Last Friday

It's been a week.  School starts this coming Tuesday. The weather, she is warm and humid.  It got up to 90 degrees today, which isn't real bad, I know, but the humidity has been floating around in the 57+  neighborhood, and is in fact 74 percent right this second!  I am dripping!

At work it got up 93.5 degrees, with a heat index of 101. The humidity was in the high seventies.  I remember it was 84 degrees in the library when I turned on the light this morning at seven A.M.

A friend's husband passed away a couple days ago.  He was declining, but I don't think anyone expected it to happen this soon.  It was very sudden.  Our hearts go out to her!

I STILL have not received my bird bath pump!

I have completed thirty days of The 31 Days Of Geocaching event.  I had to range to distant El Cajon to grab an easy one today.  Traffic was awful, especially around Parkway Plaza.  I got lost several times, despite having a GPSr and a map.  Found the cache quite easily, though.  I was fortunate to have my CD carrier-thingie with me. I was able to relax to the sound of  Silver Screen... cranked the window down, cranked it up, shared it with my fellow travelers.

Quote from yesterday's Reddit:

JimmyHavok

  You do what you can, but every once in a while a big [freak]ing rock falls down out of the sky and it doesn't matter.

B. sent me a nice card for Veteran's Day.

That is about all I can share today.  Thanks for reading!

Above

SPOILER ALERT!  This monument is was the first stage of a multicache.  I had to calculate the final waypoint using the numbers on that little tag.  I had to take a picture of it so I could see the numbers!
When I got to the final cache it was missing.  I found a part of the container about thirty feet away.  I notified the owner of the cache so he could fix it up.

Can you see where I parked the vehicle?  Right at that red arrow!

And here we have El Cajon Mountain, often called "El Cap".  Shouldn't that be "El Caj"?

That's a Vons down there!Behind that rather unattractive plant.

I found five caches today, one monument, and very nice views.  Didn't SEE any ticks, and didn't SEE or HEAR any snakes, which is more than previous cachers on this hillside can say!

Foiled Again

I thought I would combine trips and visit the Fletcher Hills library for a book, then on to El Cajon for a couple of geocaches.  Nope, library closed on Monday.  It didn't occur to me it might be closed, because, you know, it's MONDAY!!  And I had just come from dropping off books at the La Mesa branch!

I headed over to El Cajon and started driving up the rather steep hills of Rattlesnake Mountain, a place I don't remember ever being before.  Parking is rather restricted, I finally found a place near where I wanted to go, but it was on the wrong side of a construction gate that was across the road.  The gate was open, though.  As I was walking up the hill a big truck and a Bobcat (or something like) exited the gate, but they didn't close it, so I figured I was good for at least a few minutes.  I found the caches relatively quickly, for me, took a couple of pictures from the view point (but it's not the peak, more of a demi-peak), got back to the vehicle, put it in 2nd gear, and SLOWLY went back down the hill.  There is a 25 mph zone on the flats at the bottom, the policia were waving the cars over.  There were at least three police (or sheriff, I didn't notice) cars there.  I cruised by very virtuously at 25 mph.

This is looking to the west-ish, with Cowles Mountain on the left, and the 52 on the right heading up the grade towards Serra Mesa.

And this would be looking to the south-ish, with big ol' Mt. Miguel looming up there. The long street on the center-right is Mollison.  The blue is not a lake, it is the roof of Senior Aerospace Ketema

I stopped by Dixieline on the way home.  They said they had no hardware for cafe curtains, and recommended Target.  I went to Walmart, ended up buying a whole new rod.  And some bread.

And that is about all I can think of for today!

Slough Ride

This morning I made pancakes for breakfast.  With coffee (instant). I think I am getting better at this!

This afternoon Matt and I went down to check out the Famosa Slough, off of West Point Loma Boulevard.  There are a few geocaches there, we found all five, plus there are a LOT of birds..

By the way, some of these pictures are over 200KB, so the big version may take a while to load if you are on dial up.

Don't know what they are, but there are two of them. They may be Yellow-Breasted Chats.

Besides the geocaches, my main interest was the old railroad trestle.  I read it dates back to 1924, and was for the streetcars that ran out to Ocean Beach.  I wonder if the rail service to La Jolla came this way?

Same kind of bird that was on the wire, I think. This one is backlit for your artistic appreciartion.

This bird seemed to have no head. We thought it was dead.

Then it moved, but it didn't run away.  This is NOT zoomed, the birdie was about ten feet from us. That is my shadow being cast over it!

Airplanes were going over every few minutes, taking off from Lindbergh Field.

Very colorful, Matt said they were nasturtiums. They are an invasive species, having escaped from gardens. They crowd out native plants.  But they are very pretty!

Guy Wire Guy is surprised.  

We didn't see but two non-bird animals, a squirrel, and this wild creature.  It just stood there staring at us.

I saw a bunch of little tiny arms waving from the mud as the tide went down.  I guess they were crabs in the mud. We couldn't get any closer.

We were pretty hungry by the time we got out of there, so we stopped by In-N-Out Burger.  My cheeseburger was excellent.  Matt's Animal Style Fries were excellent, too!



Out In The Eastlake Again Again

Today being the tenth day of the  31 Days Of Geocaching, I was impelled to Get That Cache!  So I took a list of geocaches, including one solved puzzle cache.  I parked by some very busy little park and walked in a big circle looking for caches.  I found some, didn't find some, including the puzzle cache which was my primary focus.  Everything else was a back up.  Well, I looked and looked for that one, but no joy.  I email the cache owner, they said they were going to check on it for someone else, and so would let me know.

Surreptitious parking is so ridiculously difficult in Eastlake!

After that jaunt I parked on a turnout down by the lake and hiked on down to the water's edge to find a cache, a cache covered with ANTS!!  Zillions and zillions of ANTS!  Yikes!  Not biters, fortunately!

Getting back to the vehicle I moved on down the road a ways, hiked back down to the lake edge and found some more caches.  More success down here than up on the hill.  Less people, too!  More ants, though!!

One cache, the last one, I was kind of nervous about.  It was advertised as an "evil nano".  "Nano" is the size.  Very small.  And "Evil" means, well, EVIL!

So you can see the jug was full of little canisters, only one of which contained the log sheet.  All the rest say "Keep looking"!  I lucked out and found on the fourth one, as you can see.

Well, that was the last one, and I headed back to the vehicle.  I walked a total of about 3.07 miles, and found eight caches, but didn't find four.

Since I was in the area (And didn't need to go on the freeway!), I drove a few miles over to REI in one of them giant Eastlake malls.  It is a smaller REI.  I looked at the hiking shoes, the GoPro cameras (I need one!), but what I bought was a carabiner.  Two, in fact.  You are wondering why, is he going rock climbing?  Ha ha, not I!  But I use carabiners to secure my water bottles to my backpack, and the wimpy little key chain ones just do not do the job.  I didn't realized just how wimpy they are till I saw a real climbing 'biner!  The key chain carabiners have inferior gates, in my opinion, and the springs quickly fail so the gate does not close.  The Black Diamond (On the bottom, below) brand I bought feels extremely solid, as well it might!  Certainly heavier than the others, but I'm willing to tote them.

Plus, I could actually used them for rope work.  Again, ha ha!

That is all for today!

A Pot-Porry Of Stuff

This canal near Bakersfield seems to have a tidal surge or something.

I made this vertical panorama for a geocache background.  It's not much larger than the thumbnail. Sorry about that!

So I went geocaching out in Lakeside, saw this sign on the trail.  We're not supposed to walk down that nice wide path? HA!

I crossed over the San Diego River at one point, this device was down in the river bed. What could it be?

Well, that is all for geocaching. I found some seeds for wild flowers, planted them, and here is what I got. I just gotta keep 'en watered, it is very hot right there, reflecting the afternoon sun off the wall.

Here is me sitting with my radios in the garage.

Here is another shot of the wildflowers, taken later in the day.

I refilled the birdbath and this fellow was so pleased!

He had quite the time, but was always looking over his shoulder, as it were, at me.

Well, I can't think of another thing I haven't shared, so off you go!

Whoops, I forgot the iceplant!

NOW we're finished here!

Olde Highway 80

I have been wanting to do this section of old highway 80, geocache-wise, for a long time.  When I was but a wee child we drove this narrow highway many times to visit Cuyamaca State Park and my aunt's cabin in Mt. Laguna. The new interstate freeway was built in the 60s, bypassing this stretch and making it a dead end road. Now it is a hiking/biking/horsie trail, blocked off, and that is where I parked.

I head south, bush whacking a bit, for that one cache, then to the west. I found some, and didn't find some. Here is the view from the first cache I found. The actual view was much more impressive than this picture!

Here is what I could see from Aubrey's Cache.  Aubrey was six when she helped place this cache, in 2002, now she is in high school. That is the 8 looking to the west-ish. You can see the old road down there, and I'll be walking all the way there.  And hopefully, back again!

Not too far from Aubrey's Cache we have an expression of the true love James has for Sandy. Classic James!

This may look awful, but it's really kind of interesting.  I was looking for a cache at the Ellis rest stop (Link goes to a Facebook page with lots of pictures). There is a "bowl" hollowed out of a rock, and above there is the cistern and a series of ring pools.  It's all very interesting and old.  Unfortunately there is a LOT of unsettling graffiti.   I held the camera up to an opening in the cistern roof and took a flash picture.  And this is what was in there.  Could have been worse!

Here am I walking back along the partially overgrown cement road, towards where I parked, which is STILL way to far away!

Here's the builder's imprint in the cement highway. The first one of these I found had the "3" in 1931 so distorted it looked like 1981.  THAT can't be right, I thought!

All told, I found nine caches, and didn't find four, including one off the map at a rest stop.  I plan to come up here again some day, to pick up those two caches I didn't look for, and to explore around the old rest stop some more.  I also got my second souvenir e-badge for day two of the 31 Days Of Geocaching.

Rancho Daze

I went off geocaching in Rancho San Diego this morning, and what turned into afternoon.  Six hours, I think, and five miles walked.

So here I am reclining on a rock pile, feet up, looking down into the valley below, and Mt. Miguel above.

Cache was down in this portable potty, part of a continuing series of jokes at the expense of a friend of theirs.

Found this necklace on the trail and put it into the next cache I found. After MUCH research I discovered it is the Chinese monkey symbol.

One wonders what these doorways are for.

A view from above the old county dump.

Is that one of them hunter-killer droids from Star Wars over there?

Nope, it is an earth scope installation.

That is the 94 heading off to Jamul.

I found seven caches. Didn't find four, and two of those were DNFs on previous logs. And so I got my : ) and my The 31 Days Of Geocaching badge for August 1st.

On the way home I stopped in at the Rancho San Diego Albertsons, which was only fair since I had parked in their lot all morning, and purchased some ginger ale, root beer, and cola, all diet.  A few apple, some Irish oatmeal (I don't know why), generic granola bars, generic bran flakes, generic peanut butter, and finally, two loaves of bread, which I had a lot of difficulty locating and had to make several trips around the store.

Then I went home.

On another note, I noted that Michael Chabon had a sentence with over 250 words (I counted!) in Telegraph Avenue.