Whidbey Island Cache Machine

I posted the first draft (.PDF) for the Whidbey Island Cache Machine last Friday. The event's coming up on January 3, and will involve considerably more hiking than previous cache machine events. The views will be well worth it.

Biggest Cache Machine ever; lucky; Spooky

The Yakima Cache Machine II was a blast. It's impossible to get solid numbers, but I'm almost certain that this was the biggest cache machine ever. I'm calling it 120 people, since the reservations we made at Old Country Buffet were for 70, they turned everyone else away, and someone told me that as a result, there were 50 more cachers eating dinner next door. Wow.

On top of that, I think my experiment in separating out the stupid micro-caches from the route worked well. As someone pointed out last night, anyone who wanted to get the micros that were near the route certainly wasn't prevented from doing so, and even in my car, we attempted a couple of them that were painfully close to where we were, because they still showed up on the map and on some of the higher end GPSRs.

It's been more than 15 years since I was a passenger on the ride through the Yakima River canyon. I've never ridden through there when there was snow on the hills. I stand by my claim that it's the most beautiful drive in the state.

I expected a few of the caches to have some relatively steep hill climbing, but I didn't expect there to be as many (7+). My legs and feet are still aching 24 hours later.

Was it the best CM ever? I think it might be. YCM I was my all time favorite, but this time there wasn't a really bad one on the route.

Oh, and on the poker side, I played again last night at Casino Caribbean, won $100 in a raffle, and another $63 at the table. When I won the raffle, I had the same dealer at the table who dealt me the quad aces the night before. He was as shocked at my luck as I was.

The drive home... well... When I left, Snoqualmie had traction tires required, and White pass had traction tires advised. The ol' Saturn doesn't take chains (not enough wheel-well clearance), so I'm heading home via The Dalles, Oregon. It's about an extra hour of driving compared to White Pass, which is the way I came over on Friday. No biggie. I got to eat a good pizza burger from Spooky's restaurant in The Dalles, which has free wi-fi, which is allowing me to post this blog entry.

Yakima Cache Machine II is Saturday

I'm looking forward to the Yakima Cache Machine II event more than any cache machine in a long time. Maybe it's because the first YCM five years ago was my favorite of the 15 I've organized. Maybe it's because the drive through the Yakima River canyon is, IMHO, the most fun drive in the state -- even better than 101 along Hood Canal, or the Olympic Peninsula loop. Maybe it's because I'm the navigator for a carload of cachers (dsvaughn, GeekGirl, and hydnsek) who are gonna be a barrel of fun. We're even gonna meet up on Friday before the event for a 3-mile, 12-cache hike through Cowiche Canyon.

I'm giddy.

(And yes, Yakima has poker rooms. Maybe it'll cover my hotel room costs.)

Grab bag: sober poker, cache machine, and the wrong side of SD

It's been a couple of weeks. Time for a few bullet points to catch up:

• Sober players make bad opponents: I played at Palace again just before Christmas; several of the players were home on Christmas break from college or wherever, they brought their A game, and they weren't drinking. I was up about $70 after two hours, then the deck ran cold, I ran into a set, and walked away from the table down $100. Bah.
• Cache machine is Saturday: I've got the plans and route finalized for the Vancouver (WA) Cache Machine event, and this one feels like it's gonna be one of the better ones of the 14 I've organized. I got a call from the Vancouver PD today in response to a couple of questions I had about parking locations, and they were happy to be aware that we were coming to town. The route seems like it's pretty solid, the caches seem doable, and it's a good mix of micros, pocket parks, and quarter mile trail jaunts, with some history lessons tossed in. Should be fun.
• Bad bell curve. No biscuit: I played through my December $200 bonus at PlayersOnly last night -- and lost $250. I don't have my spreadsheet with me right now, but that's close to being 2 standard deviations off of the expected result. I'm OK with that, because even when you're gambling with a positive expectation wager, you're still gambling. Sometimes, rarely, the coin will come up heads 10 times in a row.
• Back to Happy: This month's Gambling Journal says that Happy Days is back to their ask-at-the-cage 2x$10 match plays for January. Apparently, I will be, too.
• ...and taxes: I closed down my 2007 spreadsheet last night with a third year of profitability. If you add the the PlayersOnly bonuses and the Happy Days match play bonuses together, that's pretty much my profit for the year. Everything else seems to be a wash: poker wins, poker losses, $30 on the ponies, a few bucks at charity bingo. Not as good as 2006 or (/me gets a dreamy look) the pre-UIGEA 2005 year, but still, it's in the low positive 4-figures for the year. It'll pay for a family vacation. Taxes take a small chunk of it, but tax on fun money hurts less than tax on money I really worked for.

Vancouver (WA) Cache Machine

The planning for the Vancouver Cache Machine is underway. January 5... yay!

Cache machine this weekend

It's gonna be a busy couple of weeks. I'll be in Seattle for an all day CLE on Thursday. I have to be in Aberdeen by 7:00 on Friday night for the Grays Harbor Cache Machine pre-dinner. This is followed by a half day of caching on Saturday (Kim and Krys will be cache machining for the first time - yay!) before I have to make it to SeaTac for a 7:00 PM flight to a network security conference in Las Vegas. Yes, I'll be playing some poker (CheapoVegas says the Excalibur and Imperial Palace poker rooms are full of fish, and I've got to play at the Bellagio and Wynn at least once in my life), but I think my table time will be limited, as I do need to study for my GCFA certification test.

Grays Harbor Cache Machine

After two years off, I'm hosting another cache machine event: the Grays Harbor Cache Machine on September 22. It's not likely that I'll actually make it to dinner that night, because I'll need to be in Vegas by 9:00 a.m. the next day (a six day computer forensics class), but for me, planning is just as fun as the event itself.