Today, I went out to find a mystery cache for the #geocaching Pi Day souvenir. The easiest one to find was at the New Castle Court House Museum. The last time I attempted this cache, the museum was closed. Had no trouble this afternoon. The museum is a historic attraction in this area and there are hourly tours of the court house.

After the museum visit, I still had a lot of daylight left so I decided to go for 2 more mystery caches to get the next tier of the Pi Day souvenir. I headed over to the northern part of Middletown, where there were two easy mystery caches within a mile of each other. All in all, it was an enjoyable Sunday excursion.

I finished Advent of Code 2025 earlier this month. I probably did not have to start working on each day's puzzle right when it came out but it was fun staying up to midnight to see if I could solve the puzzle before I fell asleep.

I thought most of the puzzles had fairly straightforward solutions but maybe I had the advantage of extensive experience at Codewars, another website with programming challenges / puzzles. The exception was Part Two of Day 10. I tried several approaches but that one stumped me. I set it aside. An hour later, I got the idea of reframing the problem as a system of linear equations. Then I dug around in the numpy & scipy documentation for a suitable algorithm and came up with a one-library-call solution that, of course, was simple and obvious in hindsight.

Since Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS was recently released, I decided to boot into that from a USB flash drive to see if the new COSMIC desktop is good enough for me to upgrade my daily driver laptop.

It appears to already work pretty well with my hardware and peripherals. Customization options are decent. The only reason I would wait a while before upgrading is within 15 minutes after I started to use it, the Applications menu stopped working. Not a showstopper because I use the Launcher more anyway, but there's no hurry to jump into this.

It was a good weekend.

Friday was the first day the geocaching Adventure Day 2025 souvenir was available. To get the souvenir, one had to log 5 Adventure Lab locations. Conveniently, there was a set of 5 new lab locations near the Wilmington Airport only a few miles from home. I stopped at the Dash In across the road from the airport, answered 5 questions, and got the souvenir.

On Saturday, I attended the "Halloween in NJ" munzee event ( https://calendar.munzee.com/event1759499743 ) in Woodstown. It wasn't a big event -- only 6 attendees -- but still, there were a lot of Munzees to capture, including an event trail and 2 bouncing virtual gardens.

I attended a geocaching event in Pennsville this evening. It's across the river plus a few miles from home, so aside from having to pay the bridge toll, it was an easy and convenient one for me. Logging this event also qualified me for the World Postcard Day 2025 geocaching souvenir.

The event was at Pat's Pizzeria. I ordered breadsticks. (Video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6e_467_TEKQ ) It's from the appetizer side of the menu so I didn't expect it to be quite this large and pizza-shaped. Nice though!

Before the event, I took a walk around Riverview Beach Park to capture and deploy some Munzees. It's interesting that at high tide this afternoon, the river level was almost up to the walk/bike path. That park must be getting flooded sometimes. (Video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G5Zm6NYOM8g )

CozyCon was this weekend. They always seem to schedule it on or after my birthday so that's how I remember to check in. (Please don't ever change that. LOL) It's an online convention so many of the panels were conducted via streaming video on Discord and Twitch. I was out running errands most of the weekend so I missed a lot of the con, but I did enjoy some panels on sewing and art.

This evening, I took part in Sixel's Outdoor Scenes / Landscapes Gesture Drawing Panel, following along in an art app on my tablet. I'm still somewhat more comfortable sketching with pen and paper than on a tablet screen, but I guess it takes some practice to get used to not having any surface texture to draw on. On the other hand, paper doesn't have a great undo feature.

On June 5, I went to the World Environment Day event. It was at a park less than a mile from home. I missed this event last year, so this time, I made sure it was on my calendar.

At the event, they set up a bunch of tents and tables in the field. Exhibitors included state govt agencies, utility companies, charities, and educators. I had done a fair amount of background research on related topics, so I came prepared with questions on renewable energy, residential waste recycling, nuclear power, wildlife repopulation, water quality, and PFAS monitoring. It was interesting to find out what regional organizations were doing to protect the environment and improve quality of life in the area. There were also some educational exhibits on local wildlife and plants.

https://www.drba.net/events/2025-world-environment-day-celebration