I've been searching low and high

I took a week off from posting, but I'm trying to get back on schedule now. Last weekend, we went to my nephew's 5th birthday party, picked up a used playset for the kids and finally cashed in my pile of Cabela's gift certificates and got a DeLorme Earthmate PN-40 Handheld GPS. I had been wanting a GPS for years but kept putting it off. There always seemed to be some imminent new feature that kept me from pulling the trigger.

This past Saturday morning was big sister's first official T-ball game of the season. While she played, the little one found another little sister to play with and they ran a BUNCH of races back and forth on along the pole vault runway. She ended up being the sweatier of the two.

After the game ended, the three of us hopped in the van and sped up to Thorndike for Uncle Dan's memorial service at the grange hall where I've had a few (but not nearly enough) suppers. The service was very nice and it was good to see so much of the family, even if it wasn't the happiest of occasions.

We spent Saturday night at camp with Nana and Grampa and then the next morning we hurried back home to get the Daisy scout to her "American Girl Tea Party". Angela took her there while the little one and I went to the office to get a little server maintenance done when it wouldn't impact many (if any) clients.

Later that afternoon, we took our first stab at geocaching. Geocaching is an activity where you use a GPS to search out little "treasure troves" aka "caches". These caches are catalogued at www.geocaching.com. I was amazed to find that when I punched in my zip code and told it to show me all caches within 5 miles, it came back with a list of 127 different caches! It's amazing how many of these things are out there, and the vast majority of them are on public land.

With the Delorme GPS, all you need to do is click a button on the website and all of the details of the cache are sent to the unit via USB. It can hold 500 different cache waypoints/notes and let's you go "paperless", which I guess has been something that geocachers have been waiting a long time for. Once you find a cache, you can update it and add your own field notes to the GPS. When you get home, you connect to the computer again and upload your field notes to geocaching.com and the main database gets updated. The cache owner gets notified that you visited their cache and everyone can see your notes about the cache. If an owner starts seeing a bunch of "Did Not Finds", they'll know that they need to visit the cache to make sure it's not missing/damaged.

On our first attempt, we went to nearby Westcustogo Park. It took us about 5 minutes before we found the cache. The contents weren't anything fantastic (mostly a bunch of little toys), but it's still exciting when you finally spot one.

We shot for another one near the town center on the way to dinner, but struck out. We must have spent 20 minutes looking around route 9 before giving up. After dinner, we chose to try one more that was on the way home. Angela was the first one to spot the little camouflaged container wedged in a tree. The kids really seemed to love it - it'll be great to get them out and exploring this summer.

Not much to report on the scout cam, I'm afraid. I'm perplexed that I haven't had a single turkey trip the cam when there was so much activity last fall in the same spot. It doesn't really matter much, though. With T-ball games every Saturday, I doubt that I'll be able to go turkey hunting upcountry at all this year.

Other than a boring woodchuck video, I've just got these two deer videos to show over the last two weeks. Maybe the mountain lion rumored to be in the area is having an effect on my deer and turkey action...