08.20.09

According to Facebook…

Posted in Entertainment and hobbies tagged at 1:53 pm by kyrias

…I’m German. 

How very amusing. Here’s the blurb:

You are precise yet romantic, efficient yet dreamy, friendly yet somewhat suspicious of others. You rarely smile, but when you do it’s very meaningful. You like it best when there is a group consensus, and yet you are easily annoyed by the slowness and/or stupidity of others. Sometimes you think that if only you could live on an island or move to some wonderful place far away, everything would be better, and if you can’t realize this dream you often lose yourself in books/vacations/recipes/sports — anything for an escape! All in all, however, you make your peace with life, and have many old friends.

Not too bad for an online quiz.

06.25.09

Letterboxing

Posted in Entertainment and hobbies tagged at 11:14 pm by kyrias

Azora and I went letterboxing today.

For the unintiated, a letterbox is a box with a logbook and a stamp in it, and it is hidden in a particular place that is either interesting or scenic. The person who planted the letterbox posts clues to find it online, and people like us can then go and find it. The finders usually carry along a personal stamp to stamp the logbook to show they’ve been there and use the stamp in the letterbox to stamp their own logbook to remind themselves of which ones they’ve found.

Apparently, this activity started in England, where a guide at Dartmoor left his calling card in a bottle out on the moor. Then he encouraged people he took along to participate. The hobby gathered momentum and now there’s an estimated 3,000 letterboxes in Dartmoor National park — which is all of 365 square miles.

We went searching for four letterboxes and only found one. The one we found was Head by the Charles.

The posting for Red Ear Slider was very interesting, as you can see if you go here, but we couldn’t find it. Here’s an excerpt, however:

Walk till you reach the large boulder. Stand facing Otis Grove. You should see steps leading in to the water off in the distance. Look over your right shoulder, you will see a hollow weeping willow. Go see if you can fit in the tree then start to hooting like an owl.

We also tried to find the Boston swan and “This American Life” letterboxes, but those weren’t there either. The “This American Life” one mentioned 73 paces, and that might have contributed to us not finding it. Asides from the more prosaic problem of variances of leg length, then we have the problem that apparently a pace was once a double step, or five feet. This rather changes things — although I really doubt that the person in question meant the Roman derivative.

We had a good time, but 1 out of 4 isn’t a great success rate. The problem, for me, is that not knowing if we’re simply failing to find them — or if it’s because they were mistaken for trash and removed.

This is the problem with a hobby that isn’t sanctioned. Meh.

However, I think the idea of having a postal letterbox which you just mail around sounds like a lot of fun. I think I might have to riff on that and see what comes of it. So, I might decide to mail out a box to Thene, Sunny, idnahc, and others. Sunny, Pheta and I used to have a notebook we’d pass back and forth — which is probably why this concept appeals to me so much.

Or perhaps a personal traveler, which is a letterbox that lives in your backpack and people can only claim to have “found” it if they have passed a sort of test. Say answering a riddle, or singing a song, or perhaps performing a stunt.

The possibilities…