Just Out

Went geocaching this noon and after, out to Santee/Lakeside. To escape the blues, don't yah know.

Found seven of eight caches.  A bit of walking took me over the San Diego River, and back again, then up a nameless hill, three times, but only part way each time.

Crossing the mighty San Diego River! A crossing made tricky by bifocals and slippery rocks!


EDIT:  After publishing I realized there was some objectionable I-won't-dignify-it-with-the-word-graffiti markings on a couple of the rocks, which I have edited out.


The cache in the rocks. A very nicely done hide!



A view of the nameless hill from the wrong side of the river. Gotta cross back over!



This one, up on the hill side, was missing its lid, so I brought a cammoed container, put the cache stuff in it, and inverted the old topless container on, uh, top.



View of the ball fields from on high.  I saw on a topo map that this used to be a sewage disposal plant.



Had to go DOWN then back UP to get to this one, which was completely covered by large green plants and VERY hard to find.  Can YOU see it?



This one was not hard to spot, once I got TO the spot.  I forgot to enter the coordinates into the GPSr, or even to print them out, but I managed to figure it out from the aerial view map.  I rock!




Going back UP that darn nameless hill again, I spy a bunny.



This cache had three layers of camo.  Its container color, the dead grass over it...



...and a rock!  A bit tricky to recognize, but there really wasn't any place else near!



That was about it for Today's Adventures In Geocaching!

Out AND About Today

Went geocaching this morning, over in the Eastlake area on Olympic Parkway.  Found twenty four caches, didn't find three. Walked 7.2 miles in around nearly seven hours.  Boy, are my feet sore!

Here are some pictures:

I identify this butterfly as an Lorquin Admiral (Limenitis lorquini)



I thought "X" marked the spot only in pirate tales!  Actually, it's a couple feet away in the bush.



Didn't find the cache, but I DID find a fake plastic leaf...



Crossing the Rubicon?



Seems to be a classic pose of a Red Winged Blackbird. I saw maybe five in a row, calling to each other.



This cyclist cares not that we taxpayers have spent a fortune building bike lanes for the likes of him.  Also, is not familiar with the concept of letting pedestrians know he is passing before he zooms by. What if I had flung out my arms in an act of irrational exuberance, kabonging him with my mighty walking stick? What then, eh?



That is about it for today!

Up & Down & Out & About

Seven more geocache finds in the Sweetwater County Park area have put me at 1,702 finds.Only 298 till my next goal is met!

Took a laundry basket full with three drawers worth of clothes to the thrift store this afternoon.  It's a sad thing, but maybe someone can use them.  I got an absolutely charming hand-made card from the orchestra kids thanking me for the donation of C.'s violin.  I know she would be happy to know some student is able to use it!

A lot of the poppies are blooming, I'm sorry C. didn't get to see them


On another note, is it bad that I Google my relatives' names to see what they have been up too?  Isn't it great how the internet makes available the local police blotter?  I'm just glad my own transgression didn't make the 'net, although I WOULD like to see my booking photo!

Out And About

I slept on the couch Saturday night after watching several episode of Fawlty Towers.  Woke up at 4:40 AM, decided to drive over to UCSD for to check out a special "night" geocache.  The idea is you use a flashlight to follow little TINY reflectors in the trees along the the trail.  There are WAY to few reflectors, IMHO.  After a 1/4 mile or so I ran out of reflectors, and ran out of dark, as the sun was rising.  Another time.  Snagged my back-up caches, though.

On the way home I decided to try for a newly published cache on Kwaay Paay trail.  A leisurely stroll put me on the spot.  First To Find! As I was tucking the logbook back into its plastic bag I heard a voice. "Oh, darn!"  He missed it by a minute!

Afternoon Matt and I decided to head out to Borrego Springs to check out the serpent.  Also, geocaches.

The sloth.  Or rather, sloths!



A mess of tortoises.



My personal favorite.



How disrespectful am I?



And there are many more.  We found four of the five caches we looked for.  I fell asleep twice on the trip, coming and going.

The End

The Rising Gorge

Went out for a geocache this morning, took some photos for a panorama, which I created on the accursed Photosynth. Accursed because of all the login/password/special downloads hassle.  Hope it works for you!

Link to panorama.

You may have to download and install a program to access the panorama on Photosynth.  If you prefer not to, and I don't blame you, I made another panorama as a jpeg image.  It is around 1.2 megs in size.  Click here!  Opens in a new window!

Gone Gone Gone

Picked up a box with one new copy of Cinder and two copies of Scarlet, took 'em back to the library, barcoded 'em, they are GONE in five minutes.

Going out to Singing Hills this afternoon.

I could totally do this!!

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Thursday PM

I discover we are a three music stand kind of family.  Who knew?

Made a trip to the waste disposal place today with a truck-load of bags, mattresses, and a defunct screen door.  Some tears shed deciding what to put the truck.

It's an hour short of a week since she passed away, and here I am fooling around on the computer, just like then.  Totally unreal.

Made a replacement cache for SLPB #3.  Maybe this one will last longer!

Tuesday

I was thinking yesterday...boy, it sure is quiet around here.

Dinner Tonight!

Here is what we had for dinner tonight.  Oh noes!  It's gone!


Click the image to see what it looked like before I got to it.

Yes, I know it's a different plate.  Grant me some artistic license.  I already ATE it!  The "before" is the cook's, who just got to sit down!

• Home-made tortillas
• Queso fresco
• Sauce made with tomato paste
• A hint of chopped onion.

Not UPS...

Behold the power of Senna!

Not A Shooting Star

We went out last night to the store, but before we got into the car we stood around awaitin' for the International Space Station to pass over, which it did, right on schedule.  Reminded me of when we used to sit out in the yard waiting for DOVE to pass over.

Mostly What We Had For Dinner Last Night

Well, I finished off the fricassee of peanut. Here goes the last of it!



Last night we had home-made tortillas made into enchiladas.






We got a tortilla press at Pancho Villa's Farmers Market, if you can believe it.



And so we have the press in action in these two photos!



And the results of her labors!  (I washed the dishes)

What I Had To Eat Tonight

I thought all my food posts would go into Burnt Pizza, but apparently they are not.

TONIGHT'S MENU

• Homemade tortillas
• Black beans (cooked in crockpot all night)
• Queso Fresco
• Avocados sliced
• Tomatoes sliced 

Looks somewhat odd in the photo (the flash?), tastes of heaven!

My daughter brought me this from her "vacation" in TJ!



"Fricassee", I find, has been described as "halfway between a saute and a stew"(Mastering The Art Of French Cooking Wikipedia article.), so this is a sort of peanut stew?  Or maybe peanut brittle! With more peanuts, less brittle?  Eleven grams of saturated fat, twenty five grams of carbohydrates.  Yum, I'm sure!

Words

I was looking at the Building The Funicular page on the Cliffhanger (model railroad) website and ran across the this phrase (italics mine) "The next step was to convert the track to baulkway which is typical of funiculars."  What the heck is a baulkway?  

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says a balk (baulk being a British variant of balk) is "a ridge of land left unplowed as a dividing line or through carelessness."  The Wikepedia article Red Moss, Greater Manchester, says "Baulkways, strips of higher land..."  So it might seem that baulkway is another, possibly British, word for roadbed.  Although there were only sixty-seven hits on Google!

Geocaching Terms

POR may stand for Pretty Obvious Rock.

Sunday And Other Days

I took the morning off and went down to the bay to feed the jetty kitties some canned cat food we had left over from when there was a cat here.

And also a little geocaching along the bike path.

But first, I saw a splash in the water. I saw a fin!!  Was it a porpoise, or a shark? Of course, I did not have the camera with me, so I ran (walked quickly) back to the vehicle to get it.  Took this pic, which clearly shows another disturbance in the water where there was a fin a second ago.  I swear!



Here are the kitties eating breakfast.



 That grounding wire ain't gonna work too good.

 

No, I don't know what that picture is, it was just laying there.  There was another one on the pole.

I found four of the five caches I looked for, including three that I had DNFed on previously.  Walked about 3.93 miles, according to Google Map Pedometer.

Over there under that bridge is where my mother dropped me off (on her way to work) so I could hitchhike downtown to the recruiting center to catch a bus to LA for my Army physical.  I THINK it was the physical.  Maybe it was just testing.  Anyway, it was ARMY stuff!



And that winds up Sunday.

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Introducing our new fish, Turko.

Last Night's Dinner

Dinner last night:



Dinner the other night (Opens in new window)

A Cacheing We Will Go

I got an email the other day from a fellow geocacher who offered to lead a group to find a certain difficult cache.  I think the three of us who hadn't found the cache yet had been there at least twice.  I know that I have been there at least three times. There ended up being five of us who started out on Saturday morning on the quest. 

I took this picture of this plant growing in a crack while I was resting up after finding the cache.  I used the tele lens as I was about thirty feet away.



Here are four of us, I am on the right.



Same location, but I took this one.  Resting up after finding the cache.



View from where we wuz.   Cache is about thirty feet to the left of center, and down!




Sadly, I guess the pic he took of us down in the "hole" didn't take.  Anyway, after much patient coaxing and instruction two of us were able to overcome our fear of death to make our way down a ledge (of about ten feet) and find the cache.  Actually, getting down wasn't really the problem for me, it was getting back out!  But D. and his son helped us, showing us where to place our feet and such.  It was a lot easier than I thought it would be, strength-wise, but I would have panicked if I had been  on my own.  And been stuck there.  As it was, once I was out of the "hole" I scooted on my behind to relative safety.  One guy was unable to overcome his fear of heights, and decided to try it again another day.  I was almost there myself, I'll tell you!

We mostly split up after that, heading our separate ways to find caches.  I did one more with a couple of them, then I headed back to the truck.  It was very warm and sweat made me quite blind.  I ran across a group in camo fatigues, with big radios, calling out coordinates. I couldn't make out their service, but they had been driving civilian vehicles, on park roads, so they must have had an official gate key.  They had a sentry/spotter up on a little hill in the bushes that I barely noticed. 

Anyway, walking back was a death march, I'll tell you, but I made it.   Driving home I stopped to lend assistance to a fellow stalled on the Fletcher Parkway exit, partially blocking a lane.  He had no cell phone, I had no cell phone, and he had an autistic child in the van that he couldn't leave.  I got a couple of passersby to call the CHP (Thanks, Aaron!).  A couple more guys helped roll the van a little closer to the guard rail.  A motorcyclist stopped and loaned his cell to the driver to call his boss (The ONLY vehicle that stopped! Thanks!!).  I waited an hour but neither the CHP nor the boss showed.  I had to go home at the point as I was getting a little shaky.  My kids passed by there a little later and said a tow truck was helping him.

That is it for Saturday!

Friday The 18th

Mom and her dog, Shogun.



Mom went for a little walk today.



I get my hair cut.

Before:



After:


I finished the shredding of the documents with my new shredder, which I am sure my neighbors enjoyed, and then in the after noon I finished ripping out a goodly portion of the jungle in the backyard, squishing spiders, and filling up the greens bin with ivy and such.

We then had chili for a mid-afternoon snack.  I so wanted to work "après" in that sentence, but, alas.

New Shoes

Bought some new shoes at Target, Thursday.  Because, you know, the old ones STINK so much. And I was going to a party last night.  And, last year's shoes STUNK so much at the party (same place) I was MORTIFIED! But, apparently, I do not wear a twelve. So now my right toe is sore. Are my feet growing?  While my spine shrinks? What madness is this?

Monday Hot Cheese

Did NOT ride to work again today, as it, thankfully, was rainy.  Might have to ride Tuesday, though!




How is THAT for holding the camera reasonbly steady in a low-light situation, eh?

I had at least five patrons ask about the Flaming Hot Cheetos today.



That's about it for now!

On The Shelves

I was going to post the we are probably the only middle school in California with a copy of The Teahouse Of The August Moon on the shelves, but I find we are not even the only middle school in the district to have it!

Friday Saturday Sunday

A foggy Pearl Harbor Day at work.



The bear rides in the backpack.



Saturday afternoon I forced myself to go geocaching, three DNFs, but finally one reluctant Find, two blocks from home.  I coulda walked there!

Sunday I headed out early to a little canyon off Fairmont for my annual DNF on Shiny, but I found another one in the canyon, so it was all right.

There's a spot just north of the interchange of Fairmont and Montezuma where the creek/drain is allowed to surface, where shopping carts go to die.  This ones been there awhile!



There are several abandoned homeless encampments along the creek.  I call this one "Beauty".



That's all for today!

A Rave, A Rant, And An Experiment

Zooomr 7th anniversary re-tooling.  How about bringing back all the images I've uploaded over the years, eh?

One of the orchestra students sent me this invitation to their winter concert.  I am quite overcome.  How can I explain my reluctance (FEAR?) to drive at night?



Someone has been eating PIE in the stacks!!  Found one of these a year ago in nearly the same spot. Guess it's time to clean and inventory that section!



Test End Test   Nothing to see here, move along..
Huh.  Thought the NAME text would show upon mouse over.

My rant for the day is about the television show Two Broke Girls.  It's just one smutty "joke" after another.  Very unfunny, with the usual idiotic laugh track. It makes Two And A Half Men look like the 500 Club, I swear! Why do I watch it? It comes on before Mike & Molly. That's it. My only excuse! M & M, while not the pinnacle of television programming, at least has some funny banter.  One measure of a television program might be if I will watch its repeat.  Seinfeld? Over and over. New Adventures Of Old Christine?  Every lunch, it's my go-to show!  Two And A Half Men? Love it, except when I'm cringing. Two Broke Girls? I think I'll go pull some weeds.

It's Tuesday!

Not much going on lately, so here's a bear that I eventually got in the mail from a far away place.




Big science fair push at work this week, I had just over a hundred visitors sign in the library today.  One of which stole a Nisse I had stuck up on a ceiling light.

Fortunately, there are more of them around...