(no subject)

So, lmariec has been talking about this fun little adventure thing called geocaching for months now, and it's always sounded like something we'd like to do someday. Well, Nate found a pretty good deal on a GPS unit, and went with a few coworkers to check it out, and we decided he could get one as his Father's Day gift. He had one solo adventure w/o us :( but then yesterday we did our research and went hunting!

We decided to start with two here in Livermore, and get a feel for it. The first one was at a lovely park; we excitedly romped about as the distance narrowed, and then began searching once we'd pinned down the location amongst the foliage... not entirely sure what we were searching for. I finally spotted a glimmer and yes! Cache was found, a disguised JIF jar. We opened it up, signed the log, and sorted through the many treasures to decide what we wanted to trade out. We settled on a little jet plane and left behind a pretty seashell. Then we made our way back to the playground to play... the slide is always a favorite, and there were a couple other little kids there to check out, and we swung him on a swing for a bit. I also found a couple four-leaf clovers (What? I can't NOT look, you know) which made me happy. The toy jet was lost somewhere on the way back to the car, but that's okay.

Our second geocache was a little trickier. We found the general area easily enough, but there was a lot of landscaping and fallen leaves and spiderwebs, and a few abandoned buildings there... sealed, but with window ledges and such that might have been hiding it. A friendly kitty came out for some attention - no collar, but well-fed, so probably not a stray - and we all took turns petting her. We were still searching but close to giving up (Alex was losing interest after having explored the area and no longer having the kitty around) when I finally found it! This one was a much smaller container, and only had two items inside. We signed the log, and I took a pretty pin, and we left behind a small dinosaur toy.

All in all, lots of fun! There are many other caches hidden in our area, so I'm sure we'll be out hunting again many times this summer. While it'll be a few years before Alex can really get into the 'hide and seek' aspect of things, he has a great time exploring the areas with us, so it's still fun for everyone. So, yup! That's our first geocaching adventure.

Hmmm...

So, there's this petition.

And I'm trying to decide whether to sign it or not. I find myself in agreement with the overall philosophy, meaning if I wanted myspace, I'd go to myspace, and I prefer livejournal because of its livejournal-ness. I really don't feel like the changes SixApart has been making are improving my LJ experience, and kind of liked when LJ was all a bunch of cool people who got together and made something, with volunteers to help, and all that. I'm not exactly anti-corporation, in general, but yeah... I miss that. SixApart seems to want to make LJ more youth-oriented and try to get the older people to move over to this new Vox thing, and I can't say I'm in favor of that either.

On the other hand... the petition isn't really saying "Please don't change livejournal to target young teens" or anything like that, it's against three specific items. The lj_design community has already recanted the userinfo prototype which was one of the complaints; they're currently redesigning it, so it's hard to say how objectionable the end product will be.

While I'm against the path the company seems to be taking (judging by the changes made so far), I don't know if this is going to communicate *that* to the people in charge of those decisions. :(