Day 242: After an exhausting day at the end of an exhausting week, I was delighted at the prospect of spending a quiet evening with friends (something of a rare event in my life). I joined them for dinner and their youngest son's piano recital, and when we returned to the house, it was just in time for Kevin's magic cell phone to announce that the new geocaches he'd installed had been published. Looking over his shoulder, I discovered that he had designed them with my love of Angry Birds in mind. One was a traditional cache requiring only the input of the stated coordinates, and the other was a puzzle which needed to be deciphered in order to learn the exact location. I took one look at the math involved and said, "I'm too tired to solve for the third side of an equilateral triangle, Kevin. This is going to have to wait until morning."
As I drove home, the sun was setting, but my mind was not on the comforts of my bed. I came in the door and turned on the computer, grabbed the coords for the traditional cache and sped out again under dying light to find it. It was a simple find, if perhaps a little awkward to reach for someone of my tiny stature. On returning to the house, I logged the find and then couldn't resist taking a peek at the puzzle. An hour and a half later, I finally threw in the towel and went to bed, no closer to a solution than at the point where I had started.
It was one of those nights when you're just too tired to sleep. I tossed and turned. I moaned and fussed. At 3 AM, I said profane words, got out of bed and turned the computer on to pursue a hairbrained idea about the puzzle which gained me precisely nothing. At 4:30 AM, I shot an email to Kevin and said, "This is more math than I've done in 55 years. I'm going back to bed." I included a link to a trigonometric formula I'd been wrestling: sine, cosine, trajectory, bearing, velocity, frustrated by the obviously missing factors of time and mass which I felt needed to be known in order to calculate distance. Needless to say, my further attempts at sleep were pointless. I can't let something like this rest, and it pays me back in kind.
At 5, I got up again. At 6:30, I was still wrangling numbers, but then an email popped up from Kevin to tell me I was overcomplicating things ("as usual"). He thoughtfully provided me with a link to a plug-in calculator for the required formula and I was overjoyed to see some progress being made at last. Projecting a waypoint from the solution should have been easy using either the function in my GPSr or an external projector, except that I was too muzzy to remember that I needed to reverse the direction from point of impact to point of launch, a snag which cost me yet another half an hour.
Still, once I'd got that part whipped, his validator for the coordinates failed to respond politely to my input. "Incorrect!" it told me time and again. I double-checked, triple-checked my numbers and my typing skills. Nope, it just wasn't working for me.
Now here's where human nature kicks in. It had to be someone else's fault, not mine. I decided Kevin must have made a mistake when he entered the numbers in the validator, so I called him. As I was reading my data to him over the phone, I saw where I had gone wrong.
Jeez, I should have taken off my socks when I ran out of fingers! Eight plus eight is sixteen, not seventeen!
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