Squamloonland

So many things going on and posts in my head, but the 12 of 12 must prevail.

Again the credit goes ultimately to this guy, but in my world it’s perpetuated by this thread in the PodCacher forums.

This month I thought I’d switch it up a bit and take all of the day’s photos with my BlackBerry…

I awoke to SquamDog snuggled in my sheets. If you’re not a small dog person, I apologize for the immediate gag reflex. He’s a manly dog—he just likes a good night’s sleep.

As soon as I grab those glasses, this will be my first view of the day’s weather.

I don’t understand people who shower the night before.

Arriving at school. A bit chilly for May 12th.

The morning mailbox. I have a big one because I’m a department head. Quite the perk.

The other morning mailbox. This 12th falls at an interesting time… just two days after I hosted my first geocaching event. I’d meant to post about that before now—and I still will. Anyway, those emails are all logs from Saturday’s event. I hid four caches along with the event itself, and since 85 people came, and most of them did at least a couple of my caches, there are quite a few logs arriving in my mailbox. A purposeful log makes my day.

Two minutes into the school day, just after the pledge.Left to right, up & down first:

• The tide waits for no one.
• Purple rose—a gift from a cast member in one of my plays
• The all-important clock, with my thinking-person’s version of the bell schedule
• Mona Lisa loudspeaker (to add jocundity to the morning announcements)
• No Smoking and No Spitting—procured from the Paris Métro in my moveable feast days
• Better late than never
• The beginning of a miniature Bayeux Tapestry that stretches across two walls.

I indulged French IV at the end of class with a few pictures of the WWFM on the LCD projector.

Teaching French I. Nothing like a good conjugation.

After work, I stopped off at the Casey Jones Locker cache to get the Eiffel photo I’d forgotten to take on Saturday. This is one of 1-2-1 Tech’s, which makes it special. The out-of-focus foreground is a great example of the limitations of a cameraphone.

After-dinner delight. My latest favorite flavor.

An Olympic figure skating medalist can ballroom dance. Who knew?

********************************

Think I’ll go back to the trusty Olympus SLR next month… but it was an interesting experiment anyway.

Since a portion of this new blogue of mine must needs extol the joys of the art of geocaching on a regular basis, I’d best get started.I originally took up geocaching as a solitary, secret-agent-man sort of pursuit. The idea of a society of hiders and seekers of camouflaged containers communicating over the internet using cryptic descriptions and code names, intermingled with an incentive to get outside and walk or hike, was irresistible to me. And when the street-routing GPS came into the mix, I was suddenly like Solveig Dommartin’s character at the beginning of the pre-GPS-craze 1991 film Until the End of the World, whose “Dashboard Computer System” took her where she wanted to go.

Only unlike in the movie, where a turn off the roadmoretraveled prompts the warning: “You are leaving the Map Zone Database”, my database is always with me.

And it’s taken me to some pretty special places.

Alone.

Which has, thus far, been the paradox of the pastime for me. Apart from my best friend, who lives several hundred miles away, and my father, who’s in a different stage of life, there’s not a soul in my immediate social circle who has much of an appreciation for my hobby. In fact, the general consensus of my family and friends is that the whole darned obsession is just a little bit strange. I guess I can see why, seeing as it’s not only one of the more antisocial means of being social that I’ve ever employed, but it’s based on quintessentially trivial pursuits as well.

I depend on the existence of a community of like-minded people to create escapist experiences and to experience mine, but the thrill, for me so far, has been in playing as an independent, fairly anonymous, loner.

I begin my geocaching category here only because I sense a sea change, and I have a need to get my bearings before I set sail.