April 27, 2015

Somebody has been attempting to guilt-trip me into writing another blog post. Let it be known that I am writing this because I had meant to anyway, not because the guilt-trip succeeded.

I spent the weekend caching with my geo-buddies. On Saturday we went to McLaren Park with a bunch of newbies. One of my buddies is fed up with the overwhelming 50+ demographic on the geocaching scene and is trying to get young, tech people into caching. We took a crowd of 20- and 30-somethings through the park and grabbed most of the unique hides including one that required solving a rope trick to open, one with a trick mechanism, one with multiple decoy caches, one in a pinecone and a tree climb.

I have very few pictures from Saturday, and none from Sunday because I forgot to charge my camera. Here are the Saturday ones though.

I spent all of Sunday on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena island for the Earth Day trash pick-up event. My buddies and I walked all over the entire island and picked up all of the caches except the kayak caches and two tree climbs that were just too scary. There were several tree climbs we did succeed at though! We even got the night cache since we were still there by the time it got dark.

Treasure Island is man-made, built on the shoals of natural Yerba Buena, and so it's entirely flat. The military used to use it for nuclear cleanup training and other sci-fi stuff and the entire island is still radioactive (although they've fenced off the dangerous areas). We walked along the edge of the island for a time which I enjoyed because I could see the ocean waves. The best spot for that was out at the end of a rock jetty. There was a cache there (of course) and so we hopped out over all the rocks to get it. Afterwards I just wanted to sit there for a time and watch the ocean and the wind gliders.

On the beach I saw an alive crab that was moving sideways across the sand with its industrious little crab legs. Then we spooked it and it scuttled very fast and then went back to walking. Yamjerky made a cave for it with his boot heels, which it seemed to like. Then someone else poked at it with a trash picker-upper and it snapped at the rubber with its claws and tried to climb up Yamjerky's pantleg.

We were searching for a cache in a tree and someone had duct-taped a piece of paper to the tree with the words "Baby birds - do not disturb" and an arrow pointing to a hollow in the tree. There was no noise coming from the hollow, so we said it must be abandoned. After we found the cache I took a peek inside and in the dim light I saw a yellow beak, gaping wide. Soon it shut, but I could still see the yellow line of the beak, with another one next to it. They were very quiet although the mother bird sure was making a racket.

- Antisocial Violinist

April 21, 2015

Went on a hike to Marin last Saturday with the St Dom's YA group and found only one cache out of four.

What makes wood do this?

Tree swallowed an I-beam

The old dam and the still pond

- Antisocial Violinist

April 12, 2015

Oh, here is a picture from the SFO airport that I forgot to include last week.

I can't believe this got past whoever organizes these things.

The only funny thing that happened on Monday was that in the middle of Baroque ensemble, a panel in the ceiling opened and some black cords came jerking and bouncing down like snakes (apparently something to do with the sound system). We freaked a little and then started laughing, but our teacher didn't get it and looked annoyed at us for laughing.

The only interesting thing that happened on Tuesday was that Maddy kept dropping bits of paper from the second floor down into the atrium and hoping they would land on people. We watched the little white bits go spinning down and laughed hysterically. I don't think anyone noticed (us or the papers).

The only interesting thing that happened on Wednesday was that M and I saw a mouse on our night run. A small dark shape scuttled across the sidewalk and zoomed partway up a green wall on the other side, only to fall back, twitch itself and squeeze under the fence.

Two interesting things happened on Thursday, and they were both in German class:
1. We listened to a strange song about "Hawaii Toast" and
2. We had to do little skits and one group did a graphic one where the girl kept throwing up.

I spent yesterday morning at Mountain Lake, pulling watercress out of the North Arm. It's an invasive species and I had volunteered with a group to do the weeding. They gave us rubber boots and gloves and we waded through sloshing, sinking, squeezing, sucking mud and pulled out two large patches of watercress and lots of smaller ones. Afterwards I got a bunch of caches. Wonderful was the muddy cool water and the messy green sprawling stalks.

Bird at Mountain Lake

Today was my friend's recital, in which she and I played Schnittke's "Moz-Art for two violins". It's a humourous piece with whistling, bitonality, offset themes and two spots where I am required to detune my violin. We had conscripted M to do the whistling and some random acting onstage. As J (the girl whose recital it was) put it, "I looked confused, the people were laughing, it was good"

- Antisocial Violinist

April 6, 2015

Sorry, no blog post this week. I just got back from five days in YYC which I spent decorating eggs, playing for Triduum services and hanging out with my family. Expect about six more posts before the end of the year, folks.