Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Catching up...

Ok, it's been months since I've typed anything into this spot so I'm way overdue (again). Today is probably not the best day to attempt creative (or accurate) writing as I'm recovering from a pretty bad bout of food poisoning. I wont go into details except to say that if Illness = Kung Fu, I was practicing the "Double Headed Dragon" for many hours yesterday. The final symptom was a fever coming in at a balmy 101.5° Fahrenheit. By that time I was able to stomach some dry toast - and cook it on my forehead.

The reason I haven't written here is because I've been writing elsewhere, moonlighting if you will, albeit in the daylight mostly (Thanks, Daylight Savings Time!). I'm proud to report as of this month that CentralJerseyGeocaching.net is up and running. To date we have 59 users and lots of cool features that I consider cool even if you don't because cool is subjective and all features are cooler when you identify/install/configure & manually tweak them all by yourself. Yeah, it's been a lot of work but I've learned a more about PHP coding & a lot more about Joomla as a Content Management System. We're not nearly done so I probably wont be writing here very much. Honesty == Refreshing.

Since my last writing I've had a few notable experiences. The first was the big trip to North Carolina to visit my Mom & check out (and volunteer for) the Storytelling Festival of the Carolinas. The festival is only in it's 2nd year but they brought in 4 featured tellers of national acclaim and pulled off a wonder of festivality. To make things more interesting, a very large tree decided to topple (on Arbor Day no less) right onto the main tent. Now this was a Circus Quality Super Tent so the tree didn't wreck it, but there wasn't any way we could let people sit inside with a few tons of tree looming overhead. Some emergency management found a few guys with chainsaws & a bucket truck and the tree was gone within a few hours. The tellers put on an amazing show and I got to chat them up in between sets & after the performances. My only regret is that the festival took up large hunks of the days & I didn't get a chance to just hang out with mi madre as much as I would have liked.

On the Geocaching front, the extra travel has netted me 3 more states & lots of finds. I'm at 560 finds as of this writing. I have 15 caches hidden (in 3 states) and 3 more caches right around the corner. My favorite is a cache honoring Capt. William Kidd. Disgraced & hanged as a Pirate, he was a actually a misunderstood privateer who simply ran afoul of his financiers. The geocache itself will be near Treasure Lake & is of the multi/puzzle variety. It will require you to piece together the clues that Capt. Kidd's loyal crew left allowing Captain Kidd to reclaim his buried treasure one day. Gold coins were actually discovered in two spots less than a quarter mile from my home so I couldn't resist putting a cache there. The contents of the cache are completely unique as well but I wont reveal the secret here! Kidd was hanged on May 23rd 1701 so this past weekend, exactly 307 years later, under the light of the moon, I buried Kidd's Cache while Heather stood guard.

The most recent happening was the passing of my annual Continually Reoccurring Affirmation Period. This means I'm now 33 years old. For my birthday the most interesting gift I received was the food poisoning I mentioned earlier. Happy Barfday to meeee! Fortunately, we had done some celebrating earlier in the weekend. On Saturday night we went up to a comedy club in New Brunswick & saw comedy legend Gallagher. He's the guy who is famous for smashing watermelons (among other things) to end his sets. Compared to other comedians his routine is very organic (no pun intended). He plays off of the audience &, in this small venue, interacted directly on several occasions. Not the least of which was allowing all of the folks who had a birthday to kneel before the smashing platform and receive some birthday cake at high velocity! Good times (and small bits of my birthday cake) were had by all.

That's enough for today. Rest assured that other interesting things have happened and many random thoughts were thunk but until I decide that I'd rather be typing instead of jogging, caching, movie-watching, book-reading or web-community-developing... well, the postings will be less than frequent. Until next time!

Orignal From: Catching up...