23 March, 2010 -- Big Dogs & a Pup

Five Cobras went by yesterday... they are the really big dogs!

They thum-thum-thummed by while Ron was out exercising big dog Black Bart.

After an afternoon chasing that hundred dollar hamburger,
Ron flew his new puppy on back to Douglas County.

19 March, 2010 -- Shakespeare on stage

Cam was one of the narrators in his fourth grade class' Shakespeare production in Jefferson City.


Yup, fourth graders doing Shakespeare.
Adjusting Cam's costume.
Signing the souvenir program.
Grant filmed from the balcony, Ralph and I sat in the front row, so we did manage to get a few pictures.

Dev and SammieJ and Kelly were in Jackson, Mississippi for the
Sweet Potato Queens festival. Sort of like Mardi Gras on hormones!

Sunday we went caching in the cold and wind and rain.
This is the planning stage of the puzzle... got to figure out
some code numbers first...

Aha, found it! Sort through it in the car, out of the wind!

After putting that cache back in its hidey hole, we go looking for another one.
Grant decided to take a shortcut through the ball park.
Nah, I don't think so.


Ralph & Cam with his geo-treasure, a geo-monkey!

Nah, I don't think so.

17 March, 2010 -- Too much coffee?

Do you think I've been drinking too much coffee?

Trying to hook up stuff so's I can record from old
cassette tapes on to cds. AAaargh. I've done it before,
just can't remember HOW.

16 March, 2010 -- Woof

I heard ferocious barking and protective growling as I walked past this ginormous semi-truck in the parking lot at WM this afternoon.

Guard dogs. Grr-oof.

14 March, 2010 -- That's my story and I'm stickin' to it

A little background:
Geocaching is a worldwide treasure hunt, using an internet site to get position information, gps units to find those position locations, and using common sense and puzzlemania gray matter to find little hidden pots-o-gold (trinkets, mostly). In the heat of racking up impressive status for being the First To Find a cache when it goes public, geocachers will stop at nothing to get there and put their geocaching "name" at the top of the logbook. It's one of the most friendly competitive games in the world, open to anyone, especially kids, (and folks with nothing else to do).

Well, late last night, a cache that I had hidden got the blessing of the online reviewer, and Bingo, it's on the geocaching.com site and the wolves start to hunt!

This is the site of the cache in this story; off the 4-lane between towns, just out in the boonies. The container is camouflaged with duct tape and hidden in the ground clutter beneath one of these trees.


The name of the cache is "Treeck... Trock... Which is it?", and that's a "muggle" or in this case a "moo-gle". Muggles are "those other ones, those who don't KNOW". They come up to you and ask "What're ya DOING?". Sometimes you just can't explain it.

And here's the great prize! The treasures are mostly for the kids, but the logbook is the prize for the older hunters. Cache finders can take an item and replace it with another item, or not; or trade a numbered Travel Bug Dog Tag item or souvenir coin that moves from cache to cache and is trackable online.
This is a large cache; some of them are just a little bullet shaped containers that have a rolled-up paper for signing, and you have to bring your own pen. They are usually really difficult to find. I found one at a major retailer in West Plains attached to a tree limb with a twist tie. There's one in Mtn. Grove that I haven't found yet after 6 months of searching.
This cache is an easy big one.


Like I said, at about 11:30 p.m. last night, the great cache reviewer in the sky published my cache and it became public. One of these guys is from Mtn. Grove, and one is from Houston. I've never met them, but they have both found other caches in Mtn. Grove that I've put out.

I'll let them tell the rest of this story. This posting was on the geocache site this morning (daylight savings time rolled in at 2 a.m.):

xring found Treeck... Trock... Which is it? (Traditional Cache)

This one started off with a BIG BIG LAUGH, I was all most to GZ at 2:30 in the morning (new time) and this car passed me and I noticed the license plates said SESKDS and I new who that was, who would have ever guessed that two geocachers would get to a cache in the middle of the night at the same time. So we found the cache in the cold and rain and shared the FTF. That was about the most fun cache I had been on in awhile. Thanks guys for making this find so much fun!!! We must be nuts for getting out at this time of the night in the cold and rain and driving 35 plus miles one way, just to get that FTF. That's what makes this GeoCaching game so much fun, stories just like this one.
TFTC TNLN SL xring

____________________________________

This morning, another posting popped up on the site:

seskds found Treeck... Trock... Which is it? (Traditional Cache)

WOW what a night to pull up to GZ the same time as my bud XRING . We had a good laugh talked some 2:30am cold and raining and we went for the FTF together.This was also my most expensive trip so far on a cache. When i got home i could not find my Garmin 60 CSX
i guess l left it on the trunk of the car. Well back to GZ and yup there it was in the middle of the road smashed so i took a picture of it and put in on the cache page. Thanks XRING for helping with this one.

So, is the game worth all that expense? You betcha!

FTF = first to find

TFTC = Thanks for the cache

GZ = ground zero

TNLN = took nothing, left nothing

SL = signed log

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=f48afe9a-7d1e-4d9f-90cd-f76eec8b5e43

12 March, 2010 -- It's a Howmany

It's not a whats-it, it's a howmany?
This should be an easy one for all you hunters out there.
Fonda got it, there are 3.

8 March, 2010 -- Spring flowers!

Crocuses (croci?) blooming at the airport... is winter over?

And, Happy Birthday, Grampa Airplane... too many candles, they would melt the cake.

7 March, 2010 -- The boys of the sky

Hey, Grampa Airplane and 'Nother One Son Ben went up flying this afternoon!
That's sort of a birthday present to himself. Won't divulge his age, but it's "up there".

Speaking of "up there"...

2 March, 2010 -- Caching with Granny Orchid

After visiting in Birch Tree with Juanita's cousin this afternoon, we hustled on west to Winona to the Mark Twain National Forest on a treasure hunt. There's an old Model T under a shady cover in this park, it's a neat place! When we got back to the Grove and she found a couple of my caches, dropped in some travel bugs from Arkansas. She's really got a nose for these things, sometimes she doesn't even use the gps. These are Granny O's photos!

25 Feb., 2010 -- I wanna go, too!

Two C172 camera ships refueled, I can't reveal who they work for or where they're going every day, just that Matt and Andy are shooting aerial photos. They have some "expensiver-than-mine" big name medium format digital cameras and a boatload of computer gear.

Cushy job, the pilots just fly a grid, throw a switch, and it all turns on and shoots automatically.
They are on a mission that could last about eight months to complete. It's similar to the contracts that I used to fly for the state with George H., except we used 35mm cameras and film rolls of 250 shots of slides.