Teddy in Tasmania, Yella Sam, World’s End State Park trails, ‘Lonesome Jim’, ‘Da Vinci Code’
(posted from home)
(this post covers 9-14 November)

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Tuesday, 14 November-

This morning I went once again to my periodontist to have the dental implant checked and the news isn’t good; I’ll have to have the bone graft redone. I feel a twinge of pain as the periodontist works in the area and that should not be. The bone graft apparently didn’t ‘take’ completely. We start all over again right after Thanksgiving.
I then stopped by the local Starbucks and read the Times. Several months ago I had met a Starbucks employee named Jim there and we started talking about photography. We’ve talked off and on about it on my occasional visits there. Today he joined me during his morning break and we talked about his experiences with photography in the Olympic Peninsula rain forest and Mount Rainier while I told him of the millions of dollars of rain and flood damage there being reported in the NPS Morning Report.
I spent much of the afternoon blogging and ran a few errands on the bike.
That evening we watched ‘The DaVinci Code’, the Ron-Howard-directed bomb of a movie adaptation of the Dan Brown mystery novel. I see RottenTomatoes gives it a terrible rating and I have to agree it’s not very good. IMDB.com readers give it a higher rating. It was a tough project to take on but with Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou he certainly had the talent to work with and I did enjoy watching them at work. But the story itself drags and confuses.

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Monday, 13 November-

Today marked the end of the three-week processing period for my local pistol permit. This process is a little odd here in York County. You submit your paperwork and wait three weeks. If you don’t receive a letter of denial, then you assume it has been approved and come in to have your photo taken and the permit issued. And, by the way, don’t call the office; they will not accept any calls to request status. So I took them at their word and I’m happy to report it happened just as they promised—no hassles at all.
I then ran some errands, picking up some photo-printer ink for an art project Labashi is working on and doing some grocery shopping on this rainy day.
I spent the afternoon working on my boyhood 20-gauge shotgun and .22 ‘plinker’ rifle. The shotgun just needed a routine cleaning and oiling. The .22 was given to me by my parents on my 12th birthday and has spent the great, great majority of its life stored away. It had become dangerous to use because the safety didn’t work properly. My brothers and I had noticed years ago that something had changed with the safety. It no longer locked into either the ‘safe’ or ‘fire’ position and it was possible to get the trigger positioned in such a way that taking the gun from ‘fire’ to ‘safe’ actually fired the rifle! So today I took it apart. I found it had a broken safety-spring. This allowed the safety’s trigger-catch to rotate ever-so-slightly out of position; just enough to let the trigger mechanism to slide past and jam against the trigger. Any effort to free the jam then allowed the trigger to release the firing pin. By googling for the rifle model I found a source for safety-springs for this 44-year-old el-cheapo .22 and ordered two of them. Hopefully they’re on their way. In the meantime I’ve changed the safety so it can’t jam the trigger.
That evening we watched the extras on the ‘Desperate Housewives’ disk. That Mark Cherry (the developer and chief writer of the show) is a very interesting guy and no shirker when it comes to working hard to make his dream come true.

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Sunday, 12 November-

It’s a rainy day today and I spent most of it on the web. I continue to be fascinated by the variety of videos showing up on youtube.com and video.google.com. I also spend a good bit of time ‘patrolling’ favorite interest groups and owner’s groups. I like to read the National Park Service’s Morning Report (www.nps.org/morningreport) once or twice a week and am intrigued by all the incidents that happen in our parks. I also like to check the Pennsylvania DCNR web sites (www.dcnr.state.pa.us) to see the latest news about our state parks and state forests.
That evening we wrapped up the first season of ‘Desperate Housewives’. We can use a break now before starting Season Two but we’re looking forward to it.

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Saturday, 11 November-

This morning I took the Concours to my favorite bike shop to have a clutch-switch installed. The bike had developed a quirk of not starting unless the clutch lever was depressed slightly. It was completely reliable as far as starting if you DO depress the clutch lever but that’s not how it should work. The changeout only took a half-hour and then I headed to my brother’s home about an hour away. We went out to lunch and caught up on the news from my latest trip and then I buzzed on home by dark.
That night Labashi and I watched three episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’.

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Friday, 10 November-

This morning I left my campsite at World’s End State Park and drove Mocha Joe up to the Canyon Vista viewpoint as a trailhead for a walk on the Link Trail. I again had a sunny day but it was somewhat airy and I kept taking off top layers then putting them back on as I moved from sun to shade and back again. The Link Trail winds across the mountain-top and ducks in and out of impressive stands of hemlocks. I walked for an hour and a half and came out to a forest road. I crossed and continued on for another half-mile before returning to the forest road. My map showed I could take the forest road back to the vista so I did that rather than backtrack the same trail. Along the way I was thinking how alone I was up here when two pickups full of hunters came by. A short distance further I saw a parked truck, then another, and another. I also saw one hunter just off the road; his orange cap drawing my eye. Judging by where they were parked and by the one hunter I saw, they were apparently hunting the area I had just come through and I had thought I had the woods all to myself. This just reminds me to continue to wear my extra-bright hunter-orange cap when hiking during hunting season, even when it seems nobody’s around.
My walk today lasted a bit over two-and-a-half hours.
After returning to the van I drove to a parking spot at the Loyalsock Trail intersection and made lunch, then decided it’s time to head home.
I took Route 42 south to Bloomsburg, then 11 to its intersection with 15 and then home, arriving by dark. I see the odometer says this week’s trip totaled 750 miles. Mocha Joe now has 89K on him and has done very well for us.
That evening Labashi and I watched the movie ‘Lonesome Jim’, a Steve Buscemi-directed farce starring CaseyAffleck and Liv Tyler. I’m not sure I’d have given it a two-thumbs-up rating but it did have some pretty funny moments. I see RottenTomatoes.com gives it a 43% ‘cream of the crop’ rating. I probably would not have rented it if I’d known that. My experience is I don’t like movies that don’t get at least a 60% rating there.

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Thursday, 9 November-

After my stay at the local Wal-Mart last night, I spent much of this morning connected to the internet. I was in Mocha Joe and parked in front of the Ten West coffee shop in Mansfield. This setup works well for me. I have a power source for my laptop (and can avoid the hassle of trying to find an outlet somewhere in the coffee shop), a private place to work, and I get to enjoy a morning coffee-mocha while doing my work. Today I was uploading my blog entry and handling emails. Among my emails today was a very interesting one. A woman in Tasmania had taken her son to a geocache in Tasmania where one of my travel bugs (Teddy the Traveling Turtle) was supposed to be located… but he isn’t there. Some background: I sent this travel bug (http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?tracker=449363) on his way in January of 2004 and very shortly thereafter he was taken to Australia. He then went missing for a year. The geocacher who took him to Australia contacted visitors to the cache where he’d been left but to no avail. But then he showed up in Tasmania. He traveled around there from January 2005 until July of 2005 but has not been seen since (or, more correctly, has not been logged as having been found). The email I received today came from a woman who had read about Teddy and had taken her young son, Michael, to see him and pick him up. But Teddy was gone; someone had apparently picked him up and didn’t realize he’s a travel bug. She kindly offered to replace him with another turtle if I want to send a replacement travel bug tag and explained that poor Michael had cried when Teddy wasn’t found where he was supposed to be. I declined the offer, thinking I’ll send some emails to visitors who have logged their visits to the cache and may yet come up with him but it’s a long shot. If that fails, I’ll have to re-think how to get him going again. I liked getting copies of log entries each time he moved and I enjoyed how some people would play along in the game of helping Teddy travel the world. In the meantime, I’ve ‘picked up’ Teddy’s travel bug number so it doesn’t continue to appear in the cache listing only to disappoint any kids hoping to find him there.
And that brought up the subject of Yella Sam. That’s another travel bug (http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?tracker=449587). This one is a little yellow army-guy with a parachute attached. I sent him out in February 2004 and he traveled frequently until March 2005. But then I received an email from a geocacher in North Carolina which told me Yella Sam had been lost while in their possession. I again was hoping it would show up but today was the day to finally admit defeat. I logged his travel bug number back into my possession.
By late morning I was back on the road and heading east on Route 6. I stopped for lunch at Mt. Pisgah State Park and thought I might try a little fishing in their pond on this beautiful sunny day but decided instead to continue on to World’s End State Park, my goal for the day. Shortly after leaving the park I saw a six-point buck cross the road just ahead of me and this one also stopped right after crossing the road and posed for me in an open field.
By 1400 I was at World’s End and in my campsite. I spent the next hour fishing the Loyalsock Creek across from the campground and saw one nice trout in the ultra-clear water but had no hits on the various spinners and spoons I tried. I need to work on casting accuracy anyway so my time there was by no means wasted. I’m not sure it’s even possible to ‘waste time’ when you’re fishing on a sunny day along a very pretty trout stream.
At about 1530 I decided to take a walk on the Canyon Vista trail. Since it was getting late I thought I’d just do a quick out-and-back but in only 30 minutes the trail was climbing very steeping toward the top of the mountain, so steeply that I was having trouble with the leaves causing me to occasionally slide back downhill. When I finally made the top I thought I’d rather not return down that steep section. The map showed I could continue on and intersect the Loyalsock Trail to return or just continue to the vista then continue on via the Canyon Vista trail as it circled back to the campground. When I reached the Loyalsock Trail I was only ten minutes from the vista and if I hurried I’d be able to see the sunset from the vista. I reached the vista as the sun was just touching the horizon and watched it set, then started down-trail as fast as I could walk--- darkness was coming on very quickly. I knew there was a forest road nearby and I could catch it if the trail got nasty in the dark but I did have two lights in my day-pack so I was fine. I made it back to the campground with about ten minutes to spare. That turned out to be a four-mile walk.
That evening I watched ‘Mad Max’ (the original 1980 one) and I was surprised how little I remembered of it. The bad guy looked familiar but otherwise it was a new movie for me. I enjoyed seeing the various Hondas and Kawasaki Z900’s in their cafe-racer versions --- very cool.