Friday night was movie night at paradox0220's place. Thanks to paradox for the movie (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), which was surreal and entertaining, and the pizza (Austin's Pizza), which I thought was pretty good. Also thanks to texaspatsfan for the beer and Niru for the dessert. It was fun, we should do that more often.

I haven't flown for six weeks and I was really hoping to at least be able to get some stick time this weekend. The forecast looked reasonable but not great, certainly not real soaring weather but I was optimistic.

Saturday, being the first saturday of the month, was demo day so I wouldn't be able to fly anyway. The weather was bright and sunny but I was a slacker and stayed inside most of the day. I was slow getting started, and ended up dropping by the office that afternoon to see what cowquat was up to (and to catch up on stuff I didn't get done earlier in the week). Later a bunch of us had a great sushi dinner at Ichiban (it was only my second time to try sushi, I had some salmon and salmon roe).

Sunday I got up early enough to go flying, made lunch, checked the recorded field report (marginal conditions, should be okay I thought), headed up to the field, and nobody was there. Usually when soaring is cancelled the field report is updated to say so, but not today. So I continued on for a nice drive through the hill country, taking 210 to 963 to Burnet, then 281 through Marble Falls, then 71 to 620 to Mansfield Dam where I ate my lunch. I hadn't brought my GPS (I had left it in the other car), so I couldn't look for any geocaches on the way, and found later that I had driven right by several.

I came back home and warmed up with some hot chocolate by the fireplace.

Determined to log some more geocaches, I picked three close to my house and set out to find them. They were all pretty easy (Round Rock Robber's Grave, Bigger Than Life Cache, and The Round Rock). I learned that in the bed of Brushy Creek, there are hundred-year-old ruts carved into the stone by passing wagons! (The picture links to a couple of photos.)

While wandering around the Brushy Creek bed, I stopped to talk to a nice Mexican-American woman named Yolanda. She was there with her daughter and granddaughter collecting bamboo that would be used in a traditional dance. The bamboo is cut into sections about three feet long, then bound together in groups of about five in such a way that when it is thrown by a dancer who holds on to one end, the contraption extends to its full length. It would also have ribbons tied along its length. She said she hadn't made any of these props for 15 years, but came back to the same place as she found the bamboo last time.

We talked for a while about how much the city has grown, and how Austin has crept northward to almost merge with Round Rock. She said when she was growing up in Round Rock, there was never a thought that Austin would reach all the way up here. She also remarked about how the water in Brushy Creek used to be clear, so that you could easily see the bottom, but now it is muddy and has foamy bubbles indicating some kind of pollution. Such is the price of progress, I guess.

I just logged my three geocache finds and nearly doubled the number of caches I've found. Even though I found my first cache over two years ago, I'm still new at this!

I got up this morning without any particular plans about what I was going to do today. So I first met up with equiraptor, decibel45, penny246, and maiteclay for a burger lunch at Hut's.

Without any particular destination or mission in mind, I headed up Mt. Bonnell just to go. Wandered around for a bit taking in the view, and peered down at the finely manicured houses by the lake. Some of them even had sturdy metal fences between the yard and the lake. If you had a lot with one side against the water, would you really put a fence up?

Then I headed off to Mansfield Dam to see whether they were letting people walk across it again. Ever since September 11, the old road over the dam has been closed to pedestrian traffic (and vehicle traffic too, of course). But sure enough, it's still "temporarily" closed.

I've always been curious about the "low water crossing" bridge visible south of the 620 bridge over Lake Austin. So I drove down there and found an LCRA park on the south side of Lake Austin. The low water crossing bridge doesn't go anywhere - the other side has a gate on the left labeled private, and a gate on the right with a no access sign. But from the park you can walk along the shore all the way up to the power house at the base of the dam. Someday when there's more water I'm going to go back there when there's something flowing.

When I got back to my car I remembered that my GPS still has all those geocaching waypoints and there's bound to be some around the dam somewhere. In fact, there was one right in the same park, and I'd walked right by it twice! I went back to the spot where it should be, but couldn't find it. At the time I didn't know what I was looking for, and now I do, so I'll be back there again.

There were a bunch of other caches a short way south of where I was, and I went to go check those out. After a few wrong guesses about how to get there (my gps map doesn't have all the new roads), I finally located one by the side of a trail. It only had the coordinates of another location though! This one was a multi-cache. I found the second location easily, which gave a third set of coordinates, but I couldn't find the third location. After poking around for a good half hour or more, I gave up and went to find another. The next one I found looked like it was in the middle of somebody's front yard (I didn't try to look for it there). I found out later that the listed location wasn't the actual location of the cache at all, but just the starting point for a puzzle cache! More advance planning needed, I guess.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll go find the ones I missed today, now knowing the clues and other useful information. I think it'd be fun to go with somebody else, anybody want to join me?

I woke up this morning without any definite plans for the day. Recently it's either been flying if the weather is good, or something else planned for the day. But today the weather was overcast with scattered showers, so flying was cancelled. I talked with dbaker briefly this morning about taking a short flight later in the day in a Cessna, but the weather forecast didn't show that it would get any better (it didn't).

So this morning I watched Tomb Raider which I'd picked up at the video store the other day. Mostly because it has Angelina Jolie in it. Then I headed out to return it, and to find some food (since I have almost nothing in the fridge).

( Read about geocaching and me being a dork )

Well I thought it was a lazy day. Maybe it was and I'm just being longwinded.

I've just finished loading a couple hundred geocaching waypoints around the Austin area into my GPS. Of course I didn't do that by hand, but wrote some python code to use the Garmin protocol to load the waypoint data. The waypoint data can be downloaded in XML form from the geocaching web site.

This is the first nontrivial program I've done with python, and I'm finding that it's quite nice. I did have some minor trouble with unicode vs ascii string data, but I'm sure that's just my own unfamiliarity with python's handling of such data.

So now that I have geocaching waypoints in my GPS, and my GPS is usually in my car, hopefully I'll be more spontaneous in looking for caches. However, the GPS doesn't hold very much information about the cache except the location, so that makes it a bit more challenging if you don't have a web browser handy to look up the cache info. Maybe I do need a cell phone that does WAP after all...