Today I led the Pathfinders back into the neighborhood where we distributed bags for the food drive yesterday. Some streets gave a lot, and some gave very little. I don’t know what the difference is. It didn’t seem to be related to their affluence.

Collecting the bags took about an hour, and then everyone hauled them back to the church. I had set up several tables and put signs on them. The first three or four tables had no signs, and that’s where all the food was placed. Behind those I had two tables labelled “Canned Food” and “Dry Food.” Then behind those were tables labelled “Canned Fruit,” “Canned Vegetables,” “Canned Beans/Chili,” etc. I had one group of kids moving the stuff off the first wave of tables onto the second, and two more groups to further sort them onto the tables in the back. Then we took the bags and loaded the food into them.

You might be surprised at how much Jello we got. I know I was.

I went back to the food closet, but it didn’t look to me like there was enough room back there for all the food we had collected. I decided we would wait on shuffling it back there until I can get a hold of Sharon, our Community Services Director.

Afterwards, we had some popcorn, fruit, and animal crackers, and then we started our regular Pathfinder meeting. Eating during the meeting was a mistake, as the kids left crumbs everywhere. So we had to vacuum before we did much of anything else, otherwise, we’d have had ground-in-crumbs all over the floor.

I taught the Disaster Response honor tonight, since that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and also, we had a bunch of food to sort. We used the technique I learned at the seminar last weekend, and that worked out pretty well. I’m fairly convinced that we could mount a respectable, smooth-running donations collection point if we ever need to. We weren’t numbering stuff, but that would be a pretty small leap from what we did do. All in all, I’d say it went very well.

After potluck today, I had the Pathfinders assembling the plastic bags and letters for our food drive. I had 11 kids and 6 adults (including myself). We divided into five groups and hit the neighborhood.

Sometimes people just astound me. The kids I had with me were knocking on doors, but if no one answered, they’d just leave the bag hanging on the door. But every now and then when someone answered, they’d refuse to take a bag. “No, sorry. We’re not going to do that this year.”

Who are these people? Who would refuse to even take a bag? All we were asking for was a can of food. That’s about $0.69 at the grocery store.

Oh well. We are still polite to people even if they don’t want to take a bag. Tomorrow we’ll go back through there and collect the food.

Tomorrow after church, I will lead the Pathfinders on a food drive, so there are plenty of things that I need to do before then so we can be ready.

Can Collecting is done in two phases. During the first we distribute bags with letters stapled to them. The letters explain what we’re doing, and how the recipient of said bag can help. Phase two is when we go around and collect the bags.

In the morning I need to make 300 copies of the letter (I bought some orange paper for this) so the kids can staple them onto the bags. I also need to prepare maps so I can hand them out to the drivers, and I need to figure out which kids are going with which drivers. Each driver will also need copies of the medical release forms in case of emergency. So I have some photocopying to do tomorrow.

Two years ago when we did this, we were working the collection phase, when one of the kids (a first-year member) went up to a house, looked in the bag on the porch, and then returned to the car without it. Here’s how that went:

Girl: I don’t think that one was for us.
Me: Did it have food in it?
Girl: Yes.
Me: Then I think it is for us. Who would leave food in a bag on their back porch on the very day we’re collecting cans for a food drive?
Girl: I dunno.
Me: Go get the bag.

She went and got the bag. When we got back, we were sorting the food, and we found one that had tulip bulbs in it. And fertilizer. It only took me a couple of moments to realize what had happened. She thought the tulip bulbs were onions, so when I asked if there was food in the bag, she thought there was.

We had stolen someone’s gardening supplies.

The next day I returned to the house where we had found the bulbs. There were bags of mulch piled up along the sidewalk, and all kinds of gardening evidence. I rang the bell, but I secretly heaved a tremendous sigh of relief when no one answered. I put the bag of bulbs (and fertilizer) back on the porch and made a hasty retreat.

Hopefully, we will not repeat that error this year.

One of the kids who used to be in Pathfinders approached me a while back and asked me to buy some cookies to support her field hockey team. Because I am a huge supporter of field hockey, and because I love cookies so much (one of those is a lie! can you guess which one?), I bought two boxes.

I would have bought three boxes, but they were a bit pricey. Fundraisers are like that. They came in last week, and she delivered them to us. Tonight I was feeling a bit peckish, so I popped 18 into the oven: nine oatmeal raisin (mmmm) and nine chocolate chip (for the rest of the family to share). Chocolate chip is OK I guess, but oatmeal raisins are the ultimate. The third box would have been peanut butter. I wanted it to be the second box, but then I would have been the only one in my family who would have been exceedingly joyous about the cookie purchase.

I baked them for 10 minutes. The instructions suggested 10-12, and since I wanted them as soon as possible, I went for 10. But they were clearly not finished. I even waited for the oven to preheat before I popped them in. (The nerve!) So I let them go another two minutes, but they still looked raw. I consulted the missus. She suggested that I let them go another two minutes.

Now I have heard that one definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result. I shared this lore with my bride, but she did not appreciate it too much. After two more minutes, I removed the cookies. She was correct, so if she kills me, don’t let her plead insanity.

The instructions went on to say to let them cool for 15 minutes. Va snagged two right off the cookie sheet immediately. I told her about the instructions. She lef the kitchen with both cookies. I attempted to take the moral high ground by waiting for 15 minutes. The smell was nudging me in the direction of insanity. Oooaaaat meeeeaaaal raaaaiiiisinnnnn.~~~

After five minutes Jonathan suggested that perhaps the box had intended to recommend 5 minutes rather than 15. We decided that this must be the case, and we had been plenty moral about the whole affair, so we tested it out.

I gently lifted two oatmeal raisin wonders from the cookie sheet and held one in each hand. They seemed to hold up pretty OK. I took a bite. Yummm. I polished off the cookie in the left hand in short order, and then decided that I much preferred the feeling of having one cookie in each hand, rather than just one cookie in one hand. So I grabbed another. Much better (num, num, num).

Again, I ate the cookie in the left hand and was left with only one cookie in one hand. By some miracle, I was able to eat the third cookie without holding a second cookie in the other hand (even knowing that an idle hand is the devil’s workshop). I was somehow able to resist the nearly overpowering temptation to eat a fourth cookie.

For that, I’ll wait until everyone else is in bed.

Today at lunch I went outside my office once again and made yet another attempt to find a geocache that I do not doubt is hidden there. Only I can’t find it.

I did find that my Tomtom will let me see my lat/long in gory detail, so I don’t really need the Offroad Navigator I installed on it yesterday. It has the added benefit of showing me how many satellites it’s receiving, how strong the signals from it are, and where each thinks I am. It takes an average of these (perhaps a weighted average, giving more weight to the ones with stronger signals) to decide where to tell me I am.

And even with that, when I get close to the cache, it just quits updating. But I haven’t given up yet.

After work I went to Sears and returned the timer I bought for the washing machine. Ka-ching! Got that money back, and I am ever-so-delighted about it. I still had to pay for shipping it here though, but that’s an order of magnitude less than the timer, so I’ll not complain. It was my own incompetence that led me down that path anyhow.

Tonight was much more pleasant here at the house than last night was. Two of my kids were getting a bit sassy with me yesterday. David raised his voice at me to the point where Penny climbed up on the couch with Beth (which she only does when she is scared). He was having trouble solving a math problem, and I told him how to solve it – but he didn’t believe me. Once he calmed down, he recognized that I am indeed a mathematical genius and he should never doubt my assertions. He had just never thought about the solution to his problem in the (much simpler) terms with which I phrased it.

Then it was time for Beth to practice the piano. She kept insisting she “needed my help” when I know that all she really wanted was to delay practice. Whine, whine, whine. I told her to quit whining. She whined some more. I took away TV privileges. She responded by whining. I told her to quit whining or I would keep taking away privileges. She whined. No computer. Whine. No TV tomorrow. Whine. No chocolate milk at bedtime. Whine. Bedtime now (it was only 6:00pm). That was the end of the whining. She was asleep before 7:00.

Tonight was a stark contrast to that sorry scene. Everyone was all smiles. No angry voices. No whining (even during piano practice). So maybe they learned a lesson yesterday. I hope they don’t forget it too soon.

Today at lunch I decided to try that geocache again. It was not where I expected to find it, and I’m pretty sure that’s where it is supposed to be hidden. I’m going to assume it’s just not there anymore. There’s yet another geocache near my office, so I went for that one too.

I found some software I could load onto the Tomtom called “Offroad Navigator”, and it had a lot of promise. Its main feature is that it does not insist that you must be on a road. It doesn’t use any maps either. I had to enter the latitude and longitude into it, and it would tell me how far I was from that point, and in which direction it lie. But that is way more useful for geocaching than the insistence that I must be on a road.

This cache is near a couple of power transformers. I assume that’s what they are, but I’m not 100% positive. They could just as easily be telephone equipment. This equipment is housed in two green metal enclosures standing side-by-side, and they are about 4′x2′x4′. These are surrounded by bushes, and the area is well-mulched. But as soon as I would get close to them, it’s as if the GPS would just shut down and quit updating. I’m assuming that they must be pretty strong sources of radio waves (transformers and telco stuff could both do that). Anyhow, I knew I was close. I searched around the area, poking through the mulch and looking under bushes. I picked up lots of trash too. But I found no cache.

This sport is beginning to get tedious.

As it turns out (and it comes as no surprise), hose clamps are not optional equipment on a washing machine.

I got a call from Va today while I was at work. The washing machine made a strange sound, and then sprayed water all over the floor. I suspected I knew what it was, and when I got home, I found that I was correct: I had neglected to put the hose clamps back in their proper position, so when the washer was turned on for the nth time, the fill hose came loose.

The thing that really gets me is that I remember double checking the hoses before I zipped the cabinet back together. I guess my double-check wasn’t close enough though. Not one of those four hose clamps had been put where it belonged.

It was a small matter to reattach the one that came off, and even a smaller matter to move the clamps into their proper positions. Sigh. The good thing to come from this is that I am now reminded to return the timer to Sears for a refund. I’ll try to remember to do that tomorrow.

In other news…
Today during lunch I went searching for a third geocache (I looked for two and found one on Saturday). I didn’t find it, so I’m one for three now. When I got back to the office, I read some of the comments that people who have found it left. And now I know where to look. I’ll try again tomorrow.

I went to the Disaster Recovery seminar today in Portland, ME. I had to get up at 6:00 am which is about 8 hours earlier than I usually do (or so it felt). Then I drove for two and a half hours, arriving about 15 minutes early.

The seminar itself was pretty interesting. There were a lot of people I know from other Pathfinder clubs, but I was the only one there not from Maine. The first thing they did was take our pictures so they could issue us ID cards (they will mail them out). That will get me into a disaster zone should the need arise.

I think the main message I took away from the seminar is that there are some things that are irresistible for donors to donate, but which are absolutely not needed. Chief among these is water and used clothing.

Water is not needed because pretty much all the disaster response teams in the US have agreements in place with beer bottlers. They can (and do) supply bottled drinking water by the truckload at a moment’s notice.

Used clothing is not critical either. First, it represents a huge burden to the agencies that warehouse it, because before it can be useful, it has to be sorted by size, sex, and season – that’s a lot of piles. Doing that work takes a lot of time, and frequently, the clothing isn’t needed at ground zero anyhow. There have been disasters where getting rid of excess clothing was a major problem – neither Goodwill nor Salvation Army would take it.

At the end of the seminar I had to take a test which I’m pretty sure I aced. That’s the requirement for getting the badge which should arrive in the mail sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Our conference Disaster Response Coordinator asked me if I would be willing to attend VOAD (Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster) meetings in NH, and I said I would. I hope I don’t regret that!

I have come to the conclusion that our GPS unit is not really suited for geocaching. Since it’s supposed to stay in the car, it always assumes that you’re on a road. If it finds that you are not on the road, but near one, it “makes the correction” and plots your position on the road. This is not a good thing when you are trying to find an off-road cache.

Beth, Penny, and I walked down to Sandogardy Pond and looked for the two caches that are down there. We utterly failed to find either of them. So we went back home. I checked out the geocahing website again and read the clues. Then I looked at the “spoilers” showing more precisely where to find the cache.

Now I have spent an awful lot of time hanging around at Sandogardy, so when I saw the photos, I knew exactly where this thing was. At that point we were both too tired to walk down there… so we drove.

In short order we had found the cache. It was nowhere near where the Tomtom said it should be (though Google Maps had it exactly right).

The cache itself was pretty tiny! Just a little aluminum capsule about a half inch in diameter and maybe 1.5 inches long. I unscrewed the cap and found the log inside. The log was a sheet of paper about an inch wide and I guess 11 inches long, rolled up onto a toothpick. We unrolled it and signed the second-to-the-last space. Beth signed first. I instructed her to leave enough space for me to sign too, but she didn’t. I squeezed “jwt” and the date in there anyhow. Then we came on home.

I fell asleep on the couch, and Beth played on the computer.

Tomorrow I am going to Portland, ME for a seminar on Disaster Response. I’m going to get certified to help run a donations warehouse, accepting donations, bundling them up into useful packages, and distributing them. So when a disaster strikes, I will be qualified to assist.

Last week at the Pathfinder meeting we worked on the Fungi honor. One of the requirements is to identify and either photograph or draw 15 species of fungi. There are a lot of honors like that, and I always have the kids do the drawing. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that not all the kids have cameras and I’m not about to loan them mine. Another is that drawing requires closer observation of the specimen.

But there are problems. Specifically, David isn’t very good at drawing, and hates to do it. He asked why they couldn’t just take pictures, and I explained the reasons I just mentioned above. Then he suggested that maybe he could take photos later. I said he could, but that I wanted him to keep quiet about it so I wouldn’t have a revolt on my hands.

Today when I got home from work, I suggested that he should go outside and take the pictures, and he agreed. We went out together, because I had already spent a considerable amount of time scouting the property for mushrooms (I had collected several specimens for the meeting last week). I showed him how to operate the camera in the manual mode, because the results are so much better that way. F-stop, macro lens, tripod, 2-second delay (so the camera can stop shaking after the button is pressed), and setting the exposure time. It looked like he was doing a decent job, but I haven’t reviewed his pictures yet.

Now all he needs to do is identify them. I had identified over half the ones I brought in last week, and other Pathfinders (staff and kids alike) worked on identifying the rest. So in the end, all of them had tentative ids, which is good enough for me since we’re not eating them.

Tomorrow he and Jonathan will be visiting with some friends from church, so that will leave Beth, Va, and I here at home in the afternoon. My plan is to take Beth and Penny for a hike down to Sandogardy Pond, even if it’s rainy. We’re going to try our hand at geocaching, and I found that there are two geocaches there. If that goes well, the next honor the Pathfinders do could very well be Geocaching. We’ll see!