Meme.

1. Go into your LJ's archives.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

I think that this meme is pretty stupid, so I've been avoiding it. But just now, I went and looked up my twenty-third entry, and I found it pretty amusing. It's from the twenty-second of March, 2002:

hay,i am onhere becouse i would like to meet somone, fun,smart,spearatuale and kind harted.i realy love animals i have a horse and a dog, i enjoy,going to the movies watching plays, painting, photagraphy, hanging out with freinds, and i read palms.
i would like to meet somone, funny, rtistic, a litle speratuale and kind harted,. somone who has an imagination, and i have never been with a real romantic guy id like that.

A New Hobby?

So, earlier today, saxikath cut out of work early to spend some time Letterboxing. Like her, it's something I'd heard about, but haven't found time to follow up on. So I surfed over to www.letterboxing.org. And started poking around. It looks cool, and there appear to be dozens of them in the LA area, but somewhere along the FAQ, I followed a tangent to Geocaching.

This grabbed me. Perhaps it was that, where there were dozens of nearby letterboxes, there were hundreds of nearby geocaches. Perhaps it was that the geocaching site is more organized, making it easier to tell if the caches were still active, compared to letterboxing information pages that hadn't been updated in months. Perhaps it was the existence of a geocache less than a mile from my house. Perhaps it was the variety of the types of hunts involved.

Mostly, though, there is something about many of the descriptions that remind me of the wanderings of my youth. When I was younger, teenaged mostly, I'd go on long walks or bike rides to muse quietly to myself. Up hills, around confusing residential zones. I'd just set out and be gone for hours. In the west Valley, there were plenty of ways to get a great view, as well. Now, though, I just don't get the same itch to light out and stay out until my feet can't take anymore. There's always something that I could accomplish instead, and having my own apartment obviates the need to escape into the outdoors.

Scanning across the geocaching site made me think this might be a way to recapture that. There are, of course, many caches based on hiking or exploring state parks, but there are also those in the Valley that simply direct a person to hidden spots. The small, out-of-the-way parks that spring up among the various suburbs. Museums and landmarks that many don't know about. It seems like a way to recapture that sort of wandering, disguised as a minor accomplishment. To get out occasionally and explore a new area. And it also looks conducive to getting a few people to join.

So al in all, it seems like an interesting hobby to pick up. Now all I need is a GPS device.