Life Outside the Office

Every now and then I do get out of the office. On those rare occasions I usually occupy my time doing one of the following:

If I'm not doing one of the above, I'm hanging out with my wife and our two boys.

Geocaching

Team Rubbo out geocaching With two young children, my wife and I have been searching for a family activity that all of us could enjoy. Recently we've found that geocaching was that activity. The idea behind geocaching is to use a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit to search for hidden treasures, referred to as caches, placed by a fellow geocacher. These caches can be anything from a simple logbook where you record your victorious find, to a buried box of trinkets where you can exchange one of your own trinkets for someone else's. For an overview of geocaching see the Frequently Asked Questions at geocaching.com.

The geocache locations are listed at geocaching.com. At this website you enter what part of the United States you want to do a geocache in, and it returns a list of caches in your area. When we first started geocaching we were surprised how many there are. Now we wish there were more. The profile box below is a brief review of our finds.

Profile for Team Rubbo

It's also a link to our geocaching.com profile. Feel free to check it out.

The image to the above right is of my famlily and I enjoying the scenery near the FDR Memorial cache in Washington DC. For a gallery of some of our geocaching adventures check out our family caching page here.

LEGOs

Growing up my two favorite toys were G. I. Joes and LEGO bricks. Over the years the "blow them up" phase of my life has passed, but I'm still into building with LEGO bricks. The difference between when I was a kid and now is that I can afford a larger collection, which is necessary for building complex creations. I find nothing more soothing than listening to music, preferably something by A Perfect Circle or Tool, and putting bricks together. Even the sound of shifting through a bucket of LEGO bricks has a calming effect.

Surprisingly the LEGO community for adults is quite large. Each year there are meetings of LEGO freaks like myself. Two of the larger meetings are BrickFest and Northwest BrickCon. Besides these large annual meetings, and numerous smaller local gatherings, there are many LEGO communities online. Below is a short list of some of these communities I travel to frequently.

Lately I've taken to doing LEGO CAD. Some of my own creations (MOCs) can be seen at my BrickShelf account, DrLJRIV. Most of what I've learned about LEGO CAD I've picked up on the internet. The below sites are central to CADing.

One of the most creative LEGO websites is The Brick Testament. I would love to do something like this if I only had the time . . . and the bricks.

The Simpsons

If you sit down and talk with me for a few minutes you'll quickly find out that I'm a huge Simpsons fan. I started watching The Simpsons when it was only a bumper on The Tracey Ullman Show. Back then I was too young to understand the sketches on Tracey Ullman, but The Simpsons got through to me.

Below is a list of my favorite Simpsons episodes. The list is chronologically ordered since no one episode sticks out as my favorite. However, these particular episodes do distinguish themselves from the other three hundred plus (at least for me).

As you would expect there are a number of Simpsons websites out there. A few of my favorite are

Sports

I've always enjoyed playing and watching sports. Occasionally I still get out and play something, but with my busy schedule I'm more often reduced to catching up on scores and stories using the web. To follow my favorite teams I usually go straight to their websites.

Can you tell that I grew up in Denver and that I'm not a baseball fan?

Besides the individual team sites, I read up on other stories at the league websites.