About Peter

About the Site:

The Kinzua Kid is Peter Kraatz, a member of the WNY diaspora living in Southern California with an addiction to silly games like Geocaching.  My real name is my handle on Geocaching.com (peterkraatz).  I’ve decided to post some of the more useful tidbits I’ve learned about the game for my caching friends in San Diego County.  This just seemed a LOT easier than writing a weekly newsletter and dropping it in the mail.  Since then, I’ve been encouraged to write more about IT (the day job) and my other hobbies (the ones for which I never have time).

If you’d like more mail, I can be reached via e-mail.  peterkraatz at cox dot net.

My blog was originally called “Telephone Poles on the Moon”.  Telephone Poles on the Moon were some of the favorite stories we grandkids heard told by my grandfather.  They were amazing tales of the triumph of ingenuity, perseverance and imagination over boredom and poverty in the Great Depression.  There were no life lessons, just a great retelling of a man’s childhood fun and some jokes to boot, keeping us at rapt attention for hours.  Also, they were completely false.  I’m still looking for those telephone poles on the moon every evening through the eyepiece of my own telescope.

These were great stories because they demanded an incessant string of questions about how, when, why and by what logic could each story make sense.  Stealthily, they taught us critical thinking and the admission of fiction would not come until all the details were worked out.  Then it became a game.  What new story could the man craft, rich with detail, comedy, and plenty of half-truths to keep you guessing?  What really was true about the stories and what was not?  And for goodness sake how DO you get telephone poles on the moon?

Sometime I’ll tell you how to find those metaphoric telephone poles.  Until then all I’m finding are little mint tins with scraps of paper inside under bushes, nebulae in space and a whole lotta problems to solve in IT.  I’ll find all the geocaches and Messier objects long before I fix anything in IT but the pursuit is worth it.