Dog Outing

Susan sent me some information about the Georgia Dog Hiking Club. They hike a trail near the dam at Lake Allatoona every Sunday morning.

From Creative Loafing:

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-08-28/happs.html

The home page of the guy who runs it (with info towards the bottom of a very long web page; this guy didn’t appear to be there today):

http://home.aol.com/DrBatch/

So we tried it out. I sent an e-mail to the owners of Lucy (formerly Penny a.k.a. Little Katie) so we saw Lucy and Matt out there (I also saw Lucy with both Matt and Rachel last weekend at Stone Mountain for a hike). Today there were probably 20 dogs that came. It was funny seeing all the different dogs (many of them off their leashes which is just as well because you get tangled pretty quickly). Once we started everyone let their dogs off the leashes and pandemonium ensued, but the dogs all got along and our dogs didn’t go running off with the others at least.

The first part of the hike was almost straight up a mountainside. In fact it is like walking up the stairs of a 60-story building as you nearly double your elevation above sea level from 700 to 1350 feet at the top of Vineyard Mountain (according to this USGS map). Susan wasn’t feeling well at all (she thought she would have to turn back) so we got behind pretty quickly. We caught up or passed other people and their dogs and caught up with the main pack while they were playing in a part of the lake. The dogs thought this was the greatest thing ever. Then we got lost some more, came across some other people with dogs, and finally made it back to the car after 3 hours of hiking (everyone else was gone at this point). It’s definitely worth doing and was a lot of fun, but also a major workout. I’m going to need to borrow Jeb’s geiger counter next time so I can record the trail.

Brokers

This is an e-mail I wrote to my Auntie P when she asked me about what broker I use . . .

I had been using Vanguard which charged $20 per trade, but I thought that was pretty reasonable. Then they wanted to start charging a yearly fee plus increase the per trade costs so I went elsewhere. I considered E-Trade and Ameritrade, then tried Muriel Siebert but I wound up with Scottrade (Siebert’s web site didn’t work through my work’s firewall so I would have to pay extra to make phone trades or limit orders). They have very good customer satisfaction reviews (they always talk about winning the J.D. Power award four years in a row or whatever) and they are also really cheap. Online market orders are $7 and limit orders are $12. They also have local offices though I’ve never been. They don’t have minimum balances or fees for closing out your account. I’ve had them for about 9 months.

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Tools and Chips

This was in response to one of Jeb’s postings but I don’t know how to link to that. He said my comment was too long and should be its own blog entry.

There are already Palm/cell phones. Since Palms support mp3’s then why not add one of those tiny hard drives and GPS? Maybe the Palm is the device. And if it is, the Tungsten 3 is awfully nice . . .

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Penny Instructions

The new owners of Lucy (nee Penny) wrote to me asking for instructions. They were feeling guilty for leaving her in the crate all day and then again all night when they go to bed. Here’s what I wrote:

Thanks for the update. I appreciate it now that I’m Penny-less. I’m glad she’s fitting in. She really likes people so much I knew she’d be okay, but I was a little worried she might miss the other dogs at first.

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Where’s George?

I think maybe Jeb told me about the whole concept of Where’s George. Where’s George is a web site where you can register the serial number and year of dollar bills you have. Then you write “www.wheresgeorge.com” on the bill and hope someone knows what to do it with it when they come across one.

Well, I got one in change yesterday at Waffle House (Susan and I like to go to a special restaurant on Friday nights) and told Susan about it. So we came home and logged on. We were the first person to report back on this dollar. It had come from Florida a couple of months earlier.

Neat concept. Keep your eye out. It’s like doing GPS Travel Bugs but you don’t have to leave the house!