Early Morning Geocache Rant

Okay, so I've been working on this sudoku geocache for three days now, four, I don't know. And it's a b!%@&. I am trying every method to solve this thing I can think of. I've got papers strewn everywhere and I'm going crazy. I've posted both bits on here, but to explain to those blinded by the letters and numbers: It's a 25x25 alphabet sudoku and he has given 19 different squares a unique number ranging from 3 to 25 which corresponds with a letter of the alphabet, the one that goes in that square that you are supposed to figure out. Once you have that letter you are supposed to plug it into a grid below, using it's corresponding # and, voila, you should have something that will direct you to the location of the cache (though he gives no information and you are required to figure this out on your own (not too hard, I grant)). Now, presumably this would be accurate coordinates. I'm no idiot, that was my first thought. So I thought, "Why not bypass as much of the sudoku as possible and try to figure out the lower answer by the most likely coordinates, starting with 49 and 7, North and East, and inserting point and degrees where appropriate." Well, no go. It's obvious that doesn't work out quite right, though the # of individual words still makes me think it might be coordinates. Well, I can't recall when, could have been that first day, I thought, "hey, maybe he did it in German." Nope, things just don't seem to work out with German, either. Now, granted, I could have done some research on the internet to see how they might write out coordinates and gained a little more confidence in that theory, but I didn't and so I moved on. Well, tonight, after still faithfully trying to solve this damn puzzle with only one foray into the world of cheating which I gave up as a bad job while waiting for the algorithm on the cheater to finish, I revisited trying to figure out the chart on the bottom using what would likely be there plus a little information (and I stress little - the letters V and N) I had gleaned from the past two days work, plus the possible letters associated with the numbers. After some trial and error and a few good guesses I finally determined that he did, in fact, put the coordinates in German. The only problem was he spelled two of the words incorrectly and used a gender specific version of a third, also incorrect. So I had previously disregarded the German hypothesis because of carelessness on his part. Now, you may be saying, "Well, maybe he did it on purpose to make it harder for people to get the coordinates without finishing the sudoku." Perhaps, but this is the same guy who made a careless mistake on another cache he placed which could easily have resulted in a wasted afternoon if I hadn't second guessed him while caching, and also the same guy who has buried or partially buried two caches, that I know off. It's a grey area, the way he has them, but definitely not 100% Kosher. I honestly think he doesn't put as much care into some of the important aspects of his cache as he should and puts too much time into making them special in some way or other. I'd give up special for accurate any day. His original rating of a 4 might have been accurate if this sudoku weren't incredibly difficult and he hadn't screwed up. As it stands, his current rating of a 5 is more than accurate - you have to account for the errors, after all. You know, I don't mind a little homework with my geocaching, it certainly makes them more original, but geocaching used to be about getting outside. Now it seems it has become a desk job. Thanks but I can be a couch potato quite successfully without anyone's help.

And for those of you who plan on trying the sudoku to see what my problem was, I don't want to hear about it when you solve it. Let me just take this moment to say "Congratulations. You are special" and leave it at that.

If you can catch it, you can keep it.

There are many wonderful things about Germany. If I were to write about them I could go on for hours, so I'll save you the trouble of reading all that and tell you what Max thinks is so wonderful about Germany. His list is a lot shorter than mine and it can be summed up in one word - wildlife. This place is chock full of wildlife, probably because Germans actually care about their environment and haven't polluted the heck out of their land like we have. But I digress. If you add in the neighborhood cats (including one feral tripod of a cat) Max has seen no less than 7 types of wildlife since we've been here, though he has caught sight of other things I did not see. His list of sightings includes deer, hedgehogs, some kind of squirrel, some other kind of squirrel sized ground rodent, birds, moles, voles, and the aforementioned cats. I myself have seen three additional animals that Max did not see: some sort of peccary, a fox, and a scheltopusik, a kind of legless lizard. To both myself and Max, Germany is some kind of animal wonderland. To further substantiate that claim I must add that the local zoo allows dogs, so Max has even seen an alpaca, though I hardly consider that wildlife. Anyway, Max's favorite pastime of late, since the farmers began harvesting their crops, is going for a walk in the grassy fields that border most of the farmland. Hidden within these fields are droves of voles (say that three times fast). To make things exciting for Max, the voles like to dash from one hole to another when they think they are being threatened. Well, Max is a terrier so the voles are being threatened often. He will run around the field like crazy, nose down and head flipping from side to side, until he finds the most likely smelling hole. At that point he stuffs his nose in there to get a really good sniff, then he starts digging like mad. Pause for another sniff and then dig some more. When he gets really excited and thinks he's close to a catch he will bite out chunks of dirt from the far side of the hole. Usually he doesn't catch anything, but a couple of times now he has. Squeamish and pregnant readers may wish to discontinue reading at this point. The first time he caught something Darin and I made him leave it, even though he had already killed it. I felt bad but rationalized that it would be eaten later the evening by a fox. The second time, however, I let Max have it. He caught it, he was willing to eat it, and it probably wouldn't harm him any. It's not like he's not used to raw food by now and it doesn't get any more raw than that. He scarfed the whole thing, not even stopping to pull out the guts like he did on the first. Well, I can tell you, those of you who have watched your child do something big for the first time, use the potty, say their first word, I don't know what, you can understand how proud I felt of my boy. This is what he was bred to do and he's good at it! Really good. Darin and I will point out what looks like a likely hole to us and he'll just race on by to go to a different hole and, sure enough, within moments there are voles running everywhere, fleeing for their lives, afraid of the jaws of doom on MY BOY. Yes, I'm a proud momma.

Oh God, No! Not Madonna . . .

So in the moment of fear inspired by the realization that my blog now has readers (okay, maybe just one reader) and is "in the spotlight" so to speak (Thanks for the link IHJ) I noticed that all of my blog posts (all whopping three) tend towards the melodramatic, depressed, and just generally pathetic.

Now, if you know me you will know that I am generally a thoughtful (pensive, not generous) individual who spends a great deal of time contemplating things that no one else even bothers to notice. It's me, it's who I am. In the last day I have thought about: the line painting in the BX parking lot, the reasons the signs right outside of the base are so different from the rest of the area, the most effective stanchion placement for the bank, the poor organization of the window screen boxes in the BX, the oddity of pick your own flower gardens and how they wouldn't work well in most of the US, that stupid little wood and nail puzzle that Jenn and Chris have, and about 100 individual reveries on the differences and similarities of the English and German languages. (Yes, Jenn, German is indeed the language you already know - sort of.)

So, as you can see by my list above, which, by the way, is in no way complete and is most likely missing many more inane conversations I have had with myself or the dog, there is nothing in there that tends toward the melodramatic or depressed. I leave the judging of 'pathetic' up to my reader(s). Yet, the only times I have posted previously the blogs have that overwhelming flavor to them. Obviously, I had to ponder this and here's what I've come up with:

Either A) I have very little to say about anything substantial going on in my life right now as 1) Max is not going through potty training nor his first few weeks in a big boy bed and 2) Darin and I have not visited anyplace new or special and while Darin has by himself, he's not likely to post about it and having not been there myself I'm certainly not about to tell folks what Norway, Washington, or Romania are like or B) I'm a lot more like the younger Madonna than I really want to be.

"What?" you are thinking. "Madonna? Seriously? Esther, with the big ol' gap in her teeth?" I know, I know, I came at ya' from the back alley, right? Well, I'll explain. When I was younger, almost half my life ago I would like to add so as to separate myself as far as possible, I revered Madonna. Worshipped her, loved her, wanted to be her. I don't know why - feel free to delve all you like. Anyway, during those long ago years I heard an interview with Madonna in which she was complimented on 'Cherish" and then asked why a number of her songs were so sad and if she felt that this was true of a lot of artists. Her response was that writing songs is cathartic and something you almost need to do when those sad moments arise, while the kind of joy you might feel that would inspire you to right a song like 'Cherish' doesn't really lend itself to dropping it all and sitting down and writing.

Okay, I'm probably giving her more credit than she deserves here and may even be saying more than she actually said at the time, but it struck me as true then and it still does now. If you think about it, how many teenage girls start a diary in that stage of early adolescence when everything sucks? Darn near every one of them from what I can tell. And yet it doesn't appear to be out of a great desire to become a writer because most of these girls stop writing in their diaries somewhere along the way and eventually find them when they are getting ready to leave for college, tucked away in a drawer or under their mattress, long since missing the little key that once allowed access to their deepest, darkest, secrets about how much they love (insert generic boy name here).

So, that said, it seems that the basic purpose that diaries serve is not to catalog all of life's moments, but to clear one's head of the crappier ones. All of this takes me back to the content of my blog, which everyone knows is really a diary of sorts. Most of my content has been written at moments when something was bugging me. Not something like the merits of preformed tube coin wrappers as opposed to paper sheets which one must carefully form into a tube around the ever slippery coins, but something more like "How long could I lie dead at the bottom of the stairs before 1) someone would realize I was there and 2) Max would start eating me?" You see, that's the kind of thought that you really want to get off your chest. Your not busy having fun with it, too busy to stop and write it all down. No, you're bothered by it, keep coming back to it. So what to do? Write it down for all of your friends to read and contemplate, of course. I mean, seriously, what's more interesting: Stories of the difficulty of finding just the right amount of vegetable matter to add to Max's diet to prevent constipation or delving into the neurosis in your friend (or acquaintances) head?

Right. Well then, I'll get on that story about Max just as soon as I can.

So many issues I should come with a warning label . . .

So, tonight was the last night of my German I class. We had dinner at a local restaurant and used a tiny bit of German to order. It was really just an excuse to go out to eat, not that I have a problem with that - my roulladen and knödel were quite good and my German salat was as good as any other German salat, if not better. However, as it was the last day and a more social event than the actual classes were, I got involved in more conversation than I previously had. Well, I'll be the first to tell folks that I am a blithering social idiot. As a matter of fact, I have told a group of folks that, precisely that, and they laughed; perhaps out of lack of understanding that I was serious or perhaps because they realized just how serious I was and statements like that make people uncomfortable. Probably the latter, hmmm. Either way, it's true. I am an idiot when it comes to social encounters. Either I stay relatively quiet and uncomfortably wait for the obligation to pass, or I open up my mouth and stick my foot in just as far as it will go. Now, I'm not saying that I don't feel the things I say to be true, nor am I saying that I wouldn't stand by my opinions if challenged, heck, in hindsight it is very infrequent for me to regret having said any of those things, but I am saying that I can't stand the feeling I'm left with at the end of a night like tonight. This evening, for example, driving home I went through all of the things I'd said and how much of an idiot I'd seemed. Which is weird, because I don't think anything I think is stupid (if I did I wouldn't think it anymore, duh!) yet I'm left with this uncomfortable feeling. So, if I'm okay with what I've said, why should I be worried about what other folks are thinking of what I've said? I think the inherent problem is that somewhere in the last couple of years I've allowed myself to be more comfortable in social situations but while I've backed off on that front I haven't backed off on my shyness. Weird, huh? A person whose mouth runs like she's drunk but doesn't have to wait until the next morning for the regret to set in. I still consider myself to be quite shy, but I don't think most folks would see it. It's hard to see shy when a person's mouth is going a mile a minute, but it's just the only source I can see for why I get to feeling like this. Perhaps it's because I simultaneously put myself out there as true and honest and who I really am, but I am aware that it is very hard for people to see all of the parts, especially not in one night, and so I must necessarily come across with missing information. I'm like a building that a person can see and touch and say "Oh, so this is an Alysn." but what they don't see is all of the complicated stuff inside the walls that makes it all stand up and work. As honest as I try to be, there is no way for someone to understand everything and see all of me. You would think the obvious solution would be to hold back and not allow people the ability to mistake me for something simple, but I'm not comfortable with that either. I guess I need to develop a comfort level with people not liking me, accept that there is no way people can know the whole me, that even if they did know the whole me they still might not like me and that's okay. God, do people really feel that way?

The brevity of Henry James

Henry James, an author on whose works I once spent an entire semester's focus, is quoted as having written "We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have." I heard these lines for the first time today and looked them up because they had a poignancy to my life which I could not immediately explain. Hardly surprising since they were used as the closing words to a heartfelt television show, but still no less meaningful to me for all of the emotion they were supposed to engender. It seems, however, that the writer chose to stop the quote prematurely as James actually went on to say "Our doubt is our passion. And our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art" and it was with these additional words that the television writer's spell over me was broken. Not because what James said no longer had any meaning to me, but because the addition of all that he had said was so much more meaningful and so much less trite than the abbreviated quote. I was especially taken up with "Our doubt is our passion. And our passion is our task." How true that is for me every day of my life I feel I can barely put into words. I lack confidence, plain and simple. It seems that every moment I am who I am, I am that way due to doubt: Am I good enough? Do I try hard enough? Do I love enough? My life is filled with the pursuit of answers that only continued action can pursue. Like a dog chasing its tail, I can exhaust myself and never accomplish anything, overwhelmed by the passion of chasing down answers that probably don't exist outside of myself and seem incapable of showing themselves inside. And so I work this task in the background of my life, worrying it like I would worry a wound in my mouth; painful to do but so compelling and impossible to resist. I have no answer for it, but I am exhausted, that much is certain. I wish I could find solace in James' words, but I cannot for I know that there is no solace, no peace in who I am. There is only me, my task, and the madness of this art of life and that must be good enough in the end.

The most dangerous room in the house

I read or heard somewhere that the bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house, accounting for something over 50 percent of all in home fatalities. Now, I don't know if this is really true, but I can well believe it when I consider the potential in my own home for wet floors, errant razor blades, and attacking dental floss. Yes, that's right, I said "attacking dental floss." I know it's hard to believe, but just this morning I had a near death experience thanks to my daily flossing habits. I had just released a reasonable length of floss from the little plastic container and stretched it between my fingers when a piece of wax, propelled by my energetic snapping of the floss, flew into my eye. Okay, you're thinking, I can see how a piece of wax might hurt a little, but "near death?" Don't you think you might be overstating things? Well no, no I don't, 'cause the darned wax is imbued with some kind of cinnamon flavor, more specifically, the kind that burns - burns like a Texas sidewalk in mid-July or lava erupting from Mt. St. . . .well, you get the idea. So, here I am, home alone, naked, blinded in one eye, stumbling around the bathroom in excruciating pain, trying not to trip on the dog who wants to join in on whatever excitement is causing the profanity spilling freely from my mouth, and it occurs to me; If i slipped on a wet spot, stumbled over the dog, and landed on a razor, what's my husband going to think when he finds me like this in a few days? He'll never know about the floss. He'll never know that this wasn't all brought about by vast clumsiness. His last impression of me will be of a woman who manages to take herself out in the most mundane way possible - slipping and falling. When I was younger I thought I was going to be something big in life, make some sort of difference in the world, just "be somebody" but as I've aged I have begun to come to terms with the fact that all of that, on a big scale, is unlikely. What's more likely is the life I am living right now - wife of a military man, living in a foreign country, training a dog, dabbling in hobbies, and slowly getting older. It's not a bad life. I'd have to say that it's a rare day that tallies on the downside of the spectrum, but it's not where I thought I'd be. And yet, I'm happy with it, I've come to terms with the fact that, important as I may be to myself and to those whose lives I touch, I'm simply just another ant in the anthill. So good, I think I'm at a good place with that, right? But my flossing incident has made me realize that maybe I'm not. Maybe being okay with being an ant in the anthill doesn't mean I'm completely buying into the relative meaninglessness of life. If I were, I wouldn't have been so struck by the possibility of my death looking so pointless, so stupid. I would have thought, "Well, this is it, I guess." and gracefully bowed myself out. And yet, I didn't. Instead, I began thinking, thought for two days in fact, until I realized what was bugging me. And then I wrote it all down for others to ponder. And you know what all of this comes down to, in the end? That whole thing about the bathroom being the most dangerous room in the house? That's a lot more true, and in more ways than one, than I've ever realized before.