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. 

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.