I know, the blog hasn’t had a lot of activity lately. I’ve been spending some of the past weekend climbing Mt. Strachan again (and again) in order to set up a multi-cache. It still hasn’t been completed yet.
Anyway, that chewed up a few weekends. And, you know? Things get in the way.
This weekend past was pretty busy too. On Saturday, Aidan and I biked around the city — first to “PCC”, the Preschool Curiosity Club at Science World and later to Canadian Tire to pick up some screws in order to put up more shelving in our bedroom. Yeah I know, exciting right? But Aidan sure likes being on the back of the bike.
The PCC was ok, an hour in Science World where we decorated some bags in a fall theme, learned a bit about what happens in fall, carved some pumpkins, and planted some pumpkin seeds. Aidan rather liked carving the pumpkin … we had pumpkin carving knives that were essentially kid-safe, and he did a lot of the carving himself.
Today, we headed out to Word on The Street in downtown Vancouver. We go every year (as long as it’s not pouring) and this year was no different. At least, it was no different in us going. At the risk of sounding overly harsh, the actual event was very different. There were many fewer exhibitors this year, and the crowds were much smaller. I don’t know what it was, but it sure didn’t live up to years gone by.
At least Aidan got a couple more trips on his favourite mode of transportation.
Later this afternoon, we headed up to Queen Elizabeth Park to take some pictures. Aidan wasn’t very cooperative, but we got some shots.
Aidan attends his first day of preschool a little later today. Here’s some pics of his outfit. He looks so grown-up!
Today, Aidan, Gwen, Tomer, Carla, and I participated in the Tailspin GeoRally.
This was a geocaching event that featured 20 teams of cachers trying to find a series of caches placed especially for the event. The rally started in Confederation Park in North Burnaby. Cars left the staging area every five minutes from 8:45am onwards, and our start time was 9:25am (Team 9). At the start, you were given the guidelines for the event and the coordinates for the first cache. Caching teams alternated between starting at waypoint number 1 and waypoint number 6. Teams that were on the first track had green passports and teams on the second track had yellow passports. At each waypoint, teams found the coordinates to the next waypoint (perhaps after solving a puzzle) as well as a stamp for their passport. You had to collect all the stamps or incur a 45 minute penalty. Additionally we were given a baggie with hints for each waypoint, each stapled shut. If teams opened any hint, they incurred a 15 minute penalty for each hint opened. The goal was to cross the finish line with the shortest time. We weren’t given any details about the caches, but we were told that one of the caches was ‘manned’. We joked a little about that (a man cache? huh?) and it came out that the cache was actually ‘boy-ed’ since the children of one of the organizers would be running the waypoint.
(more…)
Here’s a clip from CBC Vancouver about two local geocaching superstars, “Scruffster” and a group of the “WildWigglyBeanz” (who also run the excellent worldcaching.com site).
http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/bc/ondemand/video/bc-080903-geocaching-NIXON.wmv
Both Scruffter and Nina will be participating in Saturday’s Tailspin Georally.
