Geocaching Humor

I got this from Today's Cacher's humor section. I deleted the really un-funny ones.

Opa's Rules of Thumb for Geocaching
"Yes, officer, I know it looks suspicious"

By John Hebert, aka Opa
1. No matter how much advance research you do, the cache will be on the other side.
2. Any references to water/swamps/mosquitos/ticks in a cache’s description or log entries should be believed.
3. Always take the official bushwhacking distance and multiply by 3.62.
4. Waterproof footgear isn’t – unless the water is already inside.
8. You are allergic to some form of plant life; you just don’t know which one yet.

That last one seems especially amusing to me given the number of times I have gotten poison oak while out geocaching. I got a really bad case a month or so ago, which inspired Chris to make some "rules" for me. Rule 1 is, if it's too hot to wear pants, it's too hot for geocaching. Rule 2 is just that as soon as I get home I have to remove all clothes from the waist down (and waist up, if appropriate) and while removing them turn them inside out and put them right in the laundry. This helps keep me from reinfecting myself with oaked clothes.

I went geocaching with some new friends this past weekend on Saturday. caliseastar invited me along with a group of other women to help find one of the women's 1000th cache! It was fun to go as a group because it feels more like a social event and less like Nerds in the Field. Also, you find caches more quickly as a group because you can split up the search. A couple of them I'm not sure I would have ever found alone. We found caches in Soquel and Scotts Valley and then ate dinner in Los Gatos. It was a good time! On Sunday I went to Julia and Shannon's housewarming. They have the cutest little place - I'm quite jealous. It has this great little backyard and patio and they have very cute cats and hardwood floors. Chris and I went to church after the party and then I went shopping for some goods so I can put out my first local cache. The women I was caching with last weekend guilted me into it! Also, it's silly that I don't have any out. So now I'm almost ready. I have the idea and the materials, I just have to assemble it all.

Cyborg Name

Cantaloupe

I ate an entire cantaloupe today. I don't know what I was thinking.

Actually, I know exactly what I was thinking. Cantaloupe to me is like the proverbial girl with the curl, and I really like (and only like) very very good cantaloupe. So when I passed JJ&F today and I could smell it from 15 feet away I knew that I should get some because it's not like I have many opportunities to get that fruit as tasty as I like it. So I bought it and took it home and cut it up and realized that I had no idea when I would be back at my house and it would probably go bad if I didn't eat it right then. So I did. It's a good diet strategy. 10 hours later I'm still not hungry at all and in fact thinking about food makes me feel a little queasy.

Also today was a day of babysitting firsts for Brandy, Amelia and me - this was Amelia's first time being babysat. (Being baby sat by grandma when mother is just inside a building you can see over there doesn't count.) Bran dropped Amelia off at my house and I watched her for 4 hours while Bran was at school. She was nervous that something might happen but I promised to call if I was worried about anything at all and of course we were all fine. Funny because whenever I go over to Brandy's house Amelia is always sound asleep and they always remark that it's unusual. Well, today I got to see that. Ha. She hardly slept a wink. But she seems to not fuss and eventually go to sleep when pushed in the stroller. So we walked a lot.

Brandy asked me today what I thought I would find Amelia's favorite age. I think when she starts talking and thinking and you can really start communicating and teaching and reasoning with her. We'll see though!

Random photos

A very funny photo my roommate Laurel took.

Hideous or cute? I have to go with hideous here. Laurel strongly disagrees.

Bike conflict and photos

So last week I was borderline stressing over something that had happened. One day I came down from Chris's apartment and found a note taped to my bike seat that said "Please park your bike in front of your house, not here in front of ours. Thanks." I park my bike chained to a post right in front of Chris's carport parking spot. This parking spot is in front of apartment 144 which is immediately downstairs from Chris's apartment, #244.

Chris and I contemplated many meanings of this note. It seemed pretty friendly, so I was inclined to think the best. I thought possibly they didn't realize who the bike belonged to and thought it belonged to someone down the way or something. We had met his downstairs neighbors and they seemed like very nice people so I was having trouble imagining what they really were unhappy about. Technically the condo complex (he rents out a condo, not an apartment) has a rule that you can't lock bikes anywhere except in the parking garage, but the garage is so far away from his condo that it just didn't seem reasonable. Josh takes his bike upstairs, but he has a nice light road bike, not a steel beast like mine. Furthermore, we had parked a bike against a light pole closer to the main road (a little less conspicuous) and it was stolen. Granted it wasn't locked up, but still, it doesn't seem like a good idea to try that one again. So given all these problems I thought I would just go down and talk to the neighbors and see if they didn't have a better suggestion about where to put my bike. I couldn't believe they were really that unreasonable.

I showed Chris the note though and he inferred this really sinister meaning from it - that they disapproved of our living situation (that is, that I stay over at his house every other night - they're sort of an older couple) and they really meant I shouldn't park my bike in front of their house because it should be in front of my home where I live and where I ought to be spending my nights. This made me really worried because you just can't argue morals with someone and expect to win anything.

So I was all nervous about what to do and fretting about it all weekend with my bike parked out there and they weren't even home. Then yesterday evening I noticed their car was in and I screwed up my courage and went down there to talk to them. It went something like this:

(He answers the door)
Me: Hi! I'm Teresa, one of your upstairs neighbors and...
He: Oh, you live there too, do you?
Me: Yes and I was wondering if you left the note on my bicycle?
He (looking grumpy): Yes. You know, your bike just really shouldn't be parked there.
Me (feeling worried): Well, I was wondering if you have any other ideas about where I should park it? Because I don't want to bother you but I don't know where else it could go...
He (still looking grumpy): Well, it just shouldn't be parked there. I mean we park our cars out there and it looks bad!
Me: ....????
She (coming around the corner looking cheerful): Hello! You know, I just don't see a problem with you parking your bike out there. The neighbor down the way came over and was complaining that it looks bad but I just don't know where else you could put it!?
Me (feeling relieved): Yeah, I mean, I thought about locking it against that light post out there after I saw your note...
She (aghast): You left a note?!
He: Well, yes! I mean...
She: Men can be so grumpy!

etc etc. It was pretty funny actually, him being all grumpy and her being so friendly. In the end we chatted and negotiated. They both thought the boxes (trash really) on the balcony looked bad so I promised to get them moved inside and they agreed my bike could stay where it was. They also said they would bring up bread sometimes because they have some bakery connection who always brings them more than they can eat. All's well that ends well. But I worried about that quite a bit.

Now some photos.
Ken sent this photo from a vacation to Palm Beach with his beautiful girlfriend Kendall. He was doing a "scholarly facial hair" experiment or something .

I visited with Amelia Rose this evening and she's starting to make faces - mostly when she's asleep but here's a few cute ones from the small amount of time she was awake.

And of course Amelia's beautiful mother.

Wet sailing

Last night Chris and I (and Shannon and Carleson) went out on Bad Puddy Cat - a boat owned by Matt and Charlie in Redwood City. We were doing the Midnight Marathon regatta and headed north out of Redwood City around 5:30 in the evening. There was an ebb tide and for some reason this means there were totally huge waves!! I got the luck of getting to sit farthest forward on the boat and there were some waves that were over my head. Even the guys in back driving the boat were wet. It was incredible. So I was cold until we finished around 12:30 in the evening. There were only a few boats in the race but it was fun and the moonlight was beautiful.

Today Chris went out geocaching with me after we got up around 12:30 in the afternoon. Tee hee.

Diet TMI

I'm going to talk about dieting. If you don't want to hear, close your eyes.

A year ago May I joined Weight Watchers because I weighed 175 and my clothes weren't fitting anymore. At 5' 10 1/2" 175 lbs is only just barely out of my ideal weight range. However, I had these brown pants that I'd gotten sometime in college after I had joined Tower Club and started eating 3 desserts a night. The pants were size 14 and partway through senior year I started a rigorous exercise regimen with Jaime's help and restricted myself to 1 dessert a night and lost like 15 lbs. Then I put those brown pants back on and they were ridiculously huge and I told myself that if I ever started fitting into them again it was time for a diet. A year ago May they started fitting again, hence, diet time.

So I lost 25 lbs on Weight Watchers Online (a good program, I think) over about 5 months. It was hard at first but I got used to it and what's nice is it kind of changes your way of eating so you eat more vegetables and learn about snacks that are really low calorie like popcorn and mint meringues (I call those air cookies) and you can get pretty addicted to people saying how great you look and buying really small clothes (at an Ann Taylor there was a size 8 petite dress that was still too big for me). But the program is also very annoying because you have to write down the calories (points actually) of everything you eat and that is so tedious. So when I had lost down to my goal weight I put in a new plan - Chris helped me think it up. I go off the diet entirely until I weigh 152 lbs. Then I go on again until I weigh 148, and then I go off again. It's nice because you never get too far away from that goal weight but there's times when you don't have to be counting points at all and you can eat anything you want. But what was nice was that after so long on the diet I've just kind of adjusted to what is a reasonable size meal and so I actually went from like April until now without being on the diet at all and without going above 152 lbs.

Then came the raft trip. I knew I was going to be on the diet after that one because the river guides were also amazing chefs and baked these biscuits in Dutch ovens that were just incredible. And corn bread and chocolate cake... and I had kayaked all day so I thought maybe I had earned it. He he. Anyway - last Tuesday morning I weighed 153.5, so back on the diet for me. My palm pilot had lost its batteries so completely in those months that I had to load all the points software back on again and figure out how to use it. (I'm not still using WW Online - I'm using this program for the Palm called WWCalc that some guy wrote. It helps keep track of the points in food but is only useful if you already know and are used to the program. WW doesn't recommend my diet plan, by the way. They say when you reach your goal weight you should increase your points intake but keep counting. I just couldn't do it.)

So it's tough to be back on a diet after 5 months, but the good news is my scale this morning said 150, so maybe the 153.5 was an anomaly and I'll be down to 148 quite soon. Two pounds should be easy to lose. On the other hand, sometimes even while dieting your weight goes up and sometimes you only lose a pound a week, so I might be awhile losing those 2 lbs. But it's nice because I can say to myself while drinking regular coffee with splenda instead of my usual mocha, "In just a few weeks I'll be eating anything I want again with no guilt whatsoever. So hang in there."

Today's post is sponsored by the number 5 and the word "and."

Weekend

No new news here really. I had bookclub over the weekend and it was awfully fun - Michele was visiting us from Michigan and she seemed like she missed us. It must be hard to move off to someplace where you don't really know anyone. We got to see Lis's new house (actually, Jonah's house that she moved into) and it's totally beautiful. And they have this really cute whippet dog. She's told us so many funny stories about this dog that it's good to finally meet it - apparently it gets sunburned and once cut off the end of its tail and wagged it all over the place and sprayed blood everywhere.

I also went to an event geocache on Sunday and got to log not only another event cache, but also a bunch of random geocoins and stuff that were there, so I got a lot of new icons in my profile. Wee hoo. :)

Studly

Ok, one more non-studly link (for today). This is a really fascinating Java tool that will tell you about baby names through the last 100 years.

Now, some studly photos from the raft trip.
We had to fly into the putin by bush plane. I got to sit in the copilot seat of this little 10 place aircraft.

At lunch on the first day we did a little "cliff" jumping. This is me jumping off something that definitely looked taller from the top.

Me in my duckie. Doesn't that sound undignified? I prefer to think of it as a kayak.

One of the rapids - I think this is Chris though.

Chris survived the raging whitewater.

I'll post a whole webpage about this trip at some point here. Oh, and most of these photos were taken with little underwater capable disposable cameras. I'm not sure if it was the photo or the development but fortunately most of my photos are not that low quality.

More cute baby

Ok, I know you can hardly stand it, but here's more cute baby photos. Amelia, of course. Fear not, studly photos of me kayaking in whitewater will be up soon.

Panda

Oh man, this photo is so cute. I got it from the Smithsonian/National Zoo webpage.

More on Idaho rafting wonderfulness soon.