What a Month!

As I mentioned earlier this week, April was one massive whirlwind of events!  Some were good, some not so good, but all of them were exhausting. 😉 Thank God for coffee, that’s all I can say – ha!

It all started with the littlest GeoKidz and I attending the Georgia Geocacher’s Association April meeting at Mistletoe State Park in or near Augusta, GA.  Yes, during Masters weekend! I am not a golf fan in the least, so I didn’t much care about all the fuss over who’s playing in the Masters, who’s winning, who’s losing… WHO CARES?! 😉 (Sorry to all golf fans out there – no offense intended… I’m just not into sports much at all.).  The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and it was a PERFECT day to be outside.  Of course, the pollen count that day was roughly ten trillion, so the Kidz and I were all stuffy and fighting off pollen-induced sore throats.   

The highlight of the day was the game of “human checkers” that the event organizers put together.  I have pics on my camera that I hope to download tonight (I’ve been saying that for two weeks, so don’t hold your breath TOO much… I put the “PRO” in “Procrastination”…got it down to an art form. 😉 )  They had cut out huge plywood squares big enough for folks to stand on, and painted them red and black.  The people playing the red checkers were given red t-shirts and red bandanas.  The black checker people had black t-shirts and black bandanas. 🙂 At each end of the checkerboard, there were ladders upon which the team captains sat.  They had a perfect overview of the board and could order their people where to move.   GeoKid2 had been dying to play checkers all day, so he jumped right in as a black checker. 🙂 He had a great time playing for the first five or ten minutes, then he was “jumped” by the red team – game over for the little fella! He took it in stride though and thought it was all just the funniest thing!  After the game, the kids and I took off and found a couple geocaches hidden in the park.  There are several more I want to find, but since this was approximately two-and-a-half hours from home and it was getting late in the day, we decided it was best to go ahead and mosey on back towards Loganville and call it a day. 🙂  I’m pretty sure that day was the only day we were able to get out and hunt some caches… stupid “real life,” intruding on my hiking/playing time! Grrr! Ah well, it was better than nothing. 🙂

My Prodigal Son (GeoTeen2) returned home on April 21 – a/k/a the Thursday before Good Friday, a/k/a “Maundy Thursday.”  So far, so good.   Keep your fingers crossed and send up the prayers that he stays on track this time and continues doing what is good (and court-ordered – lol) and avoiding what is bad.  🙂  Easter was the usual whirlwind of activities, culminating in a beautiful Easter service and then the traditional dinner and egg hunt at the in-laws’ house. 

This past weekend, the Geokidz and I – yes, all four of them! – went camping together.  GeoKid2 is wrapping up his first year in cub scouts (awww….cute!) and this was the annual “Family Camping” event held up at Mount Rainey Mountain near Clayton, GA.  We had a GREAT time (except for GeoTeen1, who is terrified of the dark and the woods… .and seeing as how there wasn’t much anything by way of city lights or any lights in the camping area after sundown… she stayed curled up in a ball in the tent zipped up tight while the rest of us roasted marshmallows. She refused to come out or even budge from her hidey-corner till daylight).  GeoKid1 had his first-ever experiences shooting BB guns and bows & arrows…he earned a couple cub scout belt loops for his accomplishments.  GeoTeen2 likewise got to partake of the shooting of BBs and pointy things, as well as saving the day and helping me get the camp fire started when it was being stubborn. 🙂

All in all, April was fantastic… lots of great things happened, some rough things happened, but in the end, God is good and so is life. 🙂

Rock on, everyone!

A Caching Quickie

FINALLY, I have broken my long streak of being cooped up indoors and not being able to breathe semi-fresh air (this IS Atlanta, after all…full of pollen and polutants, but hey, allow me my delusion for a moment, ‘k? 😉 )! 

Since our family has to wake up SO freakin’ early in the mornings (and I am not by nature a morning person…I’m a night person, which is good because I like to hang out with these folks a lot, haha! Always gotta be hunting something, I guess! 😀 LOL!), usually by the time I get home I’m exhausted and ready to crumple into an incoherent heap.  And usually, that’s pretty much what I do – dinner, kids’ baths, homework, and then…CRASH!

But last night, I’d had ENOUGH of being cooped up!!! Enough, I say! Traffic was uncharacteristically kind to me, and I arrived at the GeoKids’ daycare a few minutes – like three – before 6:00 – something that almost NEVER happens, though I leave my office at 4:30 on the dot.   Took them home, coerced my teen into browning some ground beef for me so I could get a head start on sphaghetti for dinner, and then essentially turned right around and took GeoTeen1 to youth group.  Home less than 45 minutes, but that’s much longer than we are usually home several nights a week, LOL!

I figured that we had just enough daylight for me and the GeoKids to find a couple of the nearby local caches.  And by local, I mean a mile or less from our house! #winning! 😉 I didn’t bother to change clothes from work because (a) I hadn’t really had time, and (b) from the descriptions, I figured both were in nice, well-paved areas that would not necessitate crawling thru thickets or slogging thru mud. OK, well, I was half right! 😉

Our first didn’t even require our car GPS to figure out where the general location was… it was the “Downtown/Main Street USA – Loganville” cache.  Main Street isn’t particularly huge, and if you are going for smack-dab center of the street/nifty historical value, there’s pretty much only one spot real good for that. 🙂 However, that said, it took a little longer than I expected to find it, haha… Had to search pretty methodically before I found the thing. I was a little nervous, as I couldn’t really see where I was sticking my hands…there was a wasp sleeping on the flagpole next to us, and the whole time I kept thinking, “Oh PLEASE don’t let there be a bees’ nest hiding in here anywhere!” Ha! (Note to self: add gloves to cache supply bag asap….!)  GeoKid1 was in charge of the camera and was snapping pics right & left (most of which came out blurry, as you’ll see, but it’s all good!). Finally found the cache, signed the log, and away we went to cache number two!

 

After we conqured this one, we moved on to the next… it was the “Silver Bullet #4” geocache.   The hint made me think it was located in a similar urban/commercial-type area that would be a breeze to get to.

Yeah, not so much.  More like an area of future development that has not reached the paving stage yet.  And if you live in GA, you know that for a week solid, we’ve had nothing but heavy downpours and thundrstorms. Fun time! Yay! Slogging thru mud in dress shoes! (They are brand new, but thankfully only paid like $3 for them at thrift store so I wasn’t overly freaked out. 🙂 ).  Fortunately, much of the ground was firm-packed earth/fine gravel-like stuff so it wasn’t TOO bad… only had to slog thru one truly oozy and icky area briefly. The kids, of course, LOVED it! Jump! Splash! Splat! Ooze! Fun times. 🙂

GeoKid2 found it in no time flat. I had a pretty good idea, based on the description, of exactly what we were looking for. He made a beeline for it once we saw it (not saying what “it” is so as not to spoil the fun for others!) and sure enough, the cache was hanging out right where I thought it would be. 🙂

We finished finding our geocaches by 7:45, then traveled the .06 mile back home to finish making dinner before having to pick up GeoTeen1 from youth group.

All in all, it was a super-quick cache run that provided a nice diversion to our typical weeknight drugery and gave us all a much-needed shot of Kid Fun for the day. 🙂

Thanking God we’ve made it to Thursday… one more day, and the weekend is here! Woot! Have a good one, folks!

So it’s been a WHOLE MONTH (or more)…!

Yep, here it is… a month or more since I’ve been geocaching!!!! Horrors!!! I’m in serious withdrawal in a big way, but Life has NOT cooperated by any means! We’ve got a lot going on, to say the least.

GeoTeen2 came home as scheduled. We got him re-enrolled in school, etc… and then a whole two-and-a-half weeks later (this past Wednesday, in fact) – BAM – he ends up right back in juvie.  He STILL hasn’t figured out that when the judge tells you that you MUST go to boot camp, well, you really MUST.  “Oversleeping” or “forgetting what time it was” and so on are NOT adequate reasons for missing five days of BC and skipping school twice.  So… away we go again.  On the bright side, he’s in a different place now that is only five miles or so from my office, so I wont’ have to miss much work to go pick him up when he’s released, to the delight of my wonderfully-understanding bosses.  Visiting hours are also at a better time, so that makes life easy too. 🙂 Here’s hoping it really sinks in this time and we don’t ever have to do this again… besides being heartbreaking and such, it’s also just plain exhausting.  😦

In other news, there’s just been a lot going on in every area of life.  GeoKid2, The Boy, has been back into cub scouts again on Monday nights.  This past Wednesday, I ended up in a Bible study/mentorship meeting  that USUALLY takes place on Saturdays (only for the next month or two, then I’m done), but ended up HAVING to be on this particular night for a variety of reasons/schedule conflicts.  Normally no problem, except  that for the fact that during Lent, our church is doing a study on “40 Days of Community” via various small groups…and mine just happens to meet on Thursdays, cuz that’s the one with childcare so that’s the one I can go to, LOL. Oh, and I forgot, on Tuesday, GeoTeen1 had her bi-weekly counseling appt, which is usually on Fridays since that’s that night GeoTeen2 does NOT have bootcamp…but for a variety of reasons, it ended up being on Tuesday, just this once.  So this week has been NON-STOP – MondayTuesdayWednesdayThursday…. and here we are, FINALLY at FRIDAY!  Oh, wait… forgot to mention last weekend, I went HERE with these folks – it was EXTREMELY fun and I had a GREAT time (my newest adventure/addiction, along with geocaching, LOL…hmmm…wonder if I can combine the two??? LOL! Probably not…hmmmm….) ~  so I’ve been going NON-STOP since Saturday of last weekend!!!! 😮  It was a perfect storm of all our carefully-planned, carefully-coordinated commitments crunching together in one fell swoop in one week, right after each other.  Taken individually, and staying where they belong, the aforementioned commitments are manageable.  Squash them altogether into a much-condensed time frame, and you get my life this week. LOL!

Not every week has been this extreme…in fact, I think this past week is the MOST extremely busy week I’ve had in years, if ever.  Holy cow.  But life, overall, has been chaotic to some degree or another and has kept me away from the trails and my GPS and my geocaching.  GeoTeen1 is working as a volunteer at an auction tomorrow (Saturday) morning, but after it ends at 2 (and I hope I can score some cool deals there!), there’s NOTHING planned. NOTHING. 🙂  I was so excited about tomorrow, because after the youth auction, me and the GeoKidz had planned to take full advantage of the extended daylight hours and find us some caches!!! And I’d planned the same for Sunday afternoon, after church. (yeah, yeah, yeah… I’ll squeeze in laundry and house cleaning somewhere in there, but I’m sick of being cooped up inside… MUST. ESCAPE. SOON. MUST. COMMUNE. WITH. NATURE. MUST. FIND. GEOCACHES!)

BUT… Old Man Weather seems bent on ruining my plans for escape.  Turns out tomorrow there is a 70% chance of rain all day, and a 50% chance on Sunday! Seriously. :::facepalm::: My one free weekend to geocache, and…. boom.  Rain.  and more rain.  and still more rain! Maybe the weatherman will be wrong and the rain will hold off until evening.  I’m hoping so.  If I don’t escape soon and get some “OUTSIDE” time, I just might go insane. More than normal, I mean. 😉 Either that, or I just might spontaneously combust into a huge ball of stress.  Neither of which would be much fun, so… rain? Please go away till after sunset!!!

Here’s hoping we can make our escape.

Cheers,

MamaKat & Co.

 

Another Cache-Less Weekend, but….

Despite the gorgeous weather we had on Saturday, and the cloudy-but-still-nice weather we had today, I restrained myself from geocaching all weekend. (Gasp!) Yesterday, I folded & put away oodles of laundry and did the grocery shopping.  Today was church, then visit GeoTeen2, then come home and do dishes & dinner, and then dishes again.  Then, of course, there was the obligatory ten minutes before bedtime emergency homework project the littlest GeoKid forgot ALL about till JUST THEN…. ***rolling eyes*** So… yeah.  Here I am, not a cache found anywhere.

But…here’s where the good news comes in. 😀 Tomorrow is President’s Day.  School is IN tomorrow…a makeup day for the gazillion and one snowdays we had recently.  Hubby is working as usual. And me? Well, golly gee… my office, for some crazy reason (God bless them!!!!) decided that we’d be CLOSED tomorrow for President’s Day.  And, even rarer still…there is no crazy pressing deadline that is necessitating my presence in the office on the aforementioned official holiday. 😀 So… yeah.  Me, left to myself. No kids, no spouse, just me, the dog and the cats. 😀 WOOT!  So, in anticipation of this brief and exceedingly rare Window of Almost-Complete Freedom… I played at being a grown up all weekend and got a buncha stuff done.

So… Monday…tomorrow…. I’M ESCAPING!!!!!!! I mean, I’ll come BACK and all at the end of the day, but, you know, for a few hours there… I’m making a break for it!!!! 🙂  I’ve plotted out some caches I want to find in gorgeous Madison, Georgia – a town I’ve always WANTED to visit, but never have.  It has a ton of antebellum homes and such…legend has it that Madison was the town that was so beautiful, Gen. William T. Sherman refused to burn it down on his infamous March to the Sea.  One of the caches I’m hunting for is in a Civil-War era graveyard… you know how much I love history and old stuff, so I am soooooooooooooooo excited about the chance to finally explore this town.  It’s not too far from us – actually same distance or even a little closer than my office is to home, so… it’s easily doable. 🙂  Then, once I’m done in Madison, my GOAL is to head the opposite direction down to Stone Mountain Park.  There are oodles of caches hidden there, too, with a little more physical effort required to reach them.  I’ve wanted to do these for a while, as well, but as they are a bit more physically challenging than the ones I usually do, I wanted to wait until a day the GeoTeens were with me, or a day when I otherwise didn’t have the little kidlets with me.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do many – or even ANY – of the Stone Mountain ones, but what the heck… it’s a goal, I’ll aim for it. 😀

My plan is to head directly to Madison after dropping off the little kids for school.  This will be really early in the day and traffic should be a breeze (everyone is going TO Atlanta, not AWAY from it like I will be), so I’m HOPING I can be done there and in Stone Mountain by like 1 or 1:30. …find one or two caches there at  Stone Mountain, then back to the daycare by 5 or 6 at the latest to pick up the littlest GeoKids… just like on a “normal” Monday.

I know I could stay home and sleep instead.  Or, if I wanted to be a real grownup, I know there are still plenty of chores here I could be doing.  But….

naaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! 😀

That’s why I stayed home all weekend (aside from visiting GeoTeen2 in juvie)…so I could get enough stuff done & taken care of so that I could ESCAPE tomorrow with a clear conscience. 😀  And, happily, I now have a camera to tote along to get pics of all my adventures, since, as you know, hubby very kindly got me one for valentine’s day.   Woot! 😀

I think this is very possibly the first time EVER I’ve actually LOOKED FORWARD to a MONDAY! Scary! LOL

Have a great night, y’all!!!! Adventure stories to follow….. 🙂