caches we tried, we found two of them. At that pint, we decided it was time to go home for some sleep.

Saturday was amazing! Not only did we get 33 finds (including the event itself), six of those were the ones we couldn't find the night before. We felt very vindicated. I almost didn't want to go home. There was only one mark on the day which was a cache we tried twice with no luck. I think the most remarkable part was I actually got it all logged by Monday.

Sunday was much more relaxed. It didn't help, of course that we missed two ferries. We just missed the first one, so we went for lunch. That was our undoing because we ended up missing the next one by quite a margin. We saw it leave, but we were already 20 cars back. When we got to town, we kept it at a leisurely pace. We helped Kurt find a few we already had and went back to the one DNF from the day before. I don't know if it was funny or sad. We literally walked up to it and saw it. What makes it worse was I was about 20cm away from it the night before. That's the way these things roll, I guess.

Our final count for the weekend was 52 caches - including one I picked up on Monday during lunch. That brings our grand total to 2087. Jen and I have decided to take a couple weeks' break. This is good because we have been neglecting a lot of things - like house work.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like...

This is why I made no promises on this site. I have had a couple busy weeks. For the sake of categorization, I'll split this into two posts.

Over Thanksgiving, Ottawa had an Anime Convention - Naru2U. I was not involved in this convention, nor would I ever really want to. There is history there that is a little bitter, but I have moved past that. What ever.

Something happened at the convention that caused a bit of a mess. I'm not going to go into details because it has been covered in other spots and the details aren't really important. I am head of an Anime club that is supposed to be an umbrella organization for other Anime clubs in the area, so I feel a bit of responsibility when things go wrong. That said, I usually let the other club heads deal with their own issues but offer my assistance should they ever ask for it.

One of my staff was working at the convention, not as my staff. During the ordeal, he said some things and possibly crossed a couple lines he shouldn't have. Jen and I tried to step in as far as we could without crossing boundaries to talk reason to this person. Then things turned nasty. If I thought my staff member went too far, the convention staff went way beyond. Things started getting really ugly and I believe even went so far as hate speech. I have managed to get my staff member to stop (as far as I know), but now legal issues have popped into the mix.

Here is my dilemma. Both sides have asked me for help. The head of the convention has asked me to do something (discipline?) about my staff member. My staff member has asked me to help stand against the other convention staff. In the end, I feel I don't really have anything to do with anything except as a witness to an explosion. My staff member, in no way shape or form involved my club, which does not involve me in a professional sense. My staff member hasn't done anything I can officially call foul on.

On the other hand, I have built an unsteady understanding between the groups. Also, some of my own staff are very unhappy with the way he behaved. How do I deal with this person who seems uncontrollable?

Sigh. It's times like these when I consider retiring from the Anime club.

Getting Closer to the Goal

(Let's try this again. My iGoogle gadget decided to eat the first try)

We picked up another baker's dozen yesterday to get closer to the goal of 2000 finds. Today we're going out to see if we can reach it today. Since it's already past noon, I don't have any high expectations, but I have been surprised before.

We started in the Kingston Mills area. While there, we checked up on our hide. As always, it was sitting out in the open. At least it had a piece of wood on top of it this time. Everything seemed to be in order inside, so I put it back, better hiding it this time. The caches we picked up in the area were fun. The Earth Cache had me wondering, though. If we had been more experienced when we hid ours, would we have made it an Earth cache?

There were some interesting finds today. We spent over an hour at one cache, complaining the whole time. We couldn't understand why someone would hide a cache amongst a pile of mobile rocks. As we were tossing rocks around, we heard something that didn't sound right. The cache was in a piece of pumice that had been hollowed out. Genius! We also got to cache among the "haves" today. The one area had some amazing homes that I couldn't begin to imagine how much they cost. At least we went through with a decent (although dirty) looking vehicle. We tried this before with our old Cavalier and got some very strange looks.

As usual, there were a number of non-spectacular caches. These are always the toughest to log. What am I supposed to write, "This cache sucked. At least we found it and we don't have to worry about it any more."? Of course I don't want to simply write "TFTC" because that wouldn't be fair. I always seem to find something to write, though.

We had one spectacular DNF. It was very dark and we ended up going through a very dense patch of thorn bushes to reach a tree and a set of rocks that seemed to be ground zero. Of course, we found nothing. We went to the cache page from our Blackberries and tried to run the Geo-checker to confirm our coordinates. For some reason, we couldn't get past the security question. I guess the site doesn't like mobile browsers. We made our way back to the van (thank goodness for track-back), counted our wounds, and continued on.

Hopefully, today's caching will go much smoother. Then again, it's the rough patches that add character.

Another Day Of Caching

I have been noticing this a lot lately. We go out little caching and we end up with some sort of astronomical number. Due to ferry fun, we didn't even get to the mainland until 2:00. However, we still managed 21 finds by 9:00pm (Alright, fine. The last one was because we missed the 9:00 ferry). I remember when a good number for a full day of caching was 15-17, not 20 in an afternoon.

Ottawa's GAG (Go And Get'em) is coming up in a couple weeks. Our best showing for 24 hours was about 35. With the way we have been caching lately, I can't help but wonder if we're going to blow that away this year.

On a final note, we are now at 1965 finds after today's caching. It looks quite likely that we just might hit 2000 next weekend. Here's hoping.

Logging the L&A Event

It only took me a week this time. Logging 36 caches is a big undertaking. Of course, the fact that I have a project due this week didn't help. I was spending all my free time working on the project, so the logging suffered. Last night, I finally got fed up with programming and decided to log the rest of the caches. It's always satisfying when you get something off your plate. Of course, that will change if we actually go out again today (rain is holding us back a little, though).

While I am on the subject, let me air a grief. Not even two days after the event, travel bugs started disappearing from my inventory. People were picking them up before I had a chance to drop them. In all, I think there were four bugs and coins that I didn't get to drop. I feel bad for the owners because this really messes up the tracking information. I usually try to at least write a note if I still have the tracking numbers. At least they are moving again though. We have had some of these since May, and others since July.

About Time?

It's strange. I can and can't say this is something I have wanted to do for a while now. I don't exactly have a life I consider worth documenting, but now and then I have an idea I want to write down. Since I have such a wide array of interests (Geocaching, Anime, photography, family), I'm sure I'll come up with something worth reading now and then.

First, special points to whomever can figure out where I got the blog name. Let's just say I think it says a lot about me.

Second, I will not make any promises concerning this web log (Yes, I refuse to call it a "blog"). I do not promise to post on a regular schedule, I do not promise my posts will be interesting, I don't even promise I will ever come back to make another post. I do hope if you read this, you will find something of interest and come back to see what I write next.