While  out doing some snowshoeing and geocaching in Pine Grove forest this afternoon I looked back along the trail and saw this scene.

I checked my email when I got home after work and noticed that a new geocache notification for Navan road’s secret stash (GC2MYZ8) by Team Matassa had arrived about half an hour earlier. Given the fact that there are some geocachers in Ottawa who don’t hesitate in dropping everything when a new cache is published, I figured that by the time I could get to it one of them would already have logged it.

When I checked up on it an hour later to see who had claimed the FTF I was surprised to see that it still hadn’t been logged. So, I loaded it on my GPS, grabbed my geocaching backpack and headed out to see if I could find it.

Arriving at the trailhead, I noticed several sets of footprints in the snow leading in the general direction of the cache. As I closed in on the cache, the footprints lead off in a different direction.

Hmmm…

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I’m pleased to report that the van belonging to STRIDE that was stolen has been found in a parking lot on Cyrville Road. I haven’t heard whether there was much damage to it, but hopefully not. Apparently, STRIDE had a number of people willing to loan them a van and a couple of people who were willing to donate a van — a very classy response from the community indeed!

The Globe and Mail has a story about about an eighteen-year old grade 12 student who is championing a proposal to require drivers who have a provisional license, like a G1 or G2, to display a sign with a “P” on it when they’re driving a car. He came up with the idea while on vacation in Australia where they have a similar requirement.

In most cases this wouldn’t be terribly newsworthy, but this isn’t most cases.

Alex Don has used his connections from when he was a page at the Ontario Legislature to garner political support for his proposal. According to the story, five MPPs are supporting this, along with City of Burlington councillors and the chief of Halton Regional Police Service. Also supporting him is a teacher at his high school who coached the school’s soccer team. Two boys on that team were killed in a car accident a couple of years ago. With all this support, there’s a fair chance that his proposal will be introduced as a private member’s bill by Kevin Flynn, MPP for Oakville, in February.

But will it actually result in safer roads? While I’d like to say it will, I fear it won’t. And it might actually have some unexpected consequences.

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My dad volunteers with a charity called STRIDE. They clean and repair used medical equipment such as wheelchairs, electric scooters, walkers and hospital beds, and make them available to individuals and institutions at a reasonable rate. Their van, which included a special wheelchair lift, was stolen recently. Its loss is causing them a lot of problems because many of the things they refurbish are bulky meaning that they often don’t fit in an average car, so they are having problems delivering them to the people who need them.

The vehicle is a white 2007 GMC Savana 2500 Cargo Van with licence plate number 722 5YT. The organization is asking anyone with information on the whereabouts of their van to contact Ottawa police. The van has been recovered so if you see it driving around, you don’t need to call the police. 🙂

A tip o’ the hat to the Ottawa Citizen for reporting on it earlier today.

@DaniGirl retweeted a link to an article about the pitfalls of installing free WordPress themes that you find by searching for them on Google. In a nutshell, the author of the article, Siobhan, found that all but one of the first ten links Google returned pointed at themes that were incredibly dodgey. Most of them used obfuscated code in the theme to insert links and ads that the owner of the blog had no control over.

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I’ve written about this a couple of times in the past, but it’s been a few months since I last blogged about it so I thought it was worth revisiting.

Earlier today I started feeling crummy and several hours later I’m still feeling crummy. Checking the air pressure reading on Environment Canada’s website, I can see that I started feeling crummy shortly after the air pressure started falling. In fact, in the last six hours, the pressure has dropped almost 0.5 kPa.

This isn’t surprising given there’s a low pressure zone that’s passing to the south, as you can see in the snippet from the most recent surface analysis. (Ottawa is the red dot and Lake Huron is just north of the L.)

Hopefully, the pressure changes will settle down because feeling out of sorts and not being able to do anything about it sucks.