Friday, June 15, 2007

More randomness

Well, another week that has been hit and miss.

First, I went after one of byjer's caches up near the Res and managed to have a second time my phone's net connection has saved me a DNF. The cache is up the side of a massive sheer cliff and through various logs and one brillant photo - I found the cache quickly. Course, I tried on my own to find it, but with no luck, I resorted to the tools at my disposal. Not as much of a hike as I had hoped, but still, it was a lot of fun.

Then, on Monday I meant to meet up with habu! but he was driving instead of flying, so I went caching along South Shore. Before 9pm, I'd managed to clear out a handful more of the Mile Markers and a few others. One of which, again, required the use of my net connection and another close look at the photo in the gallery. My phone has now become indespensible when caching.

Tuesday, habu! arrived and I went up (again) to Tahoe to meet with him. A great little dinner and a two hour talk gave me a lot of information about Opening Day at the Lake and gave him some nuggets of information that made his brow wrinkle in thought, but an inspired gleam in his eyes told me he had struck onto something. Very nice guy and I can't wait to meet up with him again.

Wednesday (I'm doing this to justify why I didn't go hiking this week) I worked late and spent the morning dealing with various emails about various things (mostly caching). But the good news came in the afternoon. I've been trying to see if MM wanted to go after the soon-to-be-published ODL caches, and related to him habu's worry about them being approved. Later, I get another email from MM saying he's talked to habu and Jenn (apparently the woman who oversees all the reviewers).

Not much after that until an email from habu, and I quote, "Yippie! Groundspeak is going to let me publish the caches! MORE SMILEIES FOR EVERYBODY!!!!!"

I sent Lynn a thank you.

Thursday was another day of trying to figure things out for this weekend, but the great news was that late Wednesday, I got a phone call from Lil' Devil - inviting me to dinner!! I think my mouth dropped at that point and I could hardly wait. We met at China Jade Horse and spent a delightful two hours just talking and a little bit of eating. I think this is the first time I really got to sit down and talk with both Brian and Beth. I had a ball!

Today... oh today... if I was any more wired, one would think I was in the Rally itself! I was literally bouncing off the walls at work - didn't help that the DVD from Xterra Planet was on my desk waiting to be watched. I raced through my work - mostly to be available if I was called for our new hire. 2:30 couldn't come fast enough, but it finally did, and after running home to grab my stuff, I was off to Fuji Park and the spaghetti feed. Hung out with folks, watched the DVD with the others involved, and generally hung out. Then Moonchaser asks if I would download the route for those who were late to check in.

Guess I helped with the Rally after all.

Afterwards, took MM's family back to their place, then followed the infamous Green Jeep TB to the hotel and helped/waited for them to get settled. But, after a day of little finds and DNF's, MM was ready to play. So, we went caching.

First a (too late) stop at the start line and a conversation with Monty, before heading off to Jack's Valley Road and grabbing as many caches as we could along there. Then, I asked if he wanted to go off road a bit to get the drivable ones up the hill. We went after the cache by the tank and on the way back... "You drive."

What? "Drive!" Um....

How do you drive an automatic? I found out the hard way there's no clutch as I habitually went to push it in to shift and locked the brakes up. Oops, at least we were trying to stop. hehehe

Got the hang of it and drove up the hill and back down into Indian Hills and off towards a few other caches. MM swapped seats with me before we got back out onto Hwy 395 again to head into town. I think for the evening, from 6ish-9ish we got 16 caches.

Tomorrow is going to be so cool!!!

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