I've been working on the Gladden T Hart story this week, which has taken the drive away from this blog. I seem to devote myself to writing or to this blog, but not both.

Phillip and I hunted for a couple of geocaches today. That's all we had time for. The two caches were about ten miles apart, and both involved a bit of time to find. The first cache was inside Suzzullo Library, in the University of Washington. It was a very amazing geocache, and a whole lot of fun. It was listed as a mystery (puzzle) cache, but could have very well been called a multi-cache. Every waypoint was inside the library, and could be done entirely without a GPS receiver (unless you don't know where Suzzallo Library is), and could have been put together only by someone who worked there. It was find number 187 for us.

The second cache was a multi-cache inside Kubota Gardens, one of our favorite parks. It had no idea that there was a geocache hidden there, until I found it listed on someone's bookmark this morning. The cache has been there for almost a year. Phillip and I both knew the park so well that we had a pretty good idea where each of the six waypoints were even before our GPS receiver led us to them. For that reason, as well as the distance we had to drive to get to the park, the Did Not Find we logged seemed so much more frustrating that it should have been. We spent an usually long time searching the area - I kept on searching after Phillip had given up. The hints in the cache description gave us no doubt that we were in the right area. Either we overlooked something, or the cache had gone missing.

We got an email from the owner of the Kubota Gardens cache this evening. He's offering us all the help we need. He also raised another possibility: The cache was found by another geocacher today. It's possible we were there at the same time, and the other geocacher had taken the cache somewhere to sign the log.

On our way back home from Kubota Gardens, we stopped into Grocery Outlet. We love that store. We always find something fascinating there. This is my favorite from our visit today. Phillip found it, actually. In the frozen foods tray were two fish dinners, side by side. One was a Van de Kamp product, and the other was from Mrs. Paul's. The interesting thing was that they were exactly the same product - same name, same typography, same photograph, and same layout. The only difference was the brand names. I understant that products are often sold under diffent names in differnet regions - it was just funny to find them side by side in the same store.

A patient came into our clinic this afternoon, and excitedly told us all that he'd found a new girlfriend. This clinic is often like an extended family. I love it.

Tonight was the beginning of my third, and final, year as a Church Council member. I took the opportunity to resign as Council Secretary - More accurately, I chose to not continue for another year. When I was asked, during the meeting, I replied, "I would prefer not to." One of the four new Council members volunteered to be the new Secretary. The minutes for tonight's meeting will be the last that I will write.

I was also given the perfect opportunity to express what I've been feeling about my church, and to follow my mother's advice to use my position as Council member to try to fix what's wrong. We did an exercise, which we plan to present more formally to the Congregation later. We rated our church, on a scale of 1 to 10, on each of the eight quality characteristics of a growing church. Category 8 was "Loving Relationships." The other council members rated our church somewhere between 6 and 8. My rating was the lowest: 4.

Our pastor asked me why my rating was so low. I said what's been on my mind: If a person is not outgoing, is introverted, it is very difficult to be in our church. It's easy for a person to stand alone in the corner and have no one approach them. It's far too easy for a person to drop out of the church altogether and meet no resistance. I even used the phrase I'd invented to sum up the situation as I saw it: "This church is a lot better at 'welcoming' than it is at 'nurturing.'"

Barbara talked to me, before the meeting began, about the new, "unofficial" Writers' Group. She and I agreed on the next meeting time: March 5, after church.

I'll start writing down the story I've been running through my head: The story of Gladden T Hart.

So I called Flexcar this morning to reactivate my account (or repair it, if I'm following the theme of this day). It turned out that it was my fault. It had been so long since I'd used a Flexcar that I'd confused my account number with my member number - actually, I had forgotten that there was a difference.

Somewhere between 11:30 and 12, I tried to reserve a Flexcar, and I discovered just how successful this car sharing program has become. Of the twenty or more cars within two miles of our apartment, every one had been reserved until 4:00, at the earliest - most were reserved until 6 or beyond. I finally reserved a Honda Civic Hybrid from 4:00 to 5:30.

I dropped off the "All Things Bunny" in the "Very Bunny" cache close to Woodland Park Zoo. Then I decided that I had enough time to look for a puzzle cache on the UW campus that Phillip and I had previously logged a DNF on.

As I drove from Woodland Park to the U District, I started thinking about The Rule of Four, which I'm almost through reading. It's the story of two students who become obsessed with discovering the hidden message in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. I thought about the fact that I've spent the vast majority of this weekend, which I've had to myself, either geocaching or thinking about geocaching, and that I was driving a Flexcar which I reserved specifically for geocaching. I wondered how obsessed I've become.

I found the puzzle cache on the UW campus. It was find number 186. Earlier today, Phillip had gone geocaching with Pet, and found numbers 184 and 185. I returned the Flexcar with 15 minutes to spare - I'd never returned a car so close to the deadline before.

I went out to dinner tonight at La Cocina. I ran into Cliff on the way, and I invited him to join me, but he said he'd already eaten. We talked for quite a while. He wants me to start going back to church.

La Cocina has been my favorite Mexican restaurant for over twenty years. Phillip has told me before that he doesn't see anything special about it. That's the main reason I chose it for a solo dinner tonight. I can see Phillip's point, though - there's not much on the menu at La Cocina that you won't find in most Mexican restaurants. But I think the food is very good, it doesn't try to be anything more than a good place to eat, and it has a history with me.

As I ate dinner, I realized that I have not watched television at all this weekend.

This weekend is developing a theme of "repairs," it seems.

A while back, our Christmas CD of Kate Bush's Aerial developed a minor skip in the 8th track of the 2nd CD ("Nocturne"). I blame the design of the CD case, which allows the CDs to fall out if you pick it up wrong. The next time I played it, the skip was worse. The next time I played it, the whole song was unplayable. I read up on CD repair kits. I stopped by a few drug stores on my walks home from work, but none of them carry CD repair kits. Yesterday, I played the CD, planning to press the "Forward" button when "Nocturne" started skipping. But the song played just fine. I played it again later, and it still played perfectly. The CD has somehow repaired itself. I understand CDs less than I understand computers.

Yesterday, a geocacher named fauxSteve found "1st Hill, 1st Cache." He reported that the log book had become soaked - and also frozen. (Someone has stolen the baggie again, it seems.) He also reported that an object in the park, which I had been using as the cache hint, is gone. I walked over to the cache early this morning and replaced the log book, then came home and changed the hint. I'm starting to have thoughts, again, of either archiving or moving this cache.

While I was updating the cache page for "1st Hill, 1st Cache," I reached over to pick up the old log book and knocked a plastic monkey off of the computer table. We'd found that monkey in a cache somewhere. One of its legs had broken off before we found it. We took it home and glued its leg back on. When it fell off the table this morning, the leg broke off again. I rolled the inflatable medicine ball, which we use as a computer chair, to see where the leg had fallen. When I did that, the medicine ball rolled over the monkey leg, and the monkey leg gouged a hole in the medicine ball. I'm trying to figure out how to repair the leak.

This morning isn't starting out well. This is blog entry number 1000, by the way.