Geocash!

25 November - A small runin with my happy go lucky passive aggressive (and sometimes just plain aggressive) housemate Rene was resolved reasonably amicably but sometimes I think that boy needs a little help. Today's plan was to join my friend Gregory in a little bit of geocache hunting. It was bitterly cold today, only about one degree above freezing. Normally, these kind of temperatures don't bother me but i'd put my warm tights in for a wash and even though we were on our bikes there was not nearly enough of the usual exertion which keeps me warm during a workday. Very simple concept - basically, people hide caches all over the world and then post the latitude-longitude coordinates on the internet (down to a 1000th of a degree or a second or whatever its called) along with a clue as to its exact hiding spot (eg, think trollish indicated that the cache was hidden underneath a bridge - thank goodness my fairy tale trivia is up to date). Greg had a portable GPS device that we used to track the items down - it would give you the direction and distance from the preset coordinatts and would beep when we got within 75m. Depending on the number of satellites we were connected with we could have a resolution of down to 5m but generallyit wasn't much better than 10. The caches were all hidden pretty well, sometimes camoflaged and sometimes buried. Wer had a list of 11 but only sought out 5 and we found all of them. The caches were all well hidden and if you didn't know exactly where they were you'd never find them. However, the less well hidden ones are sometimes uncovered by the 'geomuggles' (I wonder where that term came from???). Nothing very valuable is in any of them - basically, they're just like crappy little time capsules with small gewgaws like pins and souvenir toys along with a logbook of all the hunters who've found the cache. Still, lots of fun - would have been more fun if it hadn't started snowing (and me wearing 3/4ers and a couple of t-shirts, the horror!).
Also, dropped into see Mark at his work on the way in and bought a 'buff', a versatile bandanna like piece of headware which would be very useful for someone in my line of work - I mentioned that I was going across the road to check out second hand skis and Mark's boss said, 'You're looking for skis? Will these do?' and showed me a pretty crappy pair of second hand skis that were my size. I told him they'd be perfect and asked him how much. His price - one spliff. Now, where would I find one of those?