Anyway, watch this, and then go over to my YouTube channel and subscribe, leave a comment, what-have-you. Thanks!
Showing posts with label geocaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label geocaching. Show all posts
I Made a Vlog!
Anyway, watch this, and then go over to my YouTube channel and subscribe, leave a comment, what-have-you. Thanks!
Cornucopia
I went to a therapy evaluation last Wednesday. The woman I saw thought that I should start on a small dose of Wellbutrin. After seeing almost every one of my significant others struggle with the side-effects of psychiatric meds, I decided to hold off on that for now. Consider me "undecided." Most of my emotional problems are due to Nikki and I having problems. I'm fine for the most part, otherwise. But get this... there is a therapist who specializes in GID (Gender Identity Disorder), less than a half hour from me! I had called about 12 therapists and psychologists last summer, but none of them took my insurance. Some of them took NO insurance. But this one does, and he works for the same psychiatric healthcare organization that has already accepted me for services. What does this mean? Well, for starters, I get a GID specialist again (haven't had one of those since 2007), who "gets" transfolk and the issues they face. Second of all, he can write letters for surgery (GRS)! All I'll need now is mucho dineros... oh yeah... that. Well, one step at a time. The only downside is the fact that he's male. I feel much more comfortable with a female therapist. It'll be some kind of awesome if he's a transman though.
Speaking of Nikki and I, we are doing a lot better than we were. We still fight about stupid things, misunderstandings and such. I hate fighting with her. I feel like it injures my soul. Valentine's Day was very nice. We made each other handmade cards and such. She made a lot more for me than I did for her, but then, she's very artistic and crafty. We're going to buy each other something nice when some money comes in.
I got the notice from the court that I don't have to appear, due to my taking that diversion class last month. I thought I would have to appear in court to show them the notice and all, but now I don't even have to do that. Bonus!
We're going to have someone build a custom enclosure for Fizban (my green iguana). We wanted it to be outside, and Nikki found somebody at work who would build it for us, but the landlady doesn't think it's allowed by the management to keep the enclosure in the back or front yard. That would mean he might have to be loose in our room, probably with shelves going diagonally up the wall. I'm not too crazy about this, but we may not have any choice. I'm hoping we can fit a big enough enclosure in our room if we can afford it.
No, that's neither me nor my iguana. I would love to have an enclosure that size though! Maybe someday...
I posted a new geocaching blog a couple days ago. You can find it here. Then if you want, click on "home" on that site, and read the rest of the posts. Maybe follow and leave a comment. It's very quiet over there. "Shhh... be vewy quiet. I'm huntin' geocaches."
On the Wicca front, I'm still waiting for the classes to start. End of March. Sigh. I'm also wondering what tradition I'm going to be joining, and who will have me. This has me maybe more worried than I should be. Here's an excerpt from a message to my good friend, Page. She's my mentor for all things Wicca, and just an overall wonderful gal. Anyway...
"I'm feeling somewhat discouraged, Page. I asked the High Priestess, who I met two weeks ago) if there would be any problem with me being in their coven due to me being a pre-op transsexual. She said that the fact that I am in-between sexes (transitioned but have not yet had surgery), would confuse the flow of energy. Garderian Wicca, which the High Priestess practices, is rather strict and structured, with a distinct male and female polarity. She also said that I could join the outer circle of the coven, but to be initiated into the inner circle is highly unlikely. They have had a transwoman as an active member, but she had to leave to relocate to a job elsewhere. She wasn't a part of the inner circle.
She was very nice, don't get me wrong, but I don't want stay a member and be never be initiated, ever. I want all the experience that I can have. And what's more, I want to belong. I thought that in Wicca, I could find a place where I belong. Gardnerians won't initiate me, and Dianic Covens want women-born-women. I had to fight and fight to get to where I am, to just be seen as female. What does almost every other female have to do, to be seen as female? Be born. They get the "my precious baby girl," the pretty dresses, and the treatment that boys their own age just don't get. I missed out on that. I missed out on grade school, middle school, high school, my 20's (party girl time!), and now I'm going to miss out on being initiated into a coven, when Wicca is supposedly the most accepting religion there is...??? I can't accept that. I don't want to just practice solitary, it's not enough. Maybe others like doing it and that's great to worship the way you truly enjoy, but I want more. I've missed out on almost EVERYTHING ELSE that's out there. I want to be included already.
The bad thing is that most covens aren't listed anywhere. I can't just email somebody about it, or look on their webpage to see their bylaws or anything. I've heard that Feri (or Faerie) Wicca accepts transfolk, and so does Reclaiming Wicca, but I can't find out if any covens following those traditions are out there. Maybe I will find a very understanding Dianic coven, there are quite a few here, but I can't find any instance of a Dianic coven with a transgender member. But then again, most covens aren't on the net at all. Sigh. I'll just have to be patient and hope for the best."
Like I said, maybe I'm making more out of this than I should. Or maybe I'm just neurotic. Or both. Here's a YouTube video for your perusal if you wish. It's someone protesting about transsexual women being discriminated against in regards to learning, or joining, the Dianic Wiccan tradition. She got on my good side, this one. :)
My New Geocaching Blog
Sometime last week, I started a new blog. It's for reporting our geocache adventures only. Click here to visit the blog. I'm keeping the trans-related issues off that blog, but please feel free to follow, leave comments, add to blogroll, what-have-you, no matter who you are. Two of the entries may look familiar. They are slightly edited versions of my geocaching entries here and here. The first half of the "What is Geocaching?" page was taken from my first geocaching entry on here. The remainder of the entries are all new material. I added GPS coordinates (latitude and longitude) to each cache I write about.
Here's a cute picture of Nikki and I after we visited a cache site. It just may be my favorite photo of us. I feel all warm inside whenever I look at it.
I do have things to write about, but not much time to do so, as of right now anyway. Stay tuned...
Here's a cute picture of Nikki and I after we visited a cache site. It just may be my favorite photo of us. I feel all warm inside whenever I look at it.
I do have things to write about, but not much time to do so, as of right now anyway. Stay tuned...
"New" Friend
We thought (and so did she) that Samantha was going to be heading back to Ohio sometime this week. I just got the good news from Nikki that Samantha won't be going home until early next month. Yay! I hope it doesn't inconvenience her, but we're really glad our friend will be around for quite awhile longer. We were already starting to get a bit melancholy in anticipation of her departure.
Samantha is a survivor. After years of abuse and depression, threats and stalking, she emerged as quite a strong woman, with a love of bicycling and the outdoors. I'm so glad she persevered, and lives on as a truly kick-ass woman.
You know, I was going to start talking about the caches we've discovered together, but I figured that would be best done in a separate post. But here's a few miscellaneous photos with Sam.
I have this cow that moos when you squeeze it. For some reason, Samantha goes into hysterics whenever she hears it moo. In fact that's what is happening here, though it looks like it's attacking her.
Sarah, Samantha, and Savannah at a the site of a geocache. (Great, we really need another "S" person in our family!) Yes, the cache container is a film canister.
Estrogen based lifeforms rule! Nikki told us to say "bull dookies" or something like that when she snapped the shot, and Samantha fell for it, ha ha! I'm holding my Garmin GPS, and also the cache, which is disguised to look like a piece of wood. More to come in my next entry.
Geocaching II
Our first cache was nearby in the Safeway parking lot. That's all we knew. I parked in front and let my GPS tell me where to go. We soon learned that the cache was behind the store. We looked behind a tall metal cabinet thingie and found the skeletal remains of a bird. No picture for this one, sorry! The cache turned out to be underneath a metal plate on a lightpost. Nikki saw that it was loose and pulled it upwards. We found a little sardine tin underneath. We took some items and left some of our items, tiny as they were. They had to be, this thing was tiny. I forgot what the items were, sorry.
We got back in the car and headed for the next one. (I would just walk but everyone else gets tired quicker than I do.) This one was in a trail behind a bunch of houses. We found it pretty quickly under a tree. There was what looked like a birdhouse, but upon closer inspection, it most definitely was not. Observe:
The owner of this cache had built the semi-birdhouse himself. That's really neat! I also loved the way the "chest o' trinkets" looked, as well as the log book. Here's a picture of me holding both.
We also found our first travel bug in this cache. A travel bug is a trackable dog tag that you can place in a cache. It's usually attached to an item in some way. This allows you to track your item online. The item becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online. The one we found was in a small plastic bag with a lego.
This travel bug is "racing" with another travel bug. Whichever one goes the most miles wins. They both started in the U.K.! The travel bug with the yellow lego is till in the U.K. This red one made it to Florida, then up to Canada, back down to New Mexico, and ended up in Arizona - first partway up Mount Lemmon, and now down here near us. What a trip! The unfortuante thing is, our car is not so good. Otherwise we'd bring it at least 30 miles or something. I'll have to drop it off somewhere else locally. Maybe the next geocacher can do right by it.
Before we headed to the next cache, we decided to take a few miscellaneous pics.
The kiddos!
I really love this picture of me and my snookums!
Our last cache was a really tricky one. It was located by the Pantano Wash, but farther south. Luckily for us, we didn't have do down in the wash, like last time. We looked so long for this damn thing. All that was around were little bushes and dirt. And my GPS was telling me I was 0.0 feet from the cache coordinates! Nikki and the kids kept kicking this log around, picking it up and putting it down, kicking it, etc. I picked it up...
The sun was in our eyes.
Wow! This guy carved a hole in the log and jammed an altoids tin into it! There wasn't much inside since it was so small. And no wonder the coordinates were off. They were moving the log from it's original location, so when I was standing there, it was somewhere else. Geez...
We took some time to fool around and climb a tree. I'm a kid at heart, so I had to get in on the fun. ;)
Yayyyyy!
Sarah, get that thing out of your mouth!
This is really good picture of Sarah.
"Honey, take the picture! Can't... hold on... much... longer...!"
We took the long way around (by mistake) when going back to the car. Skylar was really tired. She kept stopping and sitting down on the sidewalk. I wanted to hit some more caches, but we had to call it a day.
I'm considering starting another blog just to cover our geocaching exploits. We'll see...
Snippets
Skylar says, 'imagigation' instead of 'imagination.' Imagi-gay-tion. I like it. Someone should give their LGBT blog or organization (organi-gay-tion?) a name like that. That would rock.
Christmas shopping is just about done. We didn't get that much for the girls, but they'll get other things from their family in New York (semi-useless but hey it's something). We're really short on funds and high on expenses lately. Thank goodness the electric bill went down to $138 because we're really not using the air conditioner anymore. That's still pretty high though. Geez.
I've been playing a lot of Return to Castle Wolfenstein lately. Well, not a lot compared to a gaming enthusiast or anything. I play every two or three days because I'm so busy with other things. Anyway, it's great fun. Your basic shoot-em-up game. Blow the hell out of Nazis, and then all of a sudden, they bring these undead things back to life. The game totally changes into scary mode after that. Then it's back to Nazis. Hmmm.
We went geocaching again (see here for our first two times). We didn't go to as many or for as long a time as I wanted. Nikki was tired, and so was Skylar. Oh well. Maybe we'll do better next weekend. I'll write about it in more detail in my next post.
A friend of mine (granted, Facebook friend but maybe soon more of a real life friend) is going to try to start a non-profit insurance company of sorts for transfolk seeking GRS. You would pay a certain amount per month and then a deductible, and the company would pay for the rest of the surgery. Naturally, there would be guidelines to follow, and only reputable doctors would be covered. To anyone reading this, what do you think? Is this feasible? What would be some pitfalls and complications, besides getting all the money together for this?
My feelings of depression are directly linked to the cold. It got cold a couple weeks ago (thirties in the morning, and fifties in the afternoon), and I had a few bouts of depression. Ugh, it sucks to suddenly feel so down. For the last five days or so, we've been getting a bit of a heat wave for December (a warm wave?). Now that's it's been upper forties in the morning, and mid to upper seventies in the afternoon, I've been feeling just fine. I guess Arizona is really good for me.
I'm sure many of you bloggers have gotten junk mail from Goofle AdWords. They'll give you $100 of free advertising. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site. Well, I set everything up, and made sure that we would not be going over the $100. Naturally, I made an ad for my blog. However, it's been a week and the ad is still "under review." Figures.
I talked to my dad the other day. He thinks I should get a construction job or go dig ditches. "They're always looking for people to dig ditches." Yeah, that would be a great environment for me. Throw a girly transwoman in with a bunch of macho men. If they didn't figure out I was born male, I'd still be in danger for being the only soft, curvy thing there. No thanks. Dad needs a reality check.
Oh, my boobs are sore... again! It's been over seven years since I started hormones. They're still growing! Is that unheard of or what? I'm not sure. But I'm pretty thrilled about it. They're all sore and warm. Awesome! In following tradition, we need another nice picture of cleavage.
I got a haircut over the weekend. I really love it! My hair can't be too long or I end up yanking it all out. Well, not all of it (!!!), but you know. It's now just under my shoulder and I have respectable bangs again. Yay!
That's it for today. Stay tuned for another geocaching report!
Geocaching
Geocaching is a treasure hunt of sorts, using GPS technology. You can use a GPS like the one I have, or a GPS-enabled phone (though I've heard that the phones don't get you to the exact coordinates like a GPS does). You get the coordinates online from a site like geocaching.com. Once you get to the location that the container is at (which can be any kind of container), then you look high and low. Check trees, bushes, rocks, anything that may look like a likely hiding spot. Once found, the container could contain tchochkeys or small toys. You may trade an item for an item. Take a little thingie, and leave another thingie in it's place. There's often a log inside to put the date and your name or online alias. Then you put the cache back where you found it, and continue on to the next one if wish. The true fun is in getting outdoors, getting a bit of exercise, and of course, finding the cache. If my explanation made no sense to you, try this video:
I bought my Garmin eTrek Legend GPS about 5 years ago or more, and never used it. For one reason or another, I just never got around to going geocaching. Now that I have a family to share this with, and an area where the weather is almost always sunny, I decided to take up this little hobby. Here's a picture of the GPS that we're using.
So we set out to search for our first geocache. This one was near the Pantano wash. For those who don't know what a wash is, it's used to divert water away from homes and roads, etc., and out into the desert. It usually looks like a dried-up river, but it can turn into a raging torrent when the monsoons hit Tucson, which can happen in July, August or early September. First we looked on the east side of the wash. We walked about 18 meters, only to discover that we needed to go west. The GPS was telling us that the cache was down in the wash itself. The sides of the wash were way too steep to navigate, so we had to go alllll the way back. Once in the wash, we walked about the same distance. The GPS again told us to go west... as we were standing on the bottom of another steep wall of dirt. We went back again, and ended up on the west side of the wash this time. There we found it... finally! To be specific, Savannah was the one who spotted it. Here are some pics:
This... is the wash. Water flows from left to right. Well, it would, if there was any.
Walking down the east side of the wash. I love looking at the mountains here in Tucson. I wonder how long I have to live here in order to stop gawking at them.
Now we're inside the wash. Are you coming, honey?
Javelina footprints. A javelina is a large, hairy kind of pig, somewhat resembling a warthog.
This is not the cache. It's an old cassette player with the lid missing.
We found it! It was in that old stump to the right. I'm holding the old can that is our first geocache, and the kids are holding up the little goodies they got.
We later tried to find a cache behind a CVS, to no luck. There were a bunch of trees in the area, and they were confusing the hell out of my GPS. We found one more cache in a stump by the Hilton Hotel parking lot. I didn't take any pictures because it was pretty dark by the time we found it.
The next day we headed out again. Nikki was very achy and sore from the trek on the day before, so she stayed behind, as did Skylar. I took Sarah and Savannah with me, and we found a bunch more caches. It was some good quality time with my two older daughters. Here are some more pictures:
Sarah found this one. It was in a Bath & Body Works container. Savannah got a tiny bowling pin and Sarah got a bell.
"We're here searching for the infamous Kodak Cache. It's so named for the old film container that is the cache itself. What do we have here? A part of this metal fence looks suspicious..."
"Crikey! I found the bugger! It was hung inside the post, from what looks to be a straightened-out safety pin!"
"Ain't she a beauty!"
Here's another cache that was stuffed under the very rock that I'm sitting on. Unfortunately, these tiny caches don't have room for any swag -- errr, items.
If anyone has the wherewithal to invest in this hobby, I would recommend it. I heard that Tucson is a very cache-rich area (hooray!), but there are geocaches all over the world. Speaking of Tucson caches, here's a map illustrating the placement of these caches in my area. Just look at all of them! You can enlarge the pic a bit by clicking on it.
So has anyone reading this ever gone geocaching before? Would anyone like to try it?
