Geocaching Shenanigans

Yesterday, The Boss (not to be confused with my wife, a different kind of boss, and not to be confused with my real boss) and I went geocaching in Kaposi Park in South St. Paul. We managed to find four caches out of the five. This one was our coup. It's called "Tunnel Vision" and somewhere in this picture (not necessarily visible) there's a cache hidden. We found it, officially making us the Second (and Third) To Find. And not because others hadn't been looking. The web site is littered with Did Not Finds. We spent a lot of time wandering around, pondering the area and the title. At one point, I climbed up over the tunnel arch, paranoid that I was going to slide off the side and fall 20-some feet and break my leg, if lucky. But embracing my inner monkey, I made it, and yelled, "I FOUND IT!" When The Boss came walking out of the tunnel, I pushed about 4 inches of fresh snow on his head.

We left for a while without finding it. Came back. Bumped into a couple of cachers and introduced ourselves as Juggle87 and NodToNothing, and then had an epiphany. I missed the cache the first time, even though I was in the right spot, and some fine second sweeping by The Boss grabbed it. I have a picture of the location, but I'm not going to post it. It was a fine trick. Too fine to give away to the likes of you.


Here's one of the other caches we found for which I will show a picture. I spent a few minutes trying to grab it wondering how in the hell anyone could get it if my arms weren't long enough, when I realized there was a suspicious stick nearby. A general rule of geocaching - when you can't reach it, look for a supicious stick. Here's The Boss with the cache.


And me with the cache. I have snowpants, boots, and four layers of upper clothing on. By the time we were done I was exhausted from clomping around in all that outerwear. I fell down once on a hill, and I can still feel the spot on my knee where I whacked a tree, but it held up after 28 miles on the trainer, so I'm going to assume I didn't chip a bone.


Eryn and I went out last week. We found a Third To Find, which was our best so far. After spending an hour looking for one in an ice skating rink that included the hint "in the winter you'll need an extraction tool" (?) we were happy to find at least one we could add to our list.


It is that small. Here's Eryn modeling the size compared to her head, which is roughly the size of a big cantaloupe. Later we went to play in the park and throw wet tennis balls at each other. The hill behind her in the picture (just past the trees) was so iced over she could sled down it on her butt.


One of the things that confused us while caching was this wall. There's no baseball diamond nearby. It's just sitting there. No marks, like it's a backstop for golf or batting practice. No instructions. No plaque, announcing it as the Something River Hills Memorial Wall and Performance Art Exhibit. It's just a wall. In the park. For no discernible reason. You can't see it in this picture, but just to (your) right is a small child who felt it was a good idea to take a sled down an ice hill much like the one I referred to in the last paragraph. Except his hill ended in a tar-covered trail. So did his ride. And his head. There was considerable bawling and Eryn noted, "That was stupid." Good girl.

Bizzaro Earth?

Eryn and I saw this playground spinner while we were out playing. I'm pretty sure that's Africa. But if it is, and we're looking at Africa basically from the south, where is Antarctica? It's not made entirely of snow and ice - global warming couldn't have completely taken it out. And where is Atlantis, now that Google has revealed it to exist somewhere just to the west? And what the hell are all those dark blue areas compared to the light blue areas? I don't see that on any oceanographic map. What do they know that I don't? And why does the map have to be continent-of-Africa centric when we're living in the United States? I heard all the US/Europe centric map politically correct discussion while I was in college, but shouldn't the map be centralized on where you live? That would seem to be the PC answer that could be appropriately addressed in this day of targeted production, at least if you're not a playground designer/producer getting your undies in a bunch over immigration issues vis a vis the playscape. After all, English gets the priority location at the bottom, so it's not like the designer is avoiding the PC issues inherent in the choice of global positioning. There's not a specifically African language on the whole spinner, unless you include English and French as languages spoken in some African countries.

There's a lot to think about while spinning this piece of the playground. For my part, I would have made the global map top to bottom and completely around the spinner. That would have stopped individuals like me from using up playground space while cogitating what the hell was going on, and would have addressed the PC issue gracefully, as well as the Antarctic issue, if that's indeed Earth. Eryn eventually had to drag me away and insist that I stop speculating because she was getting cold.

Infection - The Photos

French Dip asked to see some photos of my incarceration. I didn't leave them out because I didn't want to show them. It's just that I wrecked 'em. Ahahahaha....just try and outpun me. Dicks. Anyway, I just hadn't managed to get them off Pooteewheet's camera yet because I have to pop the chip, put that little chip in a bigger chip, put it in the camera, and then download the pictures. It's annoying.

Unfortunately, I don't have any surgical footage for you, although I'd have enjoyed that. They should tape surgery for you - that would be cool. Way better than wedding videos. But, if you're French Dip and you really must see a few nice pictures of hemorrhoids, then here's a Google image search. Keep in mind that anal melanomas are aggressive malignancies only masquerading as hemorrhoids and shouldn't be confused with anything I was suffering from. I was in no such danger (scroll down on that one from some enjoyable photos. The phrase "6 cm prolapsed, nodular, pigmented anal melanoma" should be enough to make your stomach churn without accompanying media).

Here I am in the ER. IVed and prior to antibiotics or the hospital. Don't look up my dress, although if you start to, you can see I still have a little bit of a tan from bicycling. That is not a Lance Armstrong bracelet.


Bad oxygen levels. They don't like it when you're at 90% and your white blood cell counts are way up. So they hook you to this tube which made my sinuses first dry, then congested. I'm not sure if those are hives or dry skin. Being in a hospital/clinic environment has given me hives before (I think there's a disinfectant to which I'm slightly allergic).


The shunt they left in for my hospital stay while they pumped various antibiotics into my system to cycle the fever down.


This will be the name of a future nephew. Axial. You KNOW this is a sign. It even starts with an "A". I should have scribbled a request on the back of a napkin in case I'd died in the bed.

Halloween Geocaching

It was a nice enough day today that after breakfast we went out to try out the new Vista HCx handheld GPS and find a few of the Halloween 2008 caches we have yet to find. This was the one we attempted to find in the dark a few weeks ago and failed to locate because the GPS was bouncing all over the place, "Look Ma, No Hands." Here are Pooteewheet and Eryn hamming it up. I don't know what's scarier, the axe in the hand, or the fact that Pooteewheet looks just a little like Klund in this picture. I'm glad I married her before I knew him, or that would be embarassing.

This was our 100th cache! We're officially in the century club.


Here's a close up of the cache if you're interested. We looked in this log the night we missed it - we just didn't notice the opening where it resided. The log and pencil are in the axe handle.


Here's Eryn walking through an abandoned wheat field on our way to "Splitting Headache".


This is posed for effect and to get some appropriate light. It was hidden in the bole of that tree. Eryn hates skulls that still have their eyeballs. She was fine with touching the axe and severed hand, but wanted nothing to do with this cache.


However, she still stepped up and took a picture of me posing with the cache.