Blog Merging

When I started this blog back in January, I planned to keep it completely separate from my personal life. I wanted it to be like one of those blogs that people looked to for ideas and advice about a specific thing. I figured I’d post a bit while I got better at crocheting and then really get down to it, adding tutorials and everything.

It very quickly morphed into just a place for me to dump stories pictures of all my crafty things, which I ended up liking better than my original idea. I realized I didn’t want anything super serious after all, and I was happy just to have a place to post about my creative side each week.

It’s changing again. Starting now, I’m not going to try to post on a schedule. I’m not going to strictly post about crafts. I’m going to post whenever I want and whatever I want, including some personal things. I don’t plan to get too heavy, but it won’t be all rainbows and unicorns.

I have a personal blog that I posted in a few times, and I’m going to move the posts to this one (keeping their original dates, so they’ll be backposted). I purchased a domain name based on the name of my craft blog, but when it’s time to renew, I’ll be changing it to something more neutral.

If this change loses me some followers, that’s okay, I totally understand. I know that the majority of you started following me based on my crochet or baking posts, and now that those posts may not be as frequent, there may no longer be a good reason for you to follow me. I’ve never been concerned with my number of followers or anything, so don’t feel bad if you have to go. And thanks for hangin’ with me while I crafted!

Caching Catch Up – May 8, 2012

I haven’t been caching recently, but I did go out a few times in May and forgot to write about them. So starting with this post, I’m going to start catching up!

On Tuesday, May 8th, I went to Silver Sands State Park in Milford. I planned to walk to Charles Island, which is an island about a mile off the coast that is accessible from a sandbar that stretches across the water when the tide is low enough. There are a couple caches there, and the island itself has a really cool history. The pirate Captain Kidd once buried treasure on Charles Island, there are stories about it being haunted, and it’s also a designated Natural Area Preserve for the local bird population of herons and egrets. Unfortunately, I didn’t do my research and when I got there, the tide wasn’t low enough for me to walk across. Fortunately, I was still in a beautiful place!

I’d never been to Silver Sands, and I quickly fell in love with it. My favorite thing about it is that not only is there beach, but there’s a marshy area and woods with trails. Being from California, I’m used to a beach being just a beach. I was amazed that I could stand by the ocean, look behind me, and see huge green trees.

I parked near the marsh:

There’s a long boardwalk that stretches across the marsh and leads to the beach:

You can easily see Charles Island from Silver Sands:

The tide was low enough that I was able to sit at the very beginning of the sandbar and dangle my feet in the water. Charles Island can be seen in the background:

Sitting on the sandbar made me both happy and sad. I closed my eyes and listened to the little waves crashing against the rocks. I could smell the ocean, and for just a minute, it felt no different from a beach in California. It was like I was home, and I was overcome with homesickness and nostalgia. I had a hard time leaving, but I wanted to explore the wooded area too.

There were a ton of birds along this trail into the woods:

I found a cache hidden in the trees, kept walking, and ended up on an old road that is no longer used:

The road led back to the parking lot, where I decided to leave in search of more caches in the area. I ended up stopping for one at a Dunkin Donuts, as well as a Mystery Cache hidden along a trail in another wooded area:

On the way home, I stopped for Chicago-style pizza at Uno. I’d never been there and would rather have had New Haven-style pizza, but it was Easter and most places were closed. I’m only mentioning Uno in this post because I want to say: um, it’s disgusting. Never go there. :]

Reunion

I’m sitting at the cafe in Barnes & Noble, and there are two men sitting behind me. One of them has been here since before I arrived. I’m not sure of his name. We’ll call him Tom. A few minutes ago, a man walked in looking around a bit, and Tom said “Charles?” The man turned to Tom and said “Hey! I thought you looked familiar but I wasn’t sure!” and took the other seat at the table.

Tom and Charles are old high school buddies. They graduated 50 years ago and haven’t seen each other since accidentally bumping into each other during a game of golf in the early 80s. They brought their yearbooks and are looking through the pictures and signatures, pointing out people they remember and reminiscing about the adventures they had together. They talked about a guy, the class clown, who went on to become a librarian at a nearby university and then died way too young. It was decided that one signature was so big that it took up half a yearbook page because the signer had such a ‘big personality.’ Another guy, Robert, died not too long ago. Another one was a bully – he made fun of Tom’s last name. Rudy was a nice kid. Charles can’t remember much of high school except that he was a little ‘twerp,’ but Tom has a better memory. He remembers the time someone bet the strongest kid in class to do 100 push-ups, and the kid did it quickly and easily and that they had to eat all their food at lunch or they’d get in trouble. They both agree that generic yearbook signatures  (“best of luck in your future endeavors!”) are super lame.

Yeah, I’m eavesdropping. But in my defense, I can’t help it because they’re kinda loud. It’s a nice conversation, but there’s some sadness. They don’t know what happened to so many of their classmates, even the guys they once called great friends.

If I go to my 50-year reunion, or I meet up with old friends years and years from now, are they going to recognize me? Am I going to recognize them? Are we going to wonder “whatever happened to Matt?” Or Hannah, or Joe, or Maggie? Will we even remember their names?

It bums me out to think I might not see the people I spent such an important part of my life with ever again. Or maybe I’ll see them in 40 years, which is almost as bad as never seeing them again. My best friends, people who knew me better than anyone else back then, but don’t even talk to me now. I know that people move on, and I have too, but sometimes it hits me: I have no idea what Cindy is up to. Is she even alive? I don’t know. I found out through Facebook that Christine is engaged, and I wanted to send her a message but I couldn’t think of what to say because all I could think was “why didn’t she tell me?” even though I know it’s because we aren’t good enough friends anymore. Kevin stopped talking to me somewhere along the way, and even when I sent him a congratulatory message when he had a baby, he didn’t write back. Just three of many examples of my dead high school friendships.

I know it’s partly my fault, because I ran away to the other side of the country as soon as I turned 18, but I’m not going to take all of the blame. I tried to keep in contact with those people. I still do. I never get a response, or if I do, it’s very short and there’s nothing for me to reply to. Like I said, I don’t think about this constantly. But sometimes it pops into my head and when I realize my old friendships didn’t turn out the way I thought they would back when I was 17 and graduating – it hurts.

TURKEYS! …and Some Other Stuff, I Guess…

Today, I was supposed to meet up with a girl I met recently. We were going to go geocaching in Woodbridge. I sent her a text when I was ready to go, but she said she was busy and she’d text me soon. I waited around for a couple hours, but I was feeling kind of antsy so I decided to go to the summit of East Rock and pick up a cache there rather than wait around at home.

I love East Rock. I mean, the whole area. The neighborhood, the park, the mountainous part itself, everything. I’ll definitely be taking some pictures from the top of East Rock sometime, because the view of New Haven is beautiful, but today it was super hot and hazy out so I skipped the picture-taking. I found the GZ (Ground Zero – the term cachers use for the location of a cache) easily, especially since there were already a couple of people poking around there. It turned out that they were geocachers too, which I thought was really cool because I’d never run into other cachers. With their help, I found the cache relatively quickly and headed back down the mountain.

As I was driving out of the park, I thought about how I’d like to go hiking through the woods there. I really enjoy geocaching because it motivates me to hike in the first place. If there’s going to be a surprise at the end of a hike, I’m more likely to do it because right now, it’s hard for me to be enthusiastic about leaving the house most days. While thinking about all of that, I saw… TURKEYS!

I pulled over and captured the turkeys on video rather than taking pictures of them. Here’s a screen shot from the video:

So exciting! One of them pooped! Then they crossed the road and all the cars had to stop. There was a small bus with some jerk kids in it and they made fun of me for filming the turkeys but I didn’t care because they were turkeys! In the park!

After that bit of excitement (for me and no one else), Nate got a call from his mom asking us to come over. I texted the Craigslist girl (though I still hadn’t heard back from her) and told her we had to go but asked her if we could meet up in Wallingford instead Woodbridge. Wallingford’s a little further away but not too far, so I figured it’d be fine.

On the way to Wallingford, we stopped at Todd’s Pond in North Haven, which is another place we didn’t know about. It’s just this random pond on the side of a regular road that I’ve passed many times without realizing it was there. There was supposed to be a cache in a pretty obvious place, but it wasn’t there, I ran around taking pictures instead.

The waterfall was so cool. I wanted to sit and read so badly, but I didn’t have my nook with me. Someday!

I still hadn’t heard from girl I was supposed to hang out with. I decided she wasn’t going to text so I headed to Wallingford to search for a few more caches

I found a couple in a beautiful and peaceful cemetery with some neat old gravestones:

It was really hot for April, and while on the way to another cache I saw (and smelled) smoke from a brush fire caused by the record-high temperature:

I ended up finding a few caches in a few areas full of people, like one near Lowe’s and another behind Home Depot, then headed to an area that required a bit of hiking to find two more caches. There was a really cool tree that looked like a lady:

Actually, it doesn’t look so much like a lady anymore. I don’t know why I thought it looked like a lady. Oh well.

The hiking around was fun, but tiring, and the sun was setting, so I decided to head home. I found 10 caches total today. Pretty good, I think.

I never did hear from that girl, and I’ll admit I was a little disappointed. I was looking forward possibly forming a new friendship. I don’t feel like I have a very good first impression of her because she didn’t even bother canceling. It makes me feel like I might not want to bother making plans with her again. I mean I could have wasted the entire day waiting to hear back from her, and that’s not cool.

Geocaching in West Haven

Today, I went geocaching in West Haven.

One of the caches I found was in a tiny park in a residential area. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of it, but there was a statue there that was some sort of memorial as well as a bench or two. The best thing about the park were these beautiful trees with bright pink buds and blossoms.

I also went to the West Haven Beaches to search for two caches. It was really nice, despite the trash everywhere (Connecticut is so beautiful but some people have no respect for it!). I love the beach. Frequent trips to the beach are what I miss most about living in California. I can spend hours just sitting with my eyes closed, listening to the water. Anyway, the first cache was a quick find, but the second one required a bit of walking. I’m not going to lie, walking so far on beach sand was not easy, especially in the shoes I was wearing. I took them off at one point, but there were shells everywhere, and they poked my poor little footsies. I came across a large log and decided to sit for a while, then continued my trek down the beach only to realize a few minutes later that I’d completely overshot the cache! I had to backtrack a bit and searched everywhere but couldn’t find it. I checked the logs other geocachers had left on geocaching.com and found that several people logged it as a DNF (Did Not Find) and it hadn’t actually been found for quite some time. At that point, my feet were killing me after walking on the sand on top of all the walking I’d done earlier in the day, so I sat back down on the log and rested a bit more before headed back to the car. I took some pictures along the way.

I was a little disappointed that I’d walked all that way for nothing, but once I was able to take my shoes off in the car, I didn’t mind it so much. At least I got to go to the beach!