It has been a while since I wrote anything here, hasn't it? Like always, this place feels as though I were merely shouting hoarsely into the void, where the vastness of the Web renders my words to be as effectual as a bucket of water dumped into the ocean. But that suits me fine---this is still just one of the many outlets that I have allowed myself to have in order to ensure some minimal level of sanity.
Alright, enough of the blathering. What's new? Recently, I made a trip out to a state park in Indiana to pick up a cache that was placed there in the year 2000, one of the oldest caches that I have physically logged. The previous old cache was circa 2001 and in Singapore, so it was an interesting find. The cache was rated as 3/4.5, but I think that the terrain is at most 3. Maybe the terrain difficulties in the early days were less extreme than what we have now, which made the 4.5 terrain level justified, or it could very well be the case that I am more or less near the physical prime of my life, which made hiking through the state park a breeze, even though the trails were rated as being ``very rugged''. Of course, John and I speculated that there were some legal reasons to over rate the trails, just in case of an accident.
While on the hiking/geocaching trip, I actually come to realise the truth about combat boots---they are the all-round most mediocre boots to be hiking with, but they still trounce any sneakers that are used for the same activities. Unlike ``proper'' hiking boots, combat boots don't have that much ankle mobility, which makes long term walking tricky, but more importantly, the treads of the combat boots are not that well suited for moss-covered rocks or rocks that are generally slippery from say water. They work extremely well in mud due to the thickness of the tread (the tread pattern is basically islands of quadrilaterals, which work on a similar principle as say caterpillar tracks), but since the end of the treads do not have the smaller ``grips'' that are present in hiking boots, we find that walking over moss and/or wet rocks just does not work that well. Unfortunately, most of the hiking over in North American deals with non-muddy situations, so the combat boots are not the best way to go about. Come to think of it, I actually do own a pair of hiking boots that I wear on days that I choose not to wear my Vibrams---I treat them like sneakers, but they are fairly comfortable to walk in. But I still stick with my combat boots for the single awesome property of being waterproof up to two inches above ankle height, a very useful property when trying to ford streams while simultaneously avoiding being wet. For that purpose, a pair of tightly laced combat boots works wonders.
Strange enough, as I am typing stuff here on Firefox 16.0, I'm not facing any of the slow downs that I was experiencing earlier. Either Google fixed the scripts for the editing box, or Mozilla did something about the way they are running the scripts. In either case, it is a good thing because now, what I type is no longer taking forever to be shown.
Alright, enough updates for now. Till the next one.
No comments:
Post a Comment