When I got up this morning, Phillip was in bed, but awake. He told me that he'd called in sick from work. (It sounds like that same thing I was feeling last week.) Then he told me that there was a surprise waiting for me. I don't know why - maybe I'd been dreaming something similar - but my first thought was that the computer had crashed. I asked him if it was a good or bad surprise. He replied that it was a good surprise, and told me to go about my usual routine, and I'll find it.

I looked around the kitchen, in the bathroom, and in the living room. The only thing unusual was one of Phillip's sweaters and a pair of his jeans were laid out in the living room, and they were wet. I didn't get it. Was the surprise simply that it had cooled down in our apartment, and that it was raining outside?

I went about my usual routine. I made some coffee, took a shower, turned the TV on to Northwest Cable News, and booted up the computer. I did my usual web surfing. I logged onto geocaching.com. Then I found the surprise.

A new geocache on Beacon Hill had been published last night. Phillip had gone out at 3:00 AM, in the pouring rain, and logged a First To Find - our second FTF in Seattle. (The crazy thing was that, later in the day, the Second To Find wrote in their log that they were only fifteen minutes behind Phillip.)

Phillip and I don't see eye to eye on our solo geocaching logs. I believe in recording the experience. If the cache was difficult to find, I write that. If we were able to find the cache without our GPS receiver, I write that. If we get chased away by bees, I write that. If I go out alone and look for the cache, I write that - or, I used to, anyway. A while ago, Phillip told me that he felt like I was excluding him by recording that I'd found a cache on my own. So, I compromise now. If we go out together, and I write the log, I'll record that we went out together. "We had to look around a long time before we found the cache." If I go out by myself, I'll try to be a little more vague. "The cache was hidden well, but after a lot of searching, it was found." Phillip found our 352nd cache on his own this morning, and he wrote the log, and it reads very much as if both of us were out there getting soaked.

The cache owner, and the geocachers who found the cache after us, congratulated us on our "tiresome" behavior (a reference to the TUS). Being First To Find does feel good, and I think Phillip is just a little more enthusiastic about FTFs than I am. When the opportunity presents itself, we have (and will) go after that FTF "prize" but it's not something that will make or break my geocaching experience.

I rushed home from the Church Council meeting (which, Phillip reminds me, was one of my last three) tonight, and I immediately checked my email. "The Buzz" had been published about a half hour before I got home - without the critical clues, of course. There were also emails from two geocachers. One had guessed coordinates - I don't know how he came up with them. (The coordinates were wrong, of course.) The other had ideas on how to solve the puzzle - they were wrong, too. I completed the cache page, and emailed both geocachers, apologized for the confusion, and asked them to look again.

Yesterday morning, Phillip and I hid our eleventh geocache. It's called "The Buzz." (I won't explain the title here, because I don't want to give away the location.) It's in a neighborhood that's not one of our usual haunts, but we went there a few weeks ago, specifically because there aren't many geocaches hidden in the area. "The Buzz" is a puzzle cache of my invention. I don't think it should be too difficult to solve, but I'm hoping that people will be amused by it. Creating the cache has turned out to be a minor logistics headache. Without giving too much away here, the clues for the puzzle can't be displayed until the cache is published, and until we display the clues, no one can find the coordinates for the cache. In other words, there will be a time between publication and the display of the clue when geocachers will see a new cache, but will have no way to solve the puzzle. We will have to be right on top of it when it gets published. We've been watching our email very, very closely for two days.