I took the Prius over to the University District for an overdue oil change. On the drive back, an advertisement on the radio caused me to start wondering about the word "solution." How did the same word come to mean both an answer to a problem and a mixture of two or more substances?

Later, as I was working on a logic puzzle at home, I started wondering about the word "orient." As a verb, it means to locate yourself. As a proper noun, it's a location. Why?

It looks like I have some research ahead of me.

Someone special from our past, who disappeared so suddenly seven or eight years ago that we (literally) thought he was dead, suddenly appeared today. The combination of age, time, and weight, plus the surprise of it, made me not recognize him at first. A coworker said I looked like I had seen a ghost. I realized that that was exactly how I was feeling. I felt that way for a very long time.

Does pride exist in yoga? Pride was what I was feeling this evening when I heard Lisa tell the class "...do like Paul is doing." Pride was what I felt when I attempted a sort of reverse crane pose (legs forward rather than back), and I heard Lisa call out: "Paul! You got it! You're doing it, Paul!" It didn't even matter to me that I couldn't hold it for more than a breath - I did it.

The Internet Movie Database says that the 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon is "word-for-word and scene-for-scene virtually the same as the original novel." Well, that's not exactly true, unless you emphasize the word "virtually." Still, the film does follow the novel very closely - a lot of the dialog is so identical that I hear Peter Lorre's voice when I read Joel Cairo's words.

The IMDb also notes that Kasper Gutman's repeated phrase "By gad, sir" was originally written as "By God, sir," until the censors objected. I find that interesting, because in the novel, the phrase is "By gad, sir." Being a novel written in 1929, a lot of the vulgar language is implied rather than spelled out. (In a similar way, in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, the curse words are replaced by dashes.) I'm no prude, but I find it refreshing and somehow more powerful.

page 82: "Red rage came suddenly into his face and he began to talk in a harsh guttural voice. Holding his maddened face in his hands, glaring at the floor, he cursed Dundy for five minutes without break, cursed him obscenely, blasphemously, repetitiously, in a harsh guttural voice."

page 94: "The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second, 'you.'"

I have a bookmark to a blog named dooce. It's written by a woman who is very open about her identity, and gained some fame a few years ago by getting fired after her employers deciphered the coded references in her blog, figured out that she was writing about them, and didn't like what they read. I still have my job and, as far as I know, my employers haven't objected to anything I've written here. Still, people do object to finding things they say in public repeated in public. Phillip disagrees with my choice to edit myself, but I do stand by what I've written.

A member of the Tiresome Usual Suspects has discovered this blog, and expressed his displeasure. Unfortunately, he wasn't clear about what his complaint is, specifically. I've emailed him, and offered to start a dialog.

Is it possible to love the members of a group, but not agree with what the group represents? Is it possible to speak out against a group, but not include its individual members? I suppose it is, but I don't seem to be doing a good job of it.

While I was writing this entry, the TUS member contacted me. We are on good terms, it seems. He expressed the nature of his complaint, and I have corrected it.

Yesterday, while I was reading through recent geocaching logs, I saw that a fellow geocacher had found that new cache in our neighborhood. This was the cache I had written about earlier - the one I wrote was more trouble than it was worth. It was also the cache that the fellow geocacher had tried to find on the same morning that I had, but he had been scared away by the "No Loitering" signs. The fellow geocacher noted in his log, yesterday, that he had been tipped off by a friend of the cache owner that the cache had been moved to a better location.

On my way home yesterday, I stopped by the cache that I wrote was more trouble than it was worth and took a look. It became our 192nd find.

Last night was the first Church Council meeting in which I did not have to take minutes. It was refreshing to be able to let my mind drift through the less interesting parts, like the details of the Treasurer's Report.

We hid our eighth geocache tonight, although "hid" isn't exactly the right word. It's a unique cache container that requires a combination to open. It's also a container that is common enough in our neighborhood (but for non-geocaching purposes) that it doesn't need to be hidden. It's named "1-976-DIAL-A-CACHE." (I usually dislike all-capital names, but this one fits the cache.) The cache was my idea - I thought it up after seeing that type of container on a walk home from work. Originally, Phillip had wanted to place it outside of his office, but we found that the coordinates would have been less than the recommended 528 feet from "Get Christie, Love." We finally placed it in our neighborhood, at a spot I picked out. Our latest geocache has turned out to be more of "my" cache than I had intended. Phillip did choose the name, however, as a better alternative to my original "1-800-DIAL-A-CACHE." It was approved 46 minutes after we submitted it.

It looks like the curse of Sunday evening yoga class has lifted. Bianca was back from maternity leave, and I had an enjoyable class. I learned, among other things, how to lift myself from a forward bend to a standing position using my hips instead of my back. As Bianca pointed out, it goes against everything we've learned all our lives, but it feels so much more correct - when you figure out the concept.

Before class, when several of us were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the doors to open, Jake showed up in a Sparrow. He backed into the spot behind our Prius, and suddenly the hybrid looked bloated in comparison. I asked him questions about his car, and a couple of people joined in. He seemed pleased that I recognized the car and knew its name, but also seemed a little tired of answering questions about it. (I figure that anyone who drives anything as usual as a Sparrow should accept questions as part of the deal. I still get a lot of questions about our Prius.) I learned that electric cars have the same problem as gasoline cars do when it comes to mileage estimates. Although advertised as getting 40 to 60 miles on a charge, Jake says he's getting more like 10 to 20 miles.

I had a brief Counsel meeting this morning after church, which meant that I went to church for the second Sunday in a row. I kept thinking that I'd rather be geocaching. That's a terrible thing to think in church. In the meeting, as we made big plans, I wondered how I'm going to keep this up for another year. The first line of the Billy Bragg song, "King James Version," kept popping into my head: "He was trapped in a haircut he no longer believed in." At last week's Writers Group, Barbara informed me that since I'm no longer Counsel Secretary, I'm going to be expected to be more active in other committees. Something's going to happen here, but I don't know what it is.

Phillip and I looked for two geocaches this afternoon. The first one was a difficult puzzle cache over in Redmond. It was placed by the same geocacher who placed the difficult puzzle cache in Seattle that has the Tiresome Usual Suspects so upset because they can't solve it. (That one's been found recently by a couple who are not a member of the TUS. That made us happy.) Phillip did all the work in solving the one in Redmond, which surprised me (in a good way) - not that he was able to solve it, but that he put so much effort into trying to solve a puzzle. (I don't mean that as a negative comment. I just mean that sweating over a puzzle is something I'm more likely to do than him.) Even though I tried my best to find the cache, once we got to the hide location, I'm glad that Phillip got the honor of finding the cache he'd worked so hard at. It was a tough to find hide, too.

The second cache we tried was a multi-cache in Fremont that Phillip was interested in trying. I found the first waypoint, but neither of us can figure out how to decipher the clue to the second waypoint.

Yesterday started out disappointingly, but eventually got better. We had planned to pick Lynn up at noon, and she would go shopping with us, and probably have lunch as well. (Phillip needed to replace the base of his fountain at work.) I was ready to go at 11:40, figuring we'd take the freeway up to Lynn's house. Then Phillip told me what he'd neglected to tell me before: Lynn was on a tour with her condominium group, and we'd be picking her up, not at her house, but just four blocks away from us. We left early anyway, and found a parking spot close by. We stood on the street corner and waited. As noon approached, I realized that I'd forgotten the cell phone at home. (Not that it would have done any good, since Lynn doesn't know our cell phone number.) As noon passed, we became anxious and worried - it was not like Lynn to be late. Then Phillip realized that we'd left our discount coupon book at home. (We could use it for lunch.) At 12:20, I walked up the block to B&O Espresso and used a pay phone to check our voicemail. There were no messages from Lynn, or anyone else. At 12:40, we left to go shopping and have lunch, without Lynn. I wanted to stop by home, first.

Phillip waited in the car while I went up to our apartment. I picked up the cell phone, and checked it and our main phone - still no voicemail messages. I went down to the car and realized that I'd forgotten to pick up the coupon book. Phillip called Lynn's house while I went back upstairs. I searched and searched, but couldn't find the coupon book. So, I went back to the car without it. Phillip had left Lynn a voicemail message. Then we left for shopping and lunch.

Phillip and I had lunch at Azteca, in the U District. Then we went to City Peoples Mercantile, in Windermere. (I miss the City Peoples that used to be on 15th, on Capitol Hill.) Phillip didn't find what he wanted, so we went to the City Peoples Mercantile on Madison. Phillip found what he wanted there.

On our way back, Phillip suggested that we check on "I Can See The Dawghouse From Here!" So we stopped by the park. The barricade was still there, but it was flat on the ground. There were a lot of people on the trail. Was the barricade really down, or had vandals knocked it down? We decided to check on our geocache. The trail seemed to be in perfect shape, and we couldn't see any reason for the trail to be closed. Our geocache was in place, and doing just fine. After talking it over, we decided to re-activate "I Can See The Dawghouse From Here!" - but we added a note describing the barricade situation and suggested that geocachers use their best judgment.

When we got home, we found a voicemail from Lynn. She did not sound upset at all. Her condominium group's seminar ran longer than planned. They didn't get to the condos where Phillip and I had been waiting until past one o'clock. She didn't expect us to be waiting still. (Lynn is another person who doesn't carry a cell phone around all the time.)

We hadn't planned on doing any geocaching yesterday, but decided to do one yesterday evening. It was an easy one in Wallingford that has been around for over a year. It was called "The Rule of Four." The cache owner had placed his own copy of the book The Rule of Four in it as an honor-based lending library. Using the hints in the cache description, we found the cache before our GPS receiver had found enough satellites to get a position reading. We placed our copy of the book - the one which had been left in our apartment building lobby - in the cache. When we logged our find, we let the cache owner know that his library now has two books in its collection.