A Post About a Cache

I haven't done too much geocaching lately but I have put out a few caches of my own. Of the four I have created, this one was the most fun to build. I like to place easy-to find containers like this well off the beaten path to make it unlikely they will be accidentally discovered, but still make it a bit of a fun surprise when they are found.

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves (me so lazy). Enjoy!

 

Couldn't Be More Clear

 

What exactly about "NQ X-rays P Gamma dot dot" don't you understand?

Tennis Ball Painting

A while back the boy and I started a painting. We got the 4’ x 3’ canvas from Michael's with the intention of painting a rainy city scene using nothing but the materials in the garage. Like any DIYr’s garage, mine has an embarrassment of riches of stuff for the project, assuming that you can replace the word “riches” with “one eighth to one quarter filled paint cans” and “embarrassment” with “embarrassment”.  I figured it’d be a fun project like our last set of paintings.

For whatever reason, the vision wasn't there and the makeshift easel I knocked together held the 15% finished project for many, many months.  Eventually, I got tired of staring at it and even more tired of moving it out of the way every time I had to drag the mower out to do yardwork. Something had to be done, but what, exactly?

Looking over at my seven year old’s  wagon filled with sports stuff gave me an idea for how to put lipstick on this pig and finally recover some precious real estate in the garage. First, I painted over the dumb and boring and awful and crummy city scene with five coats of white paint.  Next, I extricated all of the spider webs and spider corpses from the easel and completely dismantled it. Then, using those pieces (well… mostly) I built a temporary frame for the canvas that had handles that would allow two people to carry it with the canvas facing up. Also, the frame had tall borders that would prevent anything that was sitting on the now-face-up canvas from falling off.

Weird, right?  Well, here’s where the inspiration to use the sports stuff comes into play. Since my son plays tennis the only things that outnumber the nearly empty paint cans and spider ghosts in the garage are old tennis balls.  We dipped a tennis ball into some paint then placed the ball on the canvas.  We took the canvas by the handles and rolled it back and forth until the “paintbrush” ran out of paint.

To avoid smearing the tracks we limited ourselves to one color per day. We also limited ourselves to five colors to keep it simple. The red is oil-based exterior paint, the yellow is poster paint, and the orange, green, and blue are acrylics. I put a temporary border 2/3 down the painting to limit the range of the blue (top part) and green (bottom part) to give the work a sunrise-y sort of feel.

After the final coat (15 total coats, I think) was done I once again dismantled the frame and used those parts (again… mostly) to build the actual picture frame. I painted it black to make the colors pop. There it is hanging in our guest bedroom.

 If all goes as planned it will be in a local art showing starting this weekend.  If not, well, the guest bedroom wall is a perfectly fine place for it. The Louvre can wait.

The Eleventh Spelling Word

Every week our six-year-old gets a new set of ten spelling words that we practice in the car on the way in to school.  My hope is that he turns out to be a better speller than I am.  The red squiggly underlines I am staring at right now tell me that that bar is pretty low, so, you know, no worries there.

For homework he gets worksheets that the teacher generates using some online service. One type of worksheet scrambles the letters in the words and generates a list for the kids to unscramble.  Here’s an example (please note that I blurred out one of them):

When I checked over his homework that night I stopped on number six, dumbfounded.  Surely, there would be filters for this sort of thing, like maybe the teachers eyeballs or something…  

Not wanting to cause what I was trying to avoid, I asked the boy “Hey, bud, did you have any trouble with your spelling homework today?”  “No,” he said  “There was a bad word on it but I didn’t say it.”  And with that he went back to eating his dinner, and I went back to biting the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t laugh.

All About Eggs

I challenge you to name a task that has a lower ratio of “This is gonna be awesome!” to “Man, I simply cannot wait until this is over…” than coloring Easter eggs.  “Reading this post” doesn't count, btw.  “Playing Monopoly” does, though.  Insert shameless plug for Zombieland here.

Let’s back up a bit.

There was an egg drop at my boy’s school this year.  You know… an egg drop.  Build a contraption that will save a raw egg from destruction when it is heaved from the roof of the school.  The rules were simple.  The device must be constructed (not pre-fab) and fit in a 20-cm (that’s about 8” for you Americans, Liberians, and Myanmarians out there) cube.  Also a parent could help.

Sweet.  Nice to be able to work a project with plenty of time to spare for a change.  I’m looking at you, Everything Else It Seems.

Here is the initial build-up, a cage within a cage, suspended there by rubber bands:

How much did the boy help? Meh… He did all the cutting of the materials and the spray-painting and came up with a method for glueing the pieces together without burning dad’s fingers or fusing the straws to the kitchen table.  The actual hot-glueing and “figuring out the math to build an icosahedron and grossly overestimating the tensile strength of a rubber band” was all me. Hooray, science!  BTW, teaching a six-year-old to spraypaint is super fun! Go fetch the “swear jar” and try it right now!  Wear white!

Anyway, the first build passed the test drop from a height of two feet onto a wooden table.  The test drop from five feet onto concrete was a horrible failure, unless your metric for success was “how big of a mess can I make” or “how much can you get a six-year-old to laugh at the mess in his dad’s garage”.  By those yardsticks, this contraption ruled.

After repairing the broken glue joints ad bolstering the inner cage with some sponge fragments we tested it again.  It passed the five-foot test.  Here is the result from the 20’ test (I let him chuck it from his bathroom window).  

Durn.  

Again, it’s all giggles and sunshine for the boy.  Unsung ground control hero of Apollo 13, he is not.

With one day left and and an ineffective and increasingly hard-to-clean device in hand, there was only time for repairs to the broken glue joints and one more addition - a few more sponge slices to cushion the pyramid inside. Testing at this point was moot.  It was either going to work the next day or die trying.  I gave it a 50/50 shot.

It worked.  I’ll be whatever-ed, it actually worked.

Fast forward to Saturday.  We got a kit to paint (not dye) the eggs, cuz the box looked awesome.  The package claimed that you could create these gorgeous, golden-toned, metallic looking eggs.  What it should have said was “INSTANT FAMILY ARGUMENT!  JUST ADD EGGS!”  Our result is in the pic in the upper left.  The less said the better, but next year we are going to go back to dying them or maybe just use my kid’s new-found spraypainting “skills” and be done in, like, forty seconds.  I was shocked to discover that the paint (or whatever it is that is included in this kit) seeps through the eggshell over the course of a couple days making tonight’s dinner of egg and lettuce salad way more festive-looking than it should have.

I’m sure I’ll be fine.

One last egg thing, and certainly not the least.  Today my wife and my boy and his aunt and his uncle participated in the Easter festivities at the White House.  Egg hunt, egg roll, football obstacle course, tennis lessons, story time, and lots of other stuff.  The pics are awesome.  I wish I could have been there, but, really, I couldn’t imagine a better team to lead this expedition than these folks.  Thanks,  aunt and uncle!  You rule!

To my wife and boy: I miss you guys.  Sleep well!  See you tomorrow!

That's a Good Sign.

Bad Sign: Cold.  Callous.  Rude. 

Good Sign (fifteen feet over from Bad Sign): Pointedly whimsical.  Delightfully threatening.  A promise of adventure.

Dusty Keyboard? Write Something Geocache-y!

Finally!  A break!  Ok.  Things have calmed down a bit so it is time to catch up on some stuff.  Let’s talk about some work on the geocaching front.

The family and I have been grinding our way through the 100-cache SNAP!!!-Land series.   This series has you driving around Suffolk, VA in a winding-but-fairly-connected path, jumping out of the car every once in a while to find a container, sign the log, and move on to the next one.  As long as you planned your route  ahead of time and you have a driver, a fetcher, and a signer you could probably knock this out in a day.  

We have been taking chunks out of this series for a couple of hours for a few weekends now (weather permitting - it actually snowed a bit last Saturday).  We have done about 75% of them so far, skipping over active construction sites and dicey neighborhoods, since our fetcher is six and is usually unarmed.

But it's not all park and grab - there are some cool things to see along the way.  The pic in the upper left of this post is a fallen tree that someone painted to look like a dragon.  I think that is near number 38 in the series...

As I reported earlier, the d20-shaped geocache I made is now officially "out there". About a week after it was placed the weather got really crummy.  Rain, snow, thaw, freezing rain, snow, thaw, freeze... Mother Nature was really taking a bat to that thing and I was concerned that it was now just a pile of pieces in the woods.  It turned out I was worried about nothing.  It survived just fine.

I built another geocache container.  Here is the progress of the build.

It is 20" x 20" x 5”, weighs a ton, and cost about eight dollars to make.  The squares are from a pine board I found in the hall closet of my old house, the trim is from another piece of pine, the chess pieces are scrap furring strip, and the sides are spruce 2 x 4.   Move the queen and the Tupperware-container cache is revealed.  I picked out a pretty good place in a nearby forest and I hope to put it out there this weekend. 

Then again, the other one sat in my garage for, what, like, a year-and-a-half before I did anything with it…  Time will tell.

New Chessboard Puzzle Hint

I got up this morning, worked out, put away the dishes, cleaned the letterbox, fed the cat, took out the trash, showered, got my lunch ready and now I'm bored.  Well, I guess you could say I was bored before, which is why a lot of that stuff got done in the first place.  

I've really got nothing specific to talk about right now except I that I type this waiting for my kid's school to open this morning after a two-hour-delay.  We had a very slight dusting last night.  The roads are bone dry.  Don't get me started.

So I went through the puzzles on the Secret Puzzle Page this morning and I was shocked to discover that I couldn't remember the encoding mechanism I used when I first posted this one over four years ago:

I eventually recalled it but, wow, I really need to write these down or something.  Here are all the hints in ROT-13 format to prevent spoilers:

Hint 1 (Posted 11/06/10): N pvepyr, ru?
Hint 2 (Posted 01/07/11): Gur svefg yrggre vf 'G'.
Hint 3[Posted 02/05/13]: Guvf fubhyq or rnfl nf pnxr.
Hint 4 (Posted 02/06/15): Rnfl nf cvr, V zrna.

All of the puzzles (and hints and links to the projects associated with the puzzles) can be found in the link in the sidebar on non-mobile devices and at the top of this page on mobile ones.

Think you have an answer?  Post a comment or send me an email.  Good Luck!

Looting the Radio Shack

In case you haven’t heard, many Radio Shacks are closing and the deals they are offering as they liquidate their inventory are incredible.  If you are a hobbyist, a DIYer, or both find out if the one near you is closing soon and check out what they have left in stock.

Most likely, everything having to do with TVs and cabling and is already gone if the stores near you serve the same demographics as the ones near me.  The upside is that you can get ceramic magnets, Arduino boards, robotics kits, solder, solar panels, lights, switches, buzzers, etc, etc, etc for pennies on the dollar.

Here’s my hoard so far:

They are even selling the cabinets and display racks, in case you are in the market. So stock up if you have the interest and the spare space.  Just remember to show a little sensitivity to the checkout personnel as you are having your Hefty Lawn and Leaf bags stuffed with zener diodes and alligator clips and whatever rung up - these guys are probably job hunting, you know.

Be cool and wish them luck.  

Phantom Zones 'R' Us

Hey!  New Toys 'R' Us catalog is here!  Sweet!

Lessee... Trampoline, Trampoline, Horrifying Prison, Trampoline...