I am saying for the record that I think this whole "Today is 6/6/06!" business is pretty stupid. NWCN reported this morning that some women were trying to delay the births of their babies so they wouldn't have satanic birthdays. I thought 7/7/77 was a lot cooler, with folks filling Las Vegas casinos.

What bugs me about it is that whenever anyone says it out loud it always comes out "six six oh six" - and it just doesn't come out right.

I will say, though, I liked that one of our patients picked today to begin ending his long-term smoking habit. He had us all laughing yesterday with his imitation of Satan saying, "O-ver heeeere... I have Malboros for a dollar a pack..."

This didn't happen to me, but it took place right next to me: The front desk person informed the patient, who had just arrived, that his appointment today had been cancelled, because the doctor had called in sick.

The patient angrily repiled, "Well, how come no one called to tell me?"

The front desk person answered, "There's a note here on your schedule. It says that we called your house this morning and spoke to a man."

The patient then said, "But they couldn't have! My phone got disconnected a month ago."

(I thought to myself: "I think you just answered your own question, sir.")

I am frustrated with geocaching. I still have the drive. I want to get out there and find geocaches. I just don't know what's gone wrong. The caches we're hunting shouldn't be any more difficult than we've be hunting before. Is it just a string of bad luck? I seem to remember a time when we'd go out and, for example, look for five and find five. Occasionally, we'd log a DNF, but they seemed to be the exception. Sometimes we'd go out after an especially difficult one and know that we'd probably have to look for it again another day. These days, we seem to be lucky if we find two out of three. I'm getting frustrated with logging as many DNFs as Finds.

We looked for three geocaches on Queen Anne Hill yesterday. The first one was a multi-cache puzzle. We found both waypoints. The second cache was a multi-cache. We found the first waypoint, but not the final. (I discovered later that I'd done the math wrong, and we were looking in the wrong area.) We found the third cache, but it took us so long that we were almost ready to call it our second DNF. The idea of logging a second DNF, with only one find, felt devastating to me. That's when I realized just how frustrated I'd become with geocaching.

Phillip suggested that we go out today and take care of some of our DNFs. We started with the final waypoint of the multi-cache we didn't find yesterday. This time, we were absolutely sure that we had the location correct (based on the cache name and the hint provided), and we looked for a very long time, but we just could not find it. We looked for a very easy cache nearby (one that we hadn't tried before), and found it quickly. It was our only Find for the day. We went to the U District, and looked for three of the four I'd tried to find only my 0 for 4 day. We gave up after the third DNF.

We stopped into Grocery Outlet on our way home. The checker was one of the most amazing baggers I've ever seen. It was a real pleasure to watch him at work. He filled our grocery bags as if he was working on a puzzle - making sure that everything fit together so that there was no wasted space in the bag, and yet he was fast.

After Grocery Outlet, we replaced the cache container for "White Noise." I wonder how long this one's going to last before disappearing.

When we got home today, we logged our one Find and our four DNFs.

Before we went out geocaching today, I walked up to the library and picked up a book I had on hold. The book is Dispatch, by Bentley Little. It's a horror novel, which isn't my favorite genre of book, but it was recommended by Steven King (who isn't one of my favorite authors) in a recent edition of Entertainment Weekly. So if it isn't my favorite genre, and it was recommended by an author I'm not especially fond of, why did I put it on hold? Because it sounded interesting, and I decided to take a chance on it. The problem is, I'm still reading The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I don't know why it's taking me so long to read that book. I am enjoying it a lot, and it's not an especially difficult or long book, but I just can't get through more than a few pages at a sitting.

When I picked up Dispatch, I discovered that "Spirit of the Century" by The Blind Boys of Alabama had also come in.