The earthworks were constructed in what is now Ohio almost 2000 years ago. While not as visually impressive as some of the other sites, the earthworks offer an intriguing glimpse into a fascinating culture that influenced this continent long ago.
This is my 69th site, representing 5.75% of the total sites.
I last did a geocaching update on this site in December 2021. I stopped, frankly, because they became boring to write -- I can only imagine how boring they were to read.
But maps are cool to look at, right?
In that update, I had found geocaches in 75 counties that were connected on the map, as shown.
I've been really connecting things up since then, getting to 183!
That stretches to 13 states (IL, IN, MI, OH, PA, NJ, WV, VA, MD, NC, SC, DE, TN) and DC!
I am continuing my project to read all of the Nebula Award winners for Best Novel. The latest winner was Babel, by R.F. Kuang. The actual full title is "Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution".
Babel takes place in an alternate history, where the Industrial Revolution is powered by silver magic, which depends on the talents of translators to perform the magic. By "translators" I mean actual translators; the magic depends on the subtle differences in meaning between words in different languages.
The book is exceedingly well written and a blistering indictment of colonialism. I think it is a bit of a letdown as an alternate history, though. I believe the availability of magic would have led to greater differences than just "the Industrial Revolution is powered by magic". I also did not come away from the novel with conclusions about 19th century England or the present day. Why was violence a "necessity"? Is it now? If not, what does it say that we got from there to here without it as a primary driver of change.
4 out of 5 stars.
As in 2019, that leaves me with:
I have been behind in awarding the Stay-At-Home Bowl trophy, which is given to a team who defeats both Super Bowl participants.
2020: No winner.
2021: 49ers and Packers
2022: No winner.
The 2021 season was the first one since 2008 to feature two winners.
Last month, I visited my 65th World Heritage Site, Belem Tower in Lisbon, Portugal.
The other part of the World Heritage Site is a monastery. I did not visit it, but here I am holding some pastries in front of it.
Since I'm re-invigorating the blog, I thought I would update some of my more interesting fixations. One of those is seeing how many World Heritage Sites I can visit.
Since my last update, more sites have been inscribed (though none I've visited), bringing the total to 1154.
I've been away from blogging for a while (yikes, only 5 posts last year...and pretty boring ones, frankly). I started this blog during a difficult time in my life. Twenty-two years later, I find myself in a surprisingly similar one, so it seemed appropriate to return to the blog to express myself.
At least for now, I'm going to talk about more cheerful things.
In 2004, I declared a goal of reading all the books to win the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
My most recent update was in 2019. I only had 5 books left. Well, three more years have added three more novels to read. I have, however, read all three.
The 2019 winner was Song for a New Day. I mostly listened to it on my drive cross-country last year to visit my mother in Arizona. It largely concerns people not wanting to leave their houses because of a pandemic. Eerie. I gave it 4 stars.
The 2020 winner was Network Effect, book 5 in the Murderbot series. I gave it five stars; I have really enjoyed the whole series.
The 2021 winner was A Master of Djinn, another 5-star book. It is a mystery set in an alternate-history, steampunk 1910 Cairo. With lots of magic. It's great, and I hope to see more books in the series.
So it's back to 5 left. The good news is that I am back to flying again, and I do some of my best reading in the skies.
After not geocaching in August and September, I found 12 caches in October and 24 in November, for a pretty busy fall.
On October 3, I found a single challenge cache. On the 8th, I found my first Adventure Lab (and a bonus cache) along with 6 challenge caches. I had avoided adventure labs for a while because they count as a "find" but not a "cache," which is confusing. But I might want to do one with the boys at some point, so I thought I'd see what was going on. Two of the challenge caches were new difficulty terrain combos (D/T #47 and #48). Another challenge cache was the first cache I found placed in October 2018 (Month 224).
On the 11th, I decided to push towards my long-standing goal of finding caches in all 24 Maryland counties. I headed for the lower Eastern Shore and found one cache in each of the counties there (Counties 159-162). Two of them were from new months, May 2005 and July 2009 (Months 225 and 226). That left three Maryland counties.
On the 7th, I headed out in Northern Virginia specifically looking for unfound months. I found six of them (Months 227-232) and a challenge cache.
I found one more cache on the 12th, and then on the 13th, I headed for West Virginia, mostly with the aim of finishing the 77 Degrees West challenge (I have now found one starting W77 00, one starting W77 01, etc.). That day, I also found my first cache in Berkeley County (County 165).
On the 20th and 21st, I went caching in Pennsylvania. Somehow, I was right near an unfound cache, so I grabbed FTF #25, and my first in Pennsylvania. All in all, I found caches in five new counties (Counties 166-170). The FTF was actually placed on October 31, so I got October 2021 as Month 233.
Finally, I found four caches on Thanksgiving, including one placed in September 2021 (Month 234).
