Phillip and I went out last night to replace the "Genmaicha" travel bug, in Lake Forrest Park. When we got there, it was dark. The city is not too far from home, but the cache was in an area I'm not familiar with. It's a residential area with undeveloped areas, winding streets, and no street lights. We got very lost. Using the GPS receiver, we finally found the park where the cache is hidden. The park, however, closes at dusk (which the cache listing didn't mention). We left frustrated, and got lost trying to find our way back home.

I went out early this morning, alone, and found the cache. I dropped off the duplicate "Genmaicha" (I'm not sure what's going to happen if the original shows up somewhere) as well as another travel bug we'd picked up at a previous cache. There's another cache .6 miles from this morning's cache, so I figured I'd try it while I was in the area. When I got home and logged our "Did Not Find" on that second cache, I noticed that it had last been found in June, and that there were two DNF's in July, I'm guessing that it's been muggled.

We had planned to go to Pet's house this afternoon, and spend two nights there. Phillip's recovering from a cold, or something, so we decided to leave tomorrow and make it a one-night stay.

We did, however, hide our fourth cache this morning. It's more my cache this time. We seem to be following a pattern. It's at a bench I'd seen for years on my drives over Capitol Hill. It's not too far from "I Can See The Dawghouse From Here!" - but just far enough to get by the "no closer than 528 feet" geocaching rule. I probably started thinking about the location as a cache site when we hid "I Can See The Dawghouse From Here!" It didn't seem like an inspired idea, though - just a bench in a nothing special place. That's why it took me so long to get moving on it.

Then, earlier this week, an idea for a "puzzle cache" came to me. I did searches on geocaching.com, using keywords for what I'd guess people would name such a puzzle. I found one cache in Germany that used the same idea as I had come up with. That was OK with me - puzzle caches often use similar puzzles, and as long as my idea didn't show up in the Seattle area, I was happy.

I went out Tuesday evening to get the coordinates for the hide. I was amazed to discover that what I had thought was a bench all these years was actually the railing for the stairs that go down the hill. (It's partially hidden behind a Jersey barrier, you see.) Still, it was a pretty good place to hide a cache.

I've worked on this cache hide more than we worked on our previous hides. (I suspect that's normal for a puzzle cache.) I did research on the puzzle, and then constructed the puzzle. I thought up a good location for the "false" coordinates, and found those coordinates. (That's how puzzle caches work: False coordinates are posted for the cache location - those have to be within a mile or two of the actual cache, and also no less than 528 feet from another cache - and then the cache hunters have solve some sort of puzzle to find the real coordinates.)

I spend some time camouflaging the cache container on Thursday and Friday.

As of this morning, I still hadn't completely decided on a name for our new cache. Before it turned into a puzzle cache, I'd been thinking of "Curve Ahead" or "Where The Rubber Meets The Road" or "The Two Bostons." When I'd decided to make it a puzzle, I was thinking of "I Thought It Was A Bench" or, more in tune with the nature of the puzzle, "Uhura" or "Universal Translator." Phillip had suggested "Babble On" or "Babelfish." I was afraid of giving too much away in the title, so I was leaning more toward calling it "U.T." - which is what it turned out to be.

We submitted the cache listing for "U.T." at 11:20 this morning, then we hid the cache on our way to removing litter from "Get Christie, Love." The cache was approved and listed at 2:35 this afternoon. (Caches in our area have been approved rather quickly lately, but I thought we'd get a day or two delay since it's the Labor Day weekend.) fauxSteve was "First To Find" at 4:47.

I don't know how I should react to the recent news that an investment firm owned by the co-founder of AOL has bought a controlling interest in Flexcar. I've been trying to sort it out over the past couple of days. Phillip and I are still Flexcar members, although we haven't used the service in well over a year. I still think it is a worthwhile, socially and environmentally friendly, concept - but it just didn't work out, financially, for what Phillip and I tried to do with it. It was intended as an alternative to owning a car. We tried to use it as an alternative to owning a second car.

Now Flexcar is going "corporate." It's no longer a Seattle-based company with branches in Oregon, California, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. Is this a good thing? Was is ever possible for a fleet of cars, tracked by an internet database, to survive as a "storefront" company? Shouldn't an idea that puts less cars on the road continue to get bigger and bigger?

As I write this entry, I am convincing myself that Flexcar's latest news is good news - even if it is becoming AOL.

I walked to work this morning. I left a little early so I could stop by 1st Hill Park and replace the cache. There was only one person in the park, and he was sitting in the cache location. I had some time, so I sat and tried to wait him out. I thought about Phillip's idea that it might have been a regular visitor to the park who took the cache and, if that was the case, I'll run the risk of having it muggled again. So, as I waited for the other visitor to leave, I looked around, visually scouting out other possible hiding spots. The other visitor was whittling little wooden crosses, and it became apparent that he was going to be there longer than me. So I left the park and went work with the cache still in my backpack.

I returned to the park at lunch. There were two visitors in the park, and they were both napping on the grass. So it was easy to replace the cache. The new cache container is smaller than the first one, so it fit better in the hiding spot.

On my way home, I bought a tea ball - the first step in replacing Genmaicha.

I now know what it feels like to have a cache muggled. It's not as devastating as I had imagined it would be.

Early this afternoon, Phillip emailed me that my "Genmaicha" travel bug had been reported stolen. A geocacher had reported that someone had vandalized a cache, and the travel bug in it (Genmaicha) was missing. That happened back in July, but since the geocacher reported it on the cache page, but not the travel bug page, I never got the automatic notification.

Phillip suggested that I "clone" Genmaicha and place it in the same cache.

Then, on my way home, I passed through 1st Hill Park, and since no one was near the hiding place of "1st Hill, 1st Cache," I decided to check on our cache. It was last found on August 19. It's now gone. It's been muggled. I searched to make sure it wasn't just returned to the wrong spot, but it's really gone. I made a new cache container this evening - a smaller, better camouflaged container - and temporarily disabled the cache.

I went to the Welcome & Nurture Committee meeting last night and realized that I've lost most of the connection I'd felt to our church. Last Sunday morning, I was dressed and ready to go to service, but I just couldn't motivate myself to take the step out the door. (I went geocaching instead.) We're planning on going to Pet's house this weekend, so we won't be at church. The following Sunday is Writers' Group, and I plan on being there. The last time I was at church service, it was because of Writers' Group.

At last night's committee meeting, our pastor was happy to report that her CAP event, a barbecue at her house, two Saturday afternoons ago, attracted 27 people. I felt bitterness at hearing that. It was an illogical bitterness, and it was unfair to blame anyone, but the bitterness existed nonetheless. I don't know what went wrong with our mini-golf CAP event. Even Gay Bingo - a kid-unfriendly event late at night - attracted a dozen people, including both of our pastors. Phillip and I put a lot of work into finding the best mini-golf course. We gave it a lot of publicity. The weather was nice. We'd received a lot of enthusiasm beforehand. There weren't any major events going on nearby. Maybe it's possible that everybody just happened to be working that day, but I just can't convince myself of it. I feel snubbed.

This is drifting around in my thoughts right now: When Phillip and I were leaving the rabbit area today, we saw a squirrel up ahead of us. I noticed, first, that the squirrel was unusually skinny. (Phillip thought it was a baby.) Then I noticed that its tail seemed unusually long. "Look! It's Squeak!" I joked.

What if there really is reincarnation? What if there really is karma? What if Squeak has come back as a squirrel?

That Interlaken Park cache was bugging me this morning. I just couldn't stand to leave an unfound cache unfound. (I guess that's what makes me a true geocacher.) So, despite the fact that we had posted that we were calling it quits on this one, I set out to find it this morning, before Phillip got up. This time, I didn't bother turning on the GPS receiver. I purposely ignored the posted hints, and relied solely on the hints emailed to us by nteclpr. I started looking in the area where the GPSr had led us previously. I couldn't find the cache. Then it occurred to me that the emailed hints didn't quite make sense - that I was trying to make them fit what I saw. So, I went back to the main road and studied nteclpr's hints without assumptions. That led me to a trail I had searched, on a hunch, in the middle of the night with Phillip. I searched and searched, and had decided to call it quits, until my geo-sense led me up a steep embankment where I found the cache. That was find number 98 for us.

In my opinion, based on the posted hints, the posted difficulty of terrain, and the plea from both the cache owner and Seattle Parks to "stay on the trail," that cache should not have been hidden where it was. (That's not "sour grapes," either.) Also, I still don't know why the coordinates led us so far off before.

When I got back home, Phillip was waiting for me in the garage. I hadn't realized I had been gone for nearly an hour and a half. (Twenty minutes of that was travel time.)

Phillip and I looked for the cache in Baker Park - the one we couldn't find once, because of muggles, and once more because, unknown to us, the cache had been muggled. We didn't turn the GPS receiver on for this one, either. This afternoon, there was no one in the park but us. While I searched in the wrong area, Phillip found the cache. That was find number 99.

We tried one more cache today. It was one I had been wanting to do for a long time, because it is an area populated with abandoned rabbits. I love rabbits. They're my favorite animals (after sugar gliders, of course). We saw a lot of rabbits - lots and lots of rabbits. I found the cache, too - I'm glad that this one was our 100th find.

Meanwhile, I rented The Motorcycle Diaries this weekend. I've watched it twice. I think it's a terrific film.

I respect the opinion of movie reviewer Roger Ebert. He is literate and knows movie history well. I usually, but not always, agree with his opinions. After I watched The Motorcycle Diaries the first time, I read his review to see what insights I could learn. This is the second time in recent memory that, not only have I disagreed with Mr. Ebert's opinion, I think he was just plain wrong. He gave this film two and a half stars (out of five), saying that if it weren't for the fact that one of the main characters would later become the famous "Che" Guevara, the story wouldn't be interesting at all.

It's the true story of two medical students who take off on an 8,000 kilometer trip up the South American coast, with a broken-down motorcycle and no money, expecting nothing but a good time, but instead find injustices that begin to change their lives forever - and Roger Ebert doesn't think that's an interesting story? It's a classic road story, very much in the tradition of Grapes Of Wrath or Easy Rider. Knowing that young Ernesto Guevera would later become a revolutionary instead of a doctor helps, but isn't necessary to the beauty of the story.

That simple campfire scene, where Ernesto and Alberto meet the couple who are looking for work because they've been forced out of their home by "land speculators," is one of the most moving things I've seen in a film. "Are you two looking for work?" asks the wife. "No," answers Ernesto. "No? Then why are you traveling?" "We travel just to travel." (Uncomfortable look exchanged by the couple, and an embarrassed look exchanged by Ernesto and Alberto)

Oh, and the other time Roger Ebert was wrong was Team America: World Police, which he gave a one star review, because it's never clear who, or what, the film is trying to satire. To me, there was never a moment when the satire wasn't crystal clear. Team America: World Police is a spot-on satire of jingoistic movies such as Independence Day - as if told from point of view of those who write such movies. Team America, after destroying every cultural monument in Paris, as well as half the city, tells the stunned French citizens that everything's OK - they've stopped the terrorists.