Holidays Archives - One Guy Outdoors

December 27, 2021December 27, 2021

Caching Christmas – Find Number 350

Prologue

I said in my last entry that I would try to find 350 caches before Christmas. I planned on finding two of them near the Birch Hill Dam. This plan met with some resistance. First, the caches were on either side of the river and we couldn’t cross the damn to get there. Second, well you will just have to wait for the second because it is basically the story of the day for Christmas Eve. Plus, it sets up for my caching Christmas story.

That, folks, is called foreshadowing. And yes, it and this ghost of an apple tree and that statement are meant to be foreboding, too.

I received a souvenir from going out on Christmas Eve. Quinn only received cold toes. Lilo, too, because she stepped on some thin ice and her front paw fell into the water. As Meatloaf said, 2 outta 3 ain’t bad. In this case, though, it most certainly was bad. Hopefully caching Christmas Eve doesn’t bring a pox on our family.

A cool new concept on Geocaching that doesn’t necessarily add anything to the hobby other than giving virtual things to collect, too.

December 24, 2021 (Day Number 111, A DNF)

Quinn chose to come with me today. We also brought the dog. A ten minute drive got us to the parking area of Birch Hill Dam about 3/4 of a mile away. I know what you’re thinking. Trust me, I thought it at first, too. However, this walk took us along a paved service road, so no chance of it increasing 3 or 4 fold like the one in Shutesbury. It took a little longer than expected because we stopped a couple of times, once for a cool ice sheet and another for a waterfall.

Cool Ice Wall with Water Behind at Birch Hill Damn

Quinn noticed the icicles in the back first.

We made it to ground zero of the geocache near the dam. If I didn’t wander across the rock wall to the actual dam, I’d have thought the name of the cache, “Water, water everwhere” was sarcastic or a joke. As evidenced by the videos, we found plenty of water on the walk, but none at the actual cache area. Unfortunately, as you probably deduced, no cache either. We tried twice with no success. I admit. Terribly unexciting and anticlimactic.

Driven by the streak, I found another cache across the river. Actually, I found it earlier as a backup and realized it was across the river when I wandered earlier in an attempt to grab it quickly after the other one fizzled. Driven by the streak, I loaded us back in the car and drove across the river. Technically, we drove over a bridge, but you get the idea. After parking, I geared up and leashed the dog. Cue the slow motion preparation montage.

December 24, 2021 (Day Number 111, Find Number 349)

We started walking. As soon as we passed the gate, I promptly slipped on a patch of snow covered ice. Aren’t you glad I cued the slow motion? Wasn’t that so much funnier in slow motion? I benefited from the slip though, when I realized that I left the bag in the car. Handing the leash off to Quinn, I slowly and painfully walked back to the car, retrieved the bag, and went carefully back to the gate. This slow motion brought to you by actual old age, not perceived coolness. Again, the hike went mostly smoothly. I need to spice these things up with more action or maybe intrigue.

You want action? Check out this tiny bridge.

Imagine if you will, Quinn, Bups, and I standing on the shore of this mighty body of water with only that single beam to cross. We give each other a knowing look. One of us may not make it to the other side alive. We have a duty to ourselves, our country, and all of you to find and extract that cache. Quinn performed his duty, crossing the bridge without hesitation. Lilo sized up the thundering river, coiled her back legs like springs and lept across the chasm with ease. I took a deep breath and then one step onto the beam. Another deep breath. Another step. Two more and then…my foot slipped! I lost my balance. Quinn reached out for me. Lilo barked and looked around for a stick in case I fell in. I saw my life flash before my eyes.

Just kidding. We all made it across without incident and continued down the path to the hiding spot. Quinn started to complain that his toes were getting cold. I doubled my efforts and checked some of the logs to see if the coordinates were solid. Turns out they weren’t, so I expanded my search. Finally found it, grabbed it, and dropped off a couple of trackables since it was a “hotel” and there weren’t any in there. When we returned to the car, I advised Quinn to take off his shoes and socks to help warm them.

If you’ve ever wondered what a cache looks like and what the heck is a “trackable”.

December 25 (Caching Christmas – NMAIN NSAL, Day Number 112, Find Number 350)

You may remember from my previous post that I wanted to find #350 before Christmas. That’s part of the reason I had two caches in the queue yesterday. Since I didn’t, that made the find on Christmas extra special. First, as usual, some background.

I bought a Jackbox bundle through Humble Bundle a few months ago. Aiden said he enjoyed playing the games. Anything to get time with your teenagers. Well, my laptop charging port went haywire and I have yet to get it fixed. So, I bought the most recent game on our XBox and we played it Christmas Eve. We enjoyed it so much, we wanted to play with the extended family. But, we forgot the XBox. Oh no!

Dad, as usual, to the rescue. I offered to get the XBox. And, caching Christmas?! I thought I found all of the caches near my in laws. Turned out I messed up a setting somehow and more appeared when I did my search. NMAIN NSAL was less than 5 miles away and a park and grab. Perfect. Cache found. XBox retrieved. Night saved?

Not so fast. The controller I picked didn’t work and we weren’t able to play Jackbox with the whole group. Bummer. But, the rest of the holiday has gone well in spite of the fact that I’ve spent the last two days searching and applying for new jobs. Oh well, can’t win em all.

Epilogue

As with many of our adventures, the first adventure has been the more adventurous. However, I’m personally excited about Christmas Day. Geocaching doesn’t recognize the 50s as official milestones, but after not being in the hobby for so long, I’m taking all the wins I can. Caching Christmas got me to 350 and that’s good enough for me. Yesterday I found another puzzle cache in the Harvard Forest among gunshots and threatening clouds. Today, I want to check out a place in Athol after dropping Liam off for work. Not sure when I’ll get around to documenting them, but stay tuned.

February 1, 2018

Christmas and New Years

Prologue

I meant to do this last Monday, but I got substitute teaching jobs three days in a row. Since my writing priority so far this year has been the main 2 Generations Gaming page, this entry got postponed. However, it works out because then, in two weeks, I can do my back to school entry. I’ve done one about Thanksgiving and Halloween. The last one was about Winter in general. All of that was done with the plan in mind that this entry would be about Christmas and New Year’s.

Since the 2GG end of the year article followed a more traditional format of best and worst of the year, I wanted to make this one less cliche. I can’t promise anything as it would appear that I’m becoming the living embodiment of the midlife crisis cliche. However, I will try to keep the fluff to a minimum. Let’s see how successful I am.

Journal

Many of my entries last year focused on one theme. (Cliche alert!) When faced with the second “half” of your life, it is only natural to look at the first “half”. More often than not, you will find things that you want to change. At least, that seems to be my attitude regarding all of this mid-life nonsense. Because that was the theme of last year. Change.

New Year

I started running to help Aiden finish his Boys on the Right Track 5k. That first run ended with me limping in pain the entire second half of it and finishing dead last. Unhappy with that result, I started a couch to 5k program on my phone. When the final 5k event happened, I was about halfway through my training. I was no longer in pain at the end. In fact, I danced a little bit at the finish line. I did not come in last, either! While the winter has slowed my schedule some, I had been running the entire 5k distance about 3 or 4 times a week.

I can’t say for certain that my running has kept me from falling into the “winter blues” that I often experience in January and February. I can only speculate that as the reason. It could be because of the other big change that I made this year. Then again, maybe it is because of my running that kept me from falling into a funk and leading to my new outlook. There’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing happening here.

I wrote in my miniature painting (that’s painting war miniatures for you non-nerds out there) article on the main site that I’m not much of a resolutions guy. That’s true. I generally don’t make resolutions because (cliche alert!) you often end up breaking them within 2 weeks, feel bad about yourself, spiral out of control, and end up worse than you started. Instead, this year, I’ve decided to continue to live my life according to the improv credo of “Yes, and…”

I realized recently that’s been my major change. Instead of being content with putting things off (sometimes until they were no longer relevant or, in some cases, unattainable), I have been doing them. It sounds like an easy change and, ultimately, it was. The hardest part was the first few times. As I said to my wife the other day, “Humans are creatures of habit. Once you’ve established that habit, it is easy to just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Now, all that remains is to get through the next big test. I start school next week and will start a night time job this week. I’m teaching 5 classes again, plus a lab, so I’m going to be very busy. It remains to be seen if I will be able to maintain my writing schedule. I’ve resigned myself that I won’t be able to write every day, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try.

Christmas

In contrast to all of the change that the New Year brings, it’s nice to have the stability of the traditions of Christmas. Granted, our traditions aren’t generations spanning rituals or anything. Also, some of those traditions are currently in flux. Still, it is nice to have that consistency to welcome you into the season. Creatures of habit and all.

Every year we visit a festival of trees. This one is multigenerational. It started with Christine, me, and my parents many years ago. Now we go with our kids. The past two years we have gone to one that they started at Yankee Candle because it is closer and also fun to go visit the store during the holidays. Similarly, we have gone to a light display almost every year. We started at Bright Nights in Springfield. This year and last it was Look Park because they had a model train show, too.

A few years ago, we went to Old Sturbridge Village for their Christmas by Candlelight experience. It was a lot of fun (and also free) and that brought us back again. The second time wasn’t as fun because there wasn’t as much snow. This year, we didn’t even think about doing it because of the arctic temperatures. So, as I said, there’s some flux to our traditions. Mainly, Liam is growing up. For those of you that still believe, I’ll just leave it at that.

My most favorite tradition every year is going to Christine’s parents house for the day of Christmas. It used to be her aunt and uncle and cousins there, too, with karaoke and laughs until too late at night. Now that everyone has kids of their own, it has just been us, our kids, Christine’s sister’s family, and her parents. The laughs are still plenty, but the karaoke hasn’t been as plentiful. Dinner and appetizers are always the best and this year I spent the entire day lying in their kitchen nook watching a whole season of Holiday Baking Championship.

Epilogue

The New Year holiday brings naturally brings with it change. (cliche alert!) The changing of the calendar from one year to the next makes you think of all the hopeful new possibilities of that new year. I often denigrate it as the one second holiday and don’t put much stock in the concept of resolutions. However, this year is different. I’ve spent most of the last year changing, in fact. I think and hope that all of the changes are for the better.

Because the things that haven’t changed are pretty great, too. It may be my new attitude, but this is the first winter break in a long time that I remember as being awesome all around. The crazy thing about it is that we didn’t do that much during the break. Other than the usual, we mostly just sat around the house and avoided the cold temperatures. Though I know it must, I don’t want it to ever change.

December 12, 2017January 14, 2018

The Holidays

Prologue

I started this journal in the early spring and it really got going during the summer months. The rest of the family are summer people. They enjoy lounging on the beach for hours at a time. I’m not a huge fan of the beach, but I have found some things about summer that I enjoy like fishing, kayaking (and fishing, canoeing (and fishing), and attempting to swim across our local lakes. That last one makes it tough to fish, but I did find and retrieve a rod once while swimming, which was cool. The point is, while this journal was conceived and nurtured during the spring and summer months and it has helped me to become more comfortable with summer, my absolute favorite time of the year is the 3 month period of October, November, and December.

Journal

After the laziness of summer and the craziness of September, the calendar flips to October. Everything starts to smell and taste like pumpkin spice. There are signs that Christmas is just around the corner. Mainly, people who complain that Christmas is just around the corner. Speaking of early grinchiness, both Christine and I have recently discovered that Aiden is a bit of a Scrooge. She tried to listen to Christmas music on her drive to work and he wondered out loud, “Why is this on?!” I was watching a Chopped episode with him and Quinn and a Christmas commercial came on and he shouted, “It’s not even Thanksgiving yet!”

To be fair, he might have gotten this attitude from me. It is only recently that I’ve mellowed on the whole Christmas before Thanksgiving thing. I know that there is Facebook evidence of me chastising Wal*Mart for their early display of merchandise. My cousin tried to rationalize with me, which obviously never works with a person that is being irrational. Maybe it planed a seed, though, that has blossomed into my new attitude about the holidays. Honestly, it is most likely just my antisocial and contrarian attitudes that have turned me around, but we can give Mark some credit, too.

There will be plenty of time for winter and Christmas. If I’ve learned anything about kids and winter in the northeast, it is that I go from 0 to “Shining” in only a matter of weeks. But, more on that cheerful transition to come. This article is about Halloween and Thanksgiving. Look, I know that Thanksgiving is not technically an outdoor holiday. Neither was Halloween this year, to be honest, but more on that later. I include Thanksgiving both because we recently celebrated it and it is one of my favorite days of the year.

I took this picture at the move theater when we went to see Wonder and posted it to the 2GG Instagram feed with the caption “Food, Football, and Family (no matter how messed up)” because that’s what’s great about Thanksgiving.

What’s funny is that this year Christine asked at the beginning of November if it would be stupid to have a turkey dinner so close to Thanksgiving. While it might have been, I shrugged and decided that it would be worth the risk of ruining actual turkey day. Aside from the fact that it didn’t ruin anything and we still enjoyed the second turkey a month later, I got the added bonus of cooking my own turkey. It didn’t quite go as well as I hoped because I undercooked it, but it turned out okay and got me warmed up to get into the holiday spirit.

So, what’s the big deal about cooking my own turkey? We used to host Thanksgiving and her parents did Christmas. Ever since learning how to cook at Friendly’s (well, that’s where I refined my skill. Don’t laugh!), I have taken pride in being able to cook. Since Thanksgiving is such a big and important meal, I especially wanted to do a good job. Heck, I even got offended when the topic came up in one of my classes. A student said that they didn’t even like turkey that much. I put on my “fight me” voice and assured them that they’d love a turkey that I cooked. Though ultimately unconvinced, we joked that we should have a Thanksgiving dinner for the class. All jokes aside, that isn’t happening. Two turkeys in a month is one thing, but three is a crime against humanity.

So, if I’m so good at Thanksgiving, why have I been demoted? Well, it is less of a demotion (that’s exactly what someone who was demoted would say) and more “life goes on”. First, my wife isn’t that keen on hosting. We have 3 kids. Her sister and husband now have 2 kids. Her parents have a house that is much more suitable for hosting company. Our house is bigger, but they recently remodeled and therefore, their house just flows better for big parties.

And so it is that I no longer am in charge of Thanksgiving dinner. It’s fine because I usually get a chance to do a turkey at least one other time during the year. Oh! One last thing about turkey and then we can get on to candy. I have told this on more than one occasion. I picked up the turkey (something in the range of 22-25 pounds, so hopefully it redeems me a bit that I undercooked it) at the local grocery store for 16 dollars. 16 dollars and it fed our family of 5 for 3 meals! The initial turkey, then soup, and finally turkey melts. I seriously don’t know why people don’t buy more turkeys.

Okay, on to ghouls, ghosts, and candy. I mentioned earlier that Halloween wasn’t an outdoor holiday this year. Most years, we engage our kids in the weird ritual of knocking on someone’s door and then threatening them unless they bribe you to leave them alone. We didn’t do that this year. The past few years, it hasn’t been the best in our town for trick or treating. There’s really only one street that has participated and last year, even that one was dead. One of our friends had the idea to have a kid Halloween party instead and we were ready for a change. It didn’t hurt that they live in the town where Christine and the boys go to school, which was hosting a party in the town hall before and that trick or treating has been lame lately.

The party was fun for the kids. They got to eat pizza, hang out with their friends, make slime, and played party games like mummifying one another, glow stick ring toss, and pin the boo to the ghost. It was less fun for us, but we did get to act like kids and take the toilet paper that was left over after making mummies and throw it all over the yard. Unfortunately, that only lasted about 5 minutes or so and the homeowner decided to play adult and make us all stop.

Epilogue

Look, I get that Halloween is a holiday for the kids, and the party was fun, but our kids still wanted to trick or treat. Christine even took them out after we got home to hit a few of the local houses. I mentioned that it would be fun to do the party the weekend before Halloween and then trick or treat on the actual night. The hosts of the party said that avoiding trick or treating was the point of the party. So, if the party is on Halloween again, we will either miss it or show up fashionably late. The town does a group trick or treat after the party, so maybe we will go along with that and then hit up the party.

Plus, it was a bit of a controversy that we skipped trick or treating. Christine’s sister, husband, and kids were disappointed that they weren’t able to go with our boys. So, we will most likely end up going with them next year. I just don’t understand why we can’t have the best of all worlds. Oh well, all the soccer mom magazines tell me that I can’t have it all. That doesn’t mean that I won’t try.