So… It’s Been A While…

It has been quite a while since I’ve written a blog post (mid-May, I believe).  Come to think of it, it’s been quite a while  since I’ve gone geocaching, which explains in part why I haven’t blogged much.  This is, after all, a blog about my (and the GeoKidz’)  favorite hobby.  🙂

But, life gets in the way sometimes.   Right now, our family is undergoing some pretty cataclysmic changes that are keeping us from our usual weekend geocaching adventures.  They are ultimately changes for the better, to be sure…but there’s still a lot of upheaval right now.  Beginning at the beginning, kinda….

Some of you may remember that in late May/early June, my Prodigal Son, GeoTeen2, went missing.  Not kidnapped or anything horrific like that, thank God… he just up & ran away.   He was gone a full seven days before he was caught.  A whole week.  One Hundred and Sixty-Eight Hours. Ten Thousand, Eighty Minutes… of not knowing where my kid was.  If he was safe.  If he was dead.  If he was hurt and in a coma somewhere.  If he was eating.  If he was getting in trouble.  If he fell into the wrong hands and was trapped in a nightmare.  If he was coming home.  If he was even in Georgia anymore.  If, if, if…. IF!  It was the longest, most exhausting, most horrific week of my entire life – all thirty-eight years of it so far.   I was playing phone tag with detectives.  Answering myriad questions. Asking even more.  Emailing as many of his Facebook friends as I could.  His sister was scouring through Loganville, finding as many of his friends as she could, searching for him, for some clue, ANY clue, as to where he was.  I even began to solicit local radio stations for help.  His siblings and I were terrified we’d never see him again.  Here’s a friendly tip for you to stow away in your memory:  If you are looking for your MIA teen, never, ever, EVER Google “what to do when your teen runs away”!  The statistics of runaways and what can happen to them are horrifying and will do nothing to contribute to your peace of mind.  

Yeah, so…that was a bad week.  Thank God they found him…thank God.  Safe and sound and in one piece.  The Loganville Police Department, and in particular Detective Massey, were absolutely out-freaking-standing during this time.  They worked hard to find him for me.  They were accessable, responsive,  patient with my dumb questions, my moments of panic, and my random, miscellaneous emails/calls/messages whenever I thought of any little thing, no matter how absurdly ridiculous or tiny, that maybe, just might help.   His little disappearing act got him another 30 days, but I’m OK with that… I know where he is and he can’t take off from there! 🙂  Ha! He’ll be home soon.   Speaking of home…

The biggest change of all.  The most difficult.  I hesitate to write of it. 

Our family is in the process of moving.  We are not moving far at all, just a little over six miles down the road, but move we must.  As a newly-single mom, I simply cannot afford the mortgage, the bills (especially the inside-the-city-limits water/sewage bills…OUCH!), and whatnot.  And even if I could…honestly, I think a change of location just might be good for us, especially a certain teenager. 

Now, don’t go thinking that you’re getting rid of us.  Oh no, not that easy!!!!! 🙂 We are not moving far at all.  Just far enough to where we will be in a somewhat rural area (with cows for neighbors…yay!) and different schools.  But not so far that we’ll have to change churches and babysitters and scout troops and whatnot.  Just enough change to be good for us, and just enough stays the same to give the kids some measure of stability in the midst of it all.   Loganville is still our hometown, and we are still firmly rooted in the community.  The big move happens within the next week or so, so this weekend is my last bit of free time to frantically scramble to get everything packed and ready to go.  I made progress last weekend, but still have a good bit to go. OK, most of it. haha.  Since I put the “pro” in procrastination and excel at the last-minute-freakout-to-get-everything-done, haha, I predict this will be a really productive weekend. 😀

I love where the kids and I are moving.  We are renting a 101-year-0ld farmhouse that just OOZES peace and tranquility…qualities we all very much need right now.  But I’m sad, too.  Deeply sad.  Leaving this house we live in is probably the hardest part of all.   When we bought it, I swore I’d live there for the rest of my life.   There’s an amazing story behind our home.  The community poured out SO MUCH LOVE and so much hard work to create this home for us.   So many did so much with a ton of love.  To walk away from that feels like a betrayal of everyone’s love and everyone’s hard work.   It feels like a slap in the face to those who poured themselves into the project.  It feels disresepctful.  It feels shameful…disgraceful. It feels like failure.  This isn’t how the story was supposed to end.  Nope, I was going to stay planted RIGHT THERE till the very end of my days…not because of the actual house itself so much, as the love that was poured into it on our behalf.

But…well, Life has a way of interrupting our plans.  This is not a decision I reached easily.  This is not even a decision I want to make.  But… when all is said and done, I’ve got to do what is best for my family.  My kids and their well-being come first.  Period.  We need to live in a more affordable home in a more affordable area.  We need a fresh start in so many ways.  When it comes right down to it…. We’ve got to move.  Just no other way around it.   So… move we shall.

So, that’s why there have been no blog posts about quirky adventures and random travels as we hunt down cleverly-hidden geocaches all over Georgia.  There’s just been no time.  Our world has collapsed, shattered, and imploded.  Picking up the pieces and rebuilding a whole new world is a full-time job, and then some. 

But once we’re all moved and settled in, you better believe that the GeoKidz and I will be back out there, hunting for our hidden treasures…using a billion-dollar satellite system to find Tupperware hidden in the woods, having zany adventures along the way.

There are lots of geocaches in the area to which we are moving.

I’ve already checked.  🙂

 

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY!

Even if it is the dreaded “Friday the 13th,” I’m so glad that this week is over.  Ever have one of those really horrific, awful weeks when absolutely positively NOTHING goes right? And where the things that DO go wrong, go as wrong as they possibly can? Oh, nothing drastic or earth-shattering – nobody has died, fallen severely ill, lost a job – nothing truly life-altering happened.  It’s just one of those weeks.  Family stuff, teen stuff, job stuff, traffic stuff… just a lot of heartbreaking STUFF in general.   A lady on a local message board has this saying on her avatar:  “I try to take it one day at a time – but sometimes, several days attack me all at once!”  Yes, that’s the kind of week I’ve had.  A week of “Mondays,” so to speak.   Just enough to where it all becomes overwhelming… especially when most of it is completely out of my control and there’s not a darn thing I can do to fix anything – that’s the worst, haha. 

I’m hardly the only one, though.  Folks all over have had weeks just as rough and even far worse.  It’s just one of those things you go through in life – some good, some bad, some just plain “blah.”  It’s just the way it goes. 🙂  God never promised that life would be easy.  Quite to the contrary… the night before Jesus was crucified, He warned His disciples:

 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace.  In this world you will have trouble.  But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

Through this long and winding road called life, we’ll have to slog through some serious amounts of sludge and yucky stuff.  But the good news is that we don’t have to slog through it alone.  He’s right there in the trenches with us!  He is right here in the trenches with me, even when I am gasping for breath, grabbing for that Light that I KNOW is there even though at times it’s but a faint flicker off in the distance… trusting the Healer, even while I’m breaking to pieces… unable to hold on but trusting – KNOWING – that the Anchor is holding me until I can.

And, in time, you and I and everyone else going through things that cause us such pain will come out the other side.  One day, we will look back and see how God was at work even in the worst of times.  It may not be apparent now, but it will be.  Just hold on a mite longer, friends, and He’ll get you through it.

Happy Friday!!

PS – there’s a great song I heard on the radio this morning that pretty much inspired this post.  I’m going to try to embed the video in this post somewhere, but if that doesn’t work, please CLICK HERE and watch/listen.   It’s a truly awesome song that was just what I needed to hear today. 

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.

 

My Weekend Quest

Yay, it is FINALLY Friday! Thank You, God! 😀 Yesterday was my birthday (I’m old now, 38 – LOL!) and it was a good one.  Thanks to Facebook, I received well over 100 birthday greetings which made me feel all loved & stuff. 🙂 Then, one of my attorneys I work for (and three paralegals) took me to lunch at the new restaraunt in our building.  It was delicious!!!! In fact, I was so stuffed, I didn’t even eat dinner last night… yummy! After I picked up the kids from daycare, I treated myself to not cooking – got them happy meals instead, LOL!We got their Valentine’s cards done for the class parties they are having today, they did their homework, got their baths, etc… I was able to have some actual PEACE AND QUIET, got some reading done, some prayers prayed,  and by 9:30-ish I was snoozing away peacefully.  Nothing like falling asleep early, which almost never happens!  It was fantastic.  So, thanks to everyone for making my birthday great!

When scoping out my weekend, I initially thought that any Geocaching would happen on Saturday only. And Saturday afternoon, at that.  Saturday morning, I have to meet some ladies for a Bible Study group I’m considering joining. After that, I have to run to Snap Fitness to sign my membership agreement and get The Tour.  I am only going to be a member for the next two months or so (not something I can afford long-term) until I get thru this half-marathon I’ve signed up for.  Those of you who have known me for a while know I signed up to do a half-marathon with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program, to help raise $$$ for cancer research and to help families who are currently in the fight.  Well, weather and illness (three+ months of bronchitis) have conspired against me, along with my hectic schedule & commute.  The only way I’m gonna be able to get the rest of my training done is if I have access to a treadmill.   Santa brought me a GPS, not a treadmill (yay for GPS, it was alos on my list, so I’m happy!) so I had to come up with Plan B.  My birthday gift to myself was the month-to-month membership at Snap (which is right across the street from me) so I could finish this dang half-marathon.  It’s been a long fight – last time I signed up, I got bronchitis FIVE DAYS before the event. Five. Days. I was sooooo upset! So… trying this again and won’t quit this time.  If I get sick or hurt or sick again right before the event… I’ll be really REALLY mad! LOL.

Anyway, I figured after the fitness center tour, it would be about 1 or 1:30 – still have enough daylight left for 4-5 hours of local caching. Probably won’t go that long, because I have a whole heap of laundry to do…but at least the GeoKids and I can get some caching done. 🙂 After two weeks, I’m going stir crazy. 🙂

Sunday, my GeoTeen1 (the girl) are going to visit GeoTeen2 (the boy, currently on “forced vacation” in Gainesville).  We’ll have to go to the early service at church (8:45 – ugh! GeoTeen1 said she didn’t think they even made an 8:45 on the clock during weekends –  LOL!) to get to Gainesville by 1:00.  Only two can visit him at any time, so it will be me and her, while hubby stays home wiht the little GeoKids.  I originally figured that, givin the 1:00-2:30 visiting hours, and the fact that it’s a 90-minute drive from home to there, it would be a geocache-free Sunday. (sad!)  Then it dawned on me… Hey! They have Geocaches in and near Gainesville, too! Duh.  So I put in the address of where we’d be, and voila! Several caches popped up.  There didn’t seem to be any that were particularly inspiring… until I found THIS ONE.  The code for this one, if you are looking it up on the Geocaching webiste, is GC2EBQ3.  In case that link doesn’t work, here is a picture from the photo album on that cache page:

Yes, this cache is located deep in the heart of a bamboo forrest!!!!!!! Ginormously tall bamboo, tall as trees! Super-thick forrest!  Trails, nature, and did I mention, ginormously tall bamboo everywhere?! HOW FREAKIN’ COOL IS THAT?????!!!!????? Hopefully I get an early Valentine’s day gift of a digital camera (our old one died… I’d also accept an iPhone now that Verizon has them, LOL… but iPhone costs more dollars than we have in the bank, so that’s pure wishful thinking there, LOL!) so I can take pics of this… it is sure to be fantastically awesome!

So, I am excited to finally be able to get out there and get some geocaching done on Saturday… but I am far, far, FAR more excited about the one on Sunday, smack-dab in the middle of a whole mess of bamboo! That will be mega, mega cool!!!!

Will let y’all know how it all goes…keep your fingers crossed for me & GeoTeen1 that we can find the bamboo forrest one! Will post pics if I can. 🙂

FINALLY Escaped!!!!!

At long last, the temperature climbed high enough above the freezing mark to thaw out most of the ice on the roads…. THANK GOD! (Which I mean quite literally, btw!) As I mentioned earlier, I did not go to work today.  A large part of the reason was that I was simply too traumatized by my commute from the ice-induced 7th level of Hell yesterday…. horrible nightmare, that.  3.25 hours TO work, then work for three hours, then over 3.5 hours HOME.  Seriously. I was really ready to go postal by the time I got home, haha.  Fortunately, today my two oldest kids, the GeoTeens, were leaving for a church youth retreat at 1:00, leaving me babysitterless for the day.  One day of  full daycare would cost almost as much as a whole week of before & after care; the lady we usually use as a backup is in a neighborhood full of twists and turns and hills and such along the route from here to there (refer to the aforementioned state of traumatized-ness resulting from my commute yesterday).   None of my attorneys were planning on being in the office anyway, so I used up a vacation day with their blessing. 🙂 Have I mentioned, I (heart) the attorneys I work for?? They are awesome! 🙂

After dropping the GeoTeens off at church, the GeoKidz and I returned home.  By this time, the ice on the roads was vanishing fast, and I finally felt safe enough to venture out on a quick cache hunt. 🙂 I fiddled around with Geocaching.com and my GPS, and figured out how to download “Pocket Queries” to my GPS, and upload my log entries to Geocaching.com. 😀 Major accomplishment for techno-challenged me! 😉  I then planned out a route of four or five local caches we would attempt to find.  We found three.

The first cache was a simple lamp-post skirt hide.  The GeoKidz had not been with me when I found previous lamp-post caches; they were fascinated with the idea that the square box part of the lamp-post actually can be MOVED and lifted up! Who knew, right?! 😉

From there, we wandered to a local park, one I’ve been to many times (it’s actually one of my most favorite places to go jogging, because the track around the football field is nice and FLAT!).  This one required that we veer off the paved path and wander in the woods for a short while.  Obviously, this one was much more challenging than the lamp-post find!  While the snow was mostly gone from the roads and such, there was still a TON of it on grassy areas and… in the woods.  No traffic (car or foot traffic) to help speed along the melting.  This meant that everything pretty much looked exactly alike. My GPS sometimes gets a little iffy if there is heavy tree cover.blocking its signal.  I’m still learning how to read and interpret its various moods and such, haha.  We spent a good bit of time wandering around, poking at the ground with sticks.  About a thousand times, my kids were POSITIVE they’d found it… only to discover that they had, in fact, found a perfectly wonderful tree root/stump/rock/miscellaneous pile of leaves.  Eventually, I found it purely and completely by accident.  Yay! 🙂 This was definitely the most accidental find I’ve had so far, though, haha! We signed the logbook and deposited some swag trinkets and a GeoCoin before heading on our way.

Our next stop was supposed to be one near a local bowling alley. I’ve wanted to find this one forever (like, all three or four weeks I’ve been geocaching! Seriously, forever! haha). This one was foiled by a good amount of ice that made the area it was hidden in dangerous… that, and a muggle (a/k/a, “non-geocacher who has no idea what we are doing”) who was watching us intently, and then got on his cell phone while watching us intently.  Although geocaches are only placed somewhere with express permission from the property owner, I still didn’t feel like having my first possible encounter with the police thinking I was behaving suspiciously, haha.  So, the GeoKidz and I left there, and marked that one as one to return to when the ice has vanished. 🙂

By this time, the day was winding down, and daylight would be fading fast soon.  I nixed the other cache or two I’d had on my list, and chose instead another lamp-post skirt hide to find, just to end the day on a positive note.  We drove, we lifted, we signed, we replaced, we left. 😉

We finally arrived home shortly after 5:00. I ordered pizza and began plotting our adventures for tomorrow.  Hubby has to work all day, followed by him attending the Falcons’ first playoff game (unless he found someone to buy his ticket…he wants to trade up his Christmas gift (the ticket) for a nicer TV for our room. Go figure, LOL!).  The GeoTeens are not home until Sunday afternoon, and thus the GeoKidz and I are free to wander as we please for the whole day. 🙂

We are going to start off with a large cache about six miles from us.  It has several travel bugs residing in it.  The plan is to grab a few travel bugs, then begin our wandering.  There is a series of historical multi-caches that a local guy has put together that I’ve been just dying to go find. I adore history (with my Greatx3 Grandfather having fought in the Civil War for the 34th GA Infantryand my ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War for the Americans… both were POWs, both were wounded in war, both survived and lived happily ever after, how can I not love history??? It’s in my blood, literally! Yep, history is COOL!) Anyway, I’ve selected a few caches to get started on that are a bit of a drive from where we live.  I figure we’ll find a few of those, then work our way back towards Loganville.  This will be the first time I’ve attempted a multi-cache.  With a multi-cache, you are given the coordinates to the first stage of the cache.  The actual cache itself is not there, but there are clues there to help you figure out the coordinates to where the cache itself is. 🙂 So you go to stage one, then on to stage two (or three or however many there are).  The ones I picked are simple two-stage caches that hopefully will not drive me TOO crazy! I need to find at least one of the critters to make the drive worth it. 😉 We aren’t wandering horribly far, closer than I commute to work, but so far we haven’t been farther than six miles or so… so this counts as “adventure” in my book! Plus, I’ve never been to these particular areas before, so that definitely counts as “adventure!”

I’m sure there’s no way we’ll actually find ALL the ones I picked out for tomorrow (8 or 9 of them), but it’s at least a rough plan to go by.  The adventure is in the journey and the wandering, not in the checking off things on a list. 🙂 We’ll find what we can, and attack the rest another day.

And now I must sign off and do those much more mundane, less fun things like trying to straighten up this catastrophe of a house, and convince hyper GeoKids that bath and bed times are really NOT the End of the Universe As We Know It. 😉

Happy Friday all! May your weekend be a stupendously fabulous one!

 

 

Snowpocalypse 2011 is still in full swing!

I finally got brave enough to sneak outta my house today to attempt this “work” thing again, LOL. Wow, what a NIGHTMARE that was!!! Much of Hwy 78 was OK, but once you got into/past Snellville, the nightmare began and it was horrible! North Druid Hills Road = Horrible, 85S = EXTREMELY Horrible, 75 N, mostly OK; Northside Parkway, not so much, at least not right by where my office was. Left home at 9:45 a.m., got to work at 1:05 PM. Worked until 4:00. Left at 4:00 ON THE DOT. Got home at 7:45 PM.     Nope, I’m not doin’ THAT again tomorrow! No way, no how, nuh-uh!!!!!!!! Likely I’ll be working over the weekend and on Monday, which is fine by me, since everything will be nice & melted by then.   Sheesh…. Not a good day at all. The highlight of the day was walking in the office door, just as the catered lunch was delivered for those hardy (insane) souls who braved (were crazy enough to go out in) the elements to get there, LOL. Free food = WIN. 😉 Hopefully in between working and such, I’ll be able to sneak in a cache or two. 😉 Carry on!

Snowpocalypse is Here!

Wow, for once, the weathermen’s dire predictions of impending doom in the guise of a ton of snow were….RIGHT!!!! There are several inches on the ground… it’s gorgeous out there! The kids are all outside, playing in the snow and turning into kidsicles, LOL.  Me, I’m curled up in bed reading a book. Oh wait, I just finished one… I WILL BE reading a new book once I pick one out from my stack-o-books to read. 😀

My office is actually CLOSED for the day, which never happens.  Likewise, hubby’s office is actually CLOSED for the day, which also never happens.   Yep, they weren’t kidding when they said it was really going to snow – it actually did! Good thing I caved in and went to the store yesterday, even though I really didn’t feel like it, LOL!

Too cold, icy, and COLD to get any geocaching done.  I was kinda hoping the weather would be just bad enough to merit a snow day, but not so bad as to keep me locked away inside all day. Usually, it’s bad in the morning, but conditions improve as the day goes on.  Nope, not this time! Conditions are worsening and will continue to worsen as the day goes on.  Now wishing I’d bought more hot chocolate at the store yesterday, LOL!

Ah well…it is a very good, lazy day nonetheless.  Back to my pile-o-books, my blankies, and my big comfy pillows. 🙂

Of GeoCoins and Traffic Stops

Howdy, everyone!  Here it is, finally Thursday.  The weekend is almost here!!!! Very excited about this weekend.  The GeoTeens and I are attending our first-ever meeting of the Georgia Geocachers’ Association on Saturday.  The event is taking place at Callaway Gardens – a place I’ve always wanted to visit but have never been to.  There is, of course, a geocache hunt before the meeting, and there’s food, too.  It’s looking to be a full day!!!  Nervous (I have the social skills of a hermit) but excited too.  Hoping to connect with another geocacher or twelve who know what they are doing and can help us out. 🙂

Anyway, due to my insanely long commute and the limited amount of daylight available during the winter (not to mention the whole “feeding and caring for four kids, two cats and a dog” thing), my geocaching is limited to weekends.  And, given that my weekends are insane, limited to a tiny portion of the weekends, at that.  That’s why I’ve only got five finds so far. Honest. 😉  Midweek geocaching is not practical for me.  That said, I did make a quick stop yesterday, which turned out to be not such a good idea.

Earlier last weekend, the kids and I found our very first-ever GeoCoin! Oh boy, I was all excited abou that! For those who may not know, GeoCoins are non-monetary coins with tracking numbers on them. Their goal is to travel all around the globe, or whatever desitination their original owner sets for them.  For those of you familiar with military stuff, they are kinda like military challenge coins, only with tracking number. Hooah! 🙂

Well, we found the GeoCoin in our first stop on Sunday’s hunt. I made sure to very, very carefully write down the tracking number listed on the clear plastic case the coin was in. Tripple checked it, even.  Then, we did one more hunt than we initially planned just so that we could put our geocoin in it’s new home.

Later on that night, after the kids were more or less in bed, I logged on to Geocaching.com to log my finds and claim my geocoin/note its new home.  I very carefully input the tracking number I’d written down… only to find out that I’d forgotten that there is also a SECOND number, usually on the coin itself, that needs to be logged in order to claim/deposit it anywhere. D’oh!!! I’d totally forgotten about that, and now it was late at night and I’d taken sleep-inducing cough syrup already… so there was no going back out to retrieve the lill thing!

Of course, I did not want to leave a geocoin out there all by its lonesome, when everything on the internet said it was in a place other than where it actually was. D’oh! ::facepalm:: Finally, Wednesday morning, I had a chance to go back to the cache I left it in.  Luckily, it was very close to home, and only a small detour on my way to work. I was going into work a bit late Wednesday because of having to handle something at one of my kids’ schools, and was fortunately running way ahead of schedule and had a couple minutes to spare.

I unfortunately found out why I was way ahead of schedule, though.  As it turns out, the road I was on, where I thought the speed limit was 45 or 50… the speed limit was actually 35. Hmmm… who knew?? Not me…there’s not much by way of signage in that area.  :::baning head against wall::: Yes, that will be one very costly driver education lesson there.. at least $165, possibly more. *sigh*

But, once I was turned loose, I immediately (albeit, MUCH more slowly!) went back to pursuing my geocoin!  I arrived at the cache a few minutes later with no further law enforcemment meet ‘n greets. 🙂 I was very aware of the fact that there were a LOT of stay-at-home moms in the area… almost every garage door was open, and an SUV or car in every one, meaning someone was home.  This was on a public area, but there were a lot of homes nearby.  I could just see myself meeting up with Loganville Cop #2…first speeding, then planting suspicious items in the kudzu patch by the side of the road!

Fortunately, I found the cache with no problem.  Even more fortunately, the above-mentioned geocoin was STILL THERE! **whew** big, big relief! I grabbed that lill critter outta the cache, re-hid the cache, and jumped back in my mini-van.  Went straight to work and still go their earlier than I expected to. Yay!

Later on that day, the GeoCoin was duly logged as being in my possession.  I’ll definitely find a new home for it over this weekend… after making absolutely sure I log both numbers on it. 🙂  Lesson learned, the hard way! haha!

Happy day-before-friday, y’all!

Greetings, y’all!

Howdy! Welcome to my humble little blog, brought to you from my humble little home in my humble little town.  🙂 Allow me to introduce myself for a moment, if I may. 🙂

My name is Kat – “MamaKat” to friends far and wide.  Residing with me are hubby and four kids -the GeoTeens (Tiff (17) and Jacob (15)) and the GeoKids (Kathryn (9) and Jeff (7)).  A few weeks ago, we discovered the fun, adventurous and HIGHTLY ADDICTIVE hobby of geocaching. What is geocaching, you may ask?  Geocaching is essentially a big ole treasure hunt that takes you all over creation and back again.  Geocachers cleverly hide a cache – which can be as small as a pencil eraser or as big as a ten-gallon bucket (or bigger) and everything in between –  then list the cache on the Geocaching.com website, together with its GPS coordinates and whatever helpful hints or info they feel like providing.  Then, other geocachers  take those GPS coordinates, put them into their trusty little GPS units, and go off on a quest to find that which was hidden and cleverly concealed. It may be in a shopping center parking lot, OR it may be way off in the woods somewhere involving a pretty lengthy hike.  There are caches for all levels of adventure-seekers…from tame to  not-tame, LOL.  Once a geocacher finds the cache, which may be hiding in plain sight or covered in leaves and branches or magnetically stuck to something, they then sign the log book in the cache.  Often, there are neat little trinkets in the cache (usually dollar-store type stuff, but sometimes folks leave pretty neat stuff in them).  If you take a trinket (otherwise known as “swag” – “Stuff We All Get” – then leave something in return of equal or greater value.  Of course, no taking or leaving of trinkets is required – that’s just a neat little added bit of fun (kids love it especially!).  The fun of geocaching is in the hunt itself, and in finding the sneakily-hidden cache.   Check out this site for all kinds of good info on it.

Anyway, I discovered geocaching a couple weeks before Christmas and was hooked, as were the GeoTeens.  We were not very successful with our hunting, though, because I did not have a hand-held GPS unit (and my BlackBerry is so old & out of date, I can’t download any GPS/Geocaching apps to it!).  We wandered all over Loganville for hours without success.  But then, Christmas Day arrived, and Santa-Hubby got me a hand-held GPS, just for geocaching! Yay! And thus was born a new addiction hobby and fun-filled family activity. 🙂

There is one minor detail you need to know about me, however.  I have NO – and I do mean NO – sense of direction whatsoever.  Think I’m exaggeratiing? I’ve gotten lost in parking lots. Heck, now that I mention it, I got lost in a parking lot today – and yes, I had my car GPS on (but it wasn’t recognizing the un-named road we were on, so maybe I’m not totally hopeless).  So, a hobby that is directly linked to navigational skills is rather an odd one for me to fall into, hahaha! But since when have I ever done anything the easy way, or stuck to the well-worn path?? (Now literally as well as figuratively?) OK, so perhaps the reason I’m so often on the road less traveled is because I’m hopelessly lost and ended up there by accident, but whatever.  It’s an adventure all the way, and life is good. 🙂

This blog came into being at the suggestion of one of my Facebook friends, who thought that Geocaching was the perfect opportunity for an exercise in photojournalism, haha.  With all the random adventures me and the GeoKids & GeoTeens are having, it sounded like a good idea to me. 🙂 Of course, another minor glitch is that at present, I don’t have a camera. My previous BlackBerry had a great camera I loved… right up until it went swimming in a glass of sweet tea one day as I was driving to work (I’m not so good at this coordination thing, either, haha).  One of my bosses, God bless him, had mercy on me and gave me one of his old (old, old) BlackBerrys, for which I truly am eternally grateful.  It’s the camera-less version, however (which makes sense, cuz why does a commercial litigator need a BalckBerry camera? haha).  So, at present I am without a camera, until we can work one into the budget.  Hopefully that won’t be too terribly long. 🙂  For the time being, this will be a photo-less journal of our treks and adventures.

I won’t bore you with details right now, since it’s getting late and I have much to do in real-life grown-up world, but this weekend was our first time taking out my new GPS and hunting for caches.  We found two yesterday, and three today. We meandered into a shopping center plaza, two local parks, and a patch of kudzu by the side of the road, for starters.  Along the way we saw a collective total of three bunny rabbits and a frog, along with miscellaneous squirrels, oddly-shaped trees, and a plethora of vines and sticker bushes. (ouch!)  Each find was met with much celebration and high-fives all around.  The little GeoKids had a great time.  When I asked what their favorite part of geocaching was? They said it was seeing all the cool nature stuff.  Chalk one up for sneaky educational opportunities, hehe.

Well, that’s it for now. Signing off and getting back to cleaning and laundry and other much less adventurous stuff of the Mom variety.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!