Loss

"What experience do you have in pest control?," he asked me. As I looked him over I took him for a simple person. Kind of a redneck, well, he was a redneck, but something told me he wasn't a guy to mess around with.

"None," I said. "But I'm not afraid of hard work and I can learn anything quickly. I'm a little more intelligent than what you're probably used to having walk through the door."

That was probably the wrong thing to say. I saw the squint in his left eye, barely noticeable, but there. I've been in enough interviews to know the signs on a persons face when they aren't exactly pleased with an answer. This continued for about thirty minutes. A long interview, in my experience, has always been a good sign.

"Well, what we're looking for is someone who doesn't mind getting dirty. Termite work is hard, I don't mind telling you that up front. We work quickly and get the job done because there is always work to do," he said. "I see you were in the Army, that's a plus, and a combat engineer. You don't mind getting dirty or working hard and I like that. Well, I'll talk to the manager and the owner and see what they think. We'll call you in a week and see what we can do."

"Don't bother," I said getting up from my chair. "It has been very nice talking to you but I need a job and really don't have the time to wait. It's a shame too, I think we could have worked well together," I said. "I'll have a job by the end of the day."

"It's awfully tough out there," he reminded me. "Jobs are scarce right now."

And didn't I know it. I'd worked for Coca-Cola for about six years and had looked for a way off of that truck for the last three. Nothing paid as well, nothing I wanted to do anyway.

"Well, I'll have something by the end of the day even if it's flipping burgers," I said as I walked out the door.

Ten minutes later back at our apartment the phone rang. I had gone to the interview in Coca Cola uniform having just quit that morning. I couldn't follow the new company line they'd adopted since buying us out from a smaller family owned operation. They were looking for any reason to get rid of us anyway.

"Hello?"

"This is Phillp from Carolina Pest, why don't you start Monday morning?," came the voice on the other end of the line. "I think I can use you."

___________________________________

This began somewhere around eleven years of a, I guess I can say, friendship. Phillip was always hard to read. You never knew quite what he was thinking. But he was the kind of guy that would praise in public and berate in private. He would never raise his voice even when he was angry.

I learned most everything I knew about termites from him. He then taught me about moisture work, powder post beetles, repairing wood damage, etc. So much knowledge in that head of his that the student would never become the master. Not that he would hold anything back, he always offered his knowledge of things relating to the job. I just couldn't hold it all in my head.

I found out a lot about him over the years. He liked his beer. He liked to fish and hunt. He gave to others. Of himself and anything else he could. He was one of those "give you the shirt off his back" kind of guys. I watched him cut the price back on a few jobs because the folks just couldn't afford it and he always, always let the owner of the company know why. Sometimes offering to make up the difference himself.

Then came one year that we weren't going to get a bonus at the company. No one was happy about it. Some threatened to quit. I had to explain to my partner Josh that we weren't due a bonus, that a bonus was something the owner gave out of appreciation and that this year was a tight year for the company. A month later and we got a surprise. A bonus, not a big one, but we all got something. At least the termite crew did.

We found out later that Phillip had taken money from his own pocket and made those bonuses for us. That's the kind of guy that hired me and I gladly worked for and with. He never made you do anything that he wasn't willing to do himself. And was always willing to lay a hand to a tool and get the job done.

___________________________________

Sadly, I fell out of touch with several folk at the company. That hits me hard because it's my fault that I did. They were like family to me but I had moved on to other opportunities. I won't ever forget my time with them.

That squint in his eye? I saw that many times. I always stood down when I saw it, no matter how much I thought I was right. Very, very rarely was I right when pointing out anything that I though was wrong on paperwork, chemicals, the way to do things on a job. But when I was I always heard, "Well, you're learnin'!" 

Yesterday I found out that my friend had passed away. I can't say that we were friends in the way that people throw around so carelessly. I had and still have a huge amount of respect for the man. And, it's not a slight against anyone else I worked for in the company, an even greater amount of loyalty. I was there for some of the hardest times he probably went through with his family. And he took me aside when he was able to come back to work after being gone awhile and thanked me for taking care of our business in the company. No one else could make me feel that proud there. He did.

Flip, I missed your funeral. I'm sorry for that, but I know that you didn't like a lot of attention. I hope that it wasn't too much for you if somehow you know all those people showed up to the funeral home making a fuss. You had a lot of people that thought the world of you, I was one of them. And I hope you don't mind but yesterday got to me when I saw your obituary there on the screen. I feel loss at your passing and things like this hardly ever bother me. You were a good boss, a good teacher, and a great man to have on my side, which is where I always knew you would be as long as I was in the right. Thanks for teaching me and guiding me. I am better for that and to have known you while you were on this earth.

Goodbye.

I was supposed to be at Geowoodstock...

I had planned last year to attend GWXI in Florida this weekend. Plans change.After several things that went down I have kind of pulled back from the geocaching world. I still give a look here and there, check out new listings, read some of the blogs, listen to some of the podcasts occasionally,but the thrill just isn't there right now. The adventure has gone out of caching for me. I don't hear those first four notes of the Indiana Jones theme song when I see a new cache anymore. Maybe it's me, maybe it's that the new cachers think that what's being put out is an adventure. Either way, here I am.

I've only attended two GeoWoodstocks.

The first was in Warren, PA. That was an awesome weekend for me. I am not very comfortable around large groups of people. I like to hang back, take pictures and watch. I never had much interest in poker but I ended up  sitting through nearly the whole of the Geopoker tournament and really enjoying it, sitting through the podcasters live shows and making a couple of friends out of the bargain (HeadHardHat probably remembers a late night call) and meeting folk from all over. This really brought me out from behind the lens of my camera. I'm so used to being on the other side and just watching that I forget that the picture has sound! I just have to listen. I met Triple HHH, DarylW4, XpunkX, you know all the big names. I met MollyMonkey and made a friendship there that, while infrequent, is always there when we see each other in real life or online. It was a whole new world for me. I also visited Centralia, PA and a part of the abandoned PA turnpike and several other very cool locations. This is what caching is about to me. 

GeoWoodstock IX was very well put together. The exhibits and the flow of it were pretty good. Nothing's perfect, I heard complaints, but I heard way more good than bad. I met some of the people I've always wanted to meet up with. I also had the chance to promote Geocoinfest 2011 which I was helping plan and I really got to see what it meant to put on a great event. I will always be thankful for that to the folk that set up the Warren event and I made it a point to tell each volunteer and board member I met for that event. It was truly worth my time and money to be there. And it was a privilege.

Then came GWX. They took it back to its roots, as close as possible anyway, I still don't understand why it wasn't held in Louisville where the first GW was held.

It was held in Sellersburg, IN. The big difference for me was that this one was very spread out. Hundreds of feet between sections of the event. The flow was very bad. the vendors were sparse, the heat was unbearable. Now they couldn't have done a thing about the heat. That's not in their power to make happen. What I saw was that there wasn't water for the animals brought to the event, public restrooms that were available on the fairgrounds weren't made available to the attendees of the event, people were having to walk in a half mile to the event (there was special parking if you bought the top tier of package, we did), the food line and drink line were split so that you got your food first then had to go stand in another line to get your drink, etc. So much was wrong with this event. Again, this was compounded by the heat, which was out of all of our hands.

Not all was lost for me that weekend. I visited Captain McHarry's Vault, which was one of my favorite caches ever, I ate dinner at Claudia Sander's Dinner House (yes, the Col's wife) and downtown Louisville is something you have to visit. If you're ever there spend a day and really take it in. Sights in between all these and other great places and you get why we cache and take the chances we do.

It's all in the journey. And at the end of it, I don't really have a complaint.
______________

This led to my decision to stay home this weekend. I didn't want to go and feel like I wasted my money. I am sure the folk in Florida made a fine presentation of GeoWoodstock and I would like to hear from cachers either way how it went. Just post in the comments here or on the comments on G+, it will get back to me.

I stayed home and took the kids to the zoo. It was a perfect Saturday with perfect weather and I couldn't have spent a better day with better people than my family. No caches found, no Munzees scanned, the zoo most of the day, a trip to the bookstore and dinner. We were home by five and relaxing.

I thought about the last two GW all weekend. I had some great road-trips and was lucky to have ended up having at least one great experience for an event. 

I just felt like writing. Thanks for reading.

Naked Castaway Pt. 1

I suppose it's prudish of me, but I didn't want to watch this at first. I had no desire to look at another mans bare butt for the length of the series. But I started watching Naked Castaway,today and I am really enjoying it. 


If you haven't watched it, the show is about adventurer Ed Stafford surviving alone on a desert island, Oloura 200 miles southeast of Fiji for sixty days and, as the title suggests, he's naked. He is dropped off on the island with nothing but a cameras and "what God gave him".

He's had a pretty cool career up to this point. He attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and became a commisioned officer in the British Army in 1999. He commanded platoons in the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment. After leaving the military he became an expedition leader with the charity Trekforce, leading community and conservation expeditions through Belize, Guatemala and Borneo. He's also walked the entire length of the Amazon for charity, a feat that landed him a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. So yeah, quite a guy.


I am liking the show. At first I though it was just going to be another boring reality show. But, as he goes through his first day you can see that he is really terrified that he may have made the wrong move here. His first task he sets for himself is the hunt for fresh water, which he finds, but there's never enough. Food is another problem which he seems to be overcoming. I found myself laughing at him as he explores the island and comes upon things that have washed ashore. Plastic bottles, a shirt, a rugby ball. Discarded trash that you and I would take for granted.

But then he makes fire and the joy he has from this really got to me. Something so very simple,that I carry in my pocket and can have at anytime being such a major necessity. I've done survival training and had to make my own fire, but not in a situation where I wouldn't have been rescued if I had failed. Of course I am sure that there's an emergency plan in place for Stafford as well.

I am splitting this into two parts. Going to finish the second and last episode this afternoon.

JS

Waiting.

At the doctors with Logan. Ear infections. Bleh.

A Foodie Post (Sort Of)

One of the few foods that I absolutely love is cornbread. Both my grandmothers and my mother can make excellent cornbread. It has to be just right, the balance of corn meal to butter in the finished product.

From Wikipedia:

Native Americans were using ground corn (maize) for food thousands of years before European explorers arrived in the New World. European settlers, especially those who resided in the southern English colonies, learned the original recipes and processes for corn dishes from the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek, and soon they devised recipes for using cornmeal in breads similar to those made of grains available in Europe. Cornbread has been called a "cornerstone" of Southern United States cuisine. Cornmeal is produced by grinding dry raw corn grains. A coarser meal (compare flour) made from corn is grits. Grits are produced by soaking raw corn grains in hot water containing calcium hydroxide (the alkaline salt), which loosens the grain hulls (bran) and increases the nutritional value of the product (by increasing available niacin and available amino acids). These are separated by washing and flotation in water, and the now softened slightly swelled grains are called hominy. Hominy, posole in Spanish, also is ground into masa harina for tamales and tortillas). This ancient Native American technology has been named nixtamalization. Besides cornbread, Native Americans used corn to make numerous other dishes from the familiar hominy grits to alcoholic beverages (such as Andean chicha). Cornbread was popular during the American Civil War because it was very cheap and could be made in many different forms—high-rising, fluffy loaves or simply fried (as unleavened pone, corn fritters, hoecakes, etc.)

Corn dogs! I love corn dogs.  Just the corn dog and some mustard. It's just perfection in junk food form. I can't remember where I first had a corn dog, at the beach maybe? Probably. I see them all the time there. Maybe the State Fair? I can smell them now as I'm writing this and my mouth is watering. A smell stuck in my memory not so much for the dog part as that sweet cornbread around it. I love the taste and texture of it.

From Wikipedia:

There is some debate as to the exact origins of the corn dog; they appeared in some ways in the US by the 1920s, and were popularized nationally in the 1940s. A US patent filed in 1927, granted in 1929, for aCombined Dipping, Cooking, and Article Holding Apparatus, describes corn dogs, among other fried food impaled on a stick; it reads in part:

I have discovered that articles of food such, for instance, as wieners, boiled ham, hard boiled eggs, cheese, sliced peaches, pineapples, bananas and like fruit, and cherries, dates, figs, strawberries, etc., when impaled on sticks and dipped in batter, which includes in its ingredients a self rising flour, and then deep fried in a vegetable oil at a temperature of about 390°F., the resultant food product on a stick for a handle is a clean, wholesome and tasty refreshment.

In 300 Years of Kitchen Collectibles, author Linda Campbell Franklin states that a "Krusty Korn Dog baker" machine appeared in the 1929 Albert Pick-L. Barth wholesale catalog of hotel and restaurant supplies. The 'korn dogs' were baked in a corn batter and resembled ears of corn when cooked.

A number of current corn dog vendors claim credit for the invention and/or popularization of the corn dog. Carl and Neil Fletcher lay such a claim, having introduced their "Corny Dogs" at the Texas State Fair sometime between 1938 and 1942.^[3] The Pronto Pup vendors at the Minnesota State Fair claim to have invented the corn dog in 1941. Cozy Dog Drive-in, in Springfield, Illinois, claims to have been the first to serve corn dogs on sticks, on June 16, 1946.  Also in 1946, Dave Barham opened the first location of Hot Dog on a Stick at Muscle Beach, Santa Monica, California.

___________

No matter where or when it came from I am certainly glad it did. You can also get these on Amazon. It's a lot of 1000 for $20.00. That's a pretty good deal. And I am sure that some enterprising person with the right motivation could make something with corn dog sticks as well of find other uses for them.

I write because of things that come into my head during the day and this has been in there rattling around for most of this one. We ordered supper out last night and the kids both wanted corn dogs and so did I. I went to town and picked up supper having to smell them and wanting to eat them all the way home. Even the kids. I wanted to take food from my babies mouths. (Did I mention I love this mixture of two of my favorite things?)

Arriving home we un-boxed supper and sat down at the table, something we are slowly getting back into every night, TV off, quiet family dinner. Well, not quiet. Not my kids. There's usually a raised voice or two.

Anyway, I sat and watched these two heathen children peel all the cornbread off the corn dog and proceed to eat the weenie inside. This confuses me. Why didn't I just get some weenies and a nice stick from a tree outside? You've taken the best part and discarded it. That's like keeping the wrapping paper and throwing away the present to me. Not a direct mental image but you know what I mean if you are reading this. Or if you have kids.

I'm torn on the subject between the discarding the corn bread and the fact that I am the recipient of the discarded corn bread. It would seem that it's a win win, but I feel as if my children have no religion. Also that deal on Amazon and buying hot dogs weenies at the store and just doing that makes more sense than buying them corndogs. Again. I would miss out on the discarded corn bread. I am starting to think I need to have them both checked. Also, if anyone want in on a thousand corn dog sticks, I may have a deal for you.

Geosphere

On Saturday I was allowed to get out of the house for a bit and wander. I cache and munzee and take pictures when I am out and found that Geosphere (iOS) is going to be a great tool in the combining of the output from three sites and two hobbies. All three sites (GC.com OC.us and Munzee) allow a GPX to be downloaded for use on your devices so with a little bit of a learning curve I was able to easily drop all three sites data into one group and export the data to another GPX to send out to my caching partner +Wally Turbeville.

I wanted to try this not just for ease of use but because of something +Dave DeBaeremaeker mentioned awhile back. When we are out in the field playing we don't want to have to switch back and forth between different apps and websites. Having all this data in the same place is much more satisfying as I only needed to run two apps, Munzee and Geosphere, the whole time I was out. It made it a much more enjoyable experience as I took Wally into the wonderful world of OCUS and took him to several of their caches in Charlotte. I am especially glad to see the virtuals with OCUS that I can find and have the chance to place. I was a late comer on virtuals for GC.com and while I have found several, sadly I will never be able to place one. I hated when virts were taken away from GC. I found them to be some of the most interesting caches. I do understand the reason for archiving the cache type though. People abused them and when a few bad apples abuse the right we all lose.

As far as I can tell, there is no icon for Munzees in Geosphere. Come to think about it, why would you need one? You can't scan Munzees from Geosphere or mark them as found. This was all done for planning and mapping purposes. As you can see each regular Munzee was marked as a MEGA because how often are you going to come across a Mega. Both OCUS and GC caches fell under the regular icons of what is available for their particular cache types. Mystery Munzees were marked automatically as CITO. We were glad to have a good map with a nice view of what was available to us in any given area. I opted to make regular Munzees a black pin and virtuals a white pin in the map view and was very pleased with the view I got from that. I was also impressed with the accuracy of the Munzee app in different conditions. It was a nice clear day but I usually have problems dialing in on locations with a GPS under power lines and such. Most of the coords were dead on with an iPhone 4s and the Munzee and Geosphere app. (Props to TermiteHunter for dead on coords at each of his OCUS hides we hit!)

All in all a great day. 30 Munzees, 5 OCUS caches, 4 GC caches. And we had fun! That's the whole point anyway. We found some interesting history due to all three of the different parts of a game we both love very much. Caching gives us more than just coords on a map. It gives us an education, skills we wouldn't otherwise have, friendship. I wouldn't have met Wally if it hadn't been for caching or most of the people reading this. If we haven't met, you never know, could be never, could be tomorrow.

S

Let's talk about WAAS.

I can't count the number of times I have run into a new cacher on the trail and have heard, "My GPS just isn't that accurate. It doesn't get me to the cache."

First, no GPS is going to put you right on top of the cache. The game just wouldn't be that fun if you were put dead on the X. Second, there's a multitude of things that can affect your GPS accuracy from tree blockage, power lines, solar activity, etc. C, there's something you can do about it with the right GPS.




Each manufacturers GPS is going to be different. 

Maps, settings, capabilities, etc. I've seen two GPS of the same model get wildly different readings dead on top of a cache. Sometimes tens of feet apart, even more. One thing I always check first for a new cacher, after politely asking if I can hold their GPS, is their WAAS setting. Most will not have WAAS enabled.

From Garmins site:
WAAS consists of approximately 25 ground reference stations positioned across the United States that monitor GPS satellite data. Two master stations, located on either coast, collect data from the reference stations and create a GPS correction message. This correction accounts for GPS satellite orbit and clock drift plus signal delays caused by the atmosphere and ionosphere. The corrected differential message is then broadcast through one of two geostationary satellites, or satellites with a fixed position over the equator. The information is compatible with the basic GPS signal structure, which means any WAAS-enabled GPS receiver can read the signal.

I knew one cacher that had his settings off and had the wrong format set in his GPS for a year. He was using the wrong datum and found 1500 caches. Quite a feat. In the end it made him a better cacher because he had to develop skills that he would not have attained otherwise.

What does this mean to you? It means that your GPS will be more accurate and put you in the general area of the cache more quickly. Typical WAAS position accuracy is three meters (9.84 feet). From there it's all about the geo-force, your eyes and hands. The best thing I can suggest is experience. Many cachers hide the same way, a lot. I know a lot of cachers that hide the same way all the time. LOL So that makes it pretty easy.

Check you settings, especially on older models, to see if your GPS is WAAS enabled. You might be surprised.

And if you're  one of the new breed of cachers who use them new fangled cell phones for all your caching needs, I can't help ya. Just kidding. I found something that really help with my iPhone 4S. But that's next time.

Next up: GLONASS