Here is a list of eight things I've recently looked up in Wikipedia:
List of X-Men Characters
(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais
The Smiths
Ivory Coast
St. Louis Arch
Augusto César Sandino
Surrealism
Skunk

Tonight was my next-to-last Church Counsel meeting. Before the meeting, the Counsel President asked me if I'd be interested in continuing with a second term. My answer was gentle, succinct, and non-explanatory: "No." She didn't explore the subject further, so I suspect that she knew the answer already.

Phillip and I have been discussing the idea of finding a new church recently. We've brought the idea up to each other occasionally in the past, but what started the recent discussion was finding a geocache next to a church in Greenwood. It was a church that we'd heard was progressive. We continued the discussion this morning as I rode with Phillip to the grocery store. I realized this morning that he and I may have some compromises between us as we shop for a church. Phillip's set on it being a Lutheran church, and that's just fine with me, although denomination is not a major concern with me. Phillip voiced the concern that the church in Greenwood is a lot bigger than our present one, but to me, that's a plus. I pointed out to him that with a large church, there will be less pressure to join committees.

I love what our church stands for, and what it practices: its inclusive language, the openness to all, and its work for the community. I love the fact that it's in our neighborhood. Phillip and I should fit in perfectly, but we don't feel like we do. I have come up with specific reasons for why that is, but I'd rather not go into it here.

I had a dream this morning that I wasn't in. I don't remember that ever happening to me before. I've had dreams in which I was a passive observer of the action, but this one was like I was being shown a film. In this dream, a teenage girl was in a hospital because she had never spoken in her life. Everybody assumed that she was unable to talk. At the moment that I was watching the dream, the girl amazed everyone by speaking a few, hesitant words. It was then discovered that she had a supernatural ability to produce an almost infinite range of sounds and frequencies (this was illustrated by white smoky lines and musical notes swirling out of her open mouth) and that it had taken her whole life, up to that point, to learn how to control the sounds into something approximating human speech.

I woke up from the dream and Phillip was not in our bedroom. I fell back asleep. The alarm woke me up, and Phillip was still not in the room. I got up and found him on the computer. "You need to update our profile," he said to me. He was referring to our geocaching.com account profile. He had gotten up in the middle of the night, couldn't get back to sleep, had gone out and logged a First To Find on the new Douglass-Truth library cache.

I had been online last night, and Phillip had gone to bed, when that new cache had been published and, although it's close to home, I just didn't feel like rushing out to find it. The thing is, Phillip is more excited by FTFs than I am. On the other hand, I'm more into the number of finds than he is.

This three day weekend feels like it's lasted about a week. It's weird.

On Friday afternoon, we confirmed that Seattle is one of the coolest cities in the country. Phillip and I, and a group of Phillip's coworkers, went on a tour of the Theo Chocolate factory in Fremont. Theo Chocolate is the only chocolate company in the USA that produces completely organic, Free Trade certified, chocolate. It's one of only about eleven chocolate companies in the USA that makes its chocolate completely from the roasting of raw cacao to the packaging. The smell of the little factory was heavenly. The chocolates are delicious. Their "origin" bars were the most fascinating to me - the chocolate is named for its country of origin and the percentage of cacao in it. It brought to my mind Seattle's gourmet coffee revolution. Hershey Bars may never taste the same to me anymore.

Before meeting everyone for the tour, Phillip and I did some geocaching. We went after three previous DNFs, and found two of them.

Then we checked on "Get Christie, Love" and discovered that it's either missing again, or it was put back in the wrong spot after it was found last Wednesday. Phillip is now thinking about archiving the cache. I can see his point - it's had a history of being returned to the wrong spot - but I suggested to Phillip that he find another hiding spot in the same park, and place a new cache there right after archiving the present one, if that's what he chooses to do.

After the tour, Phillip and Lynn and I went to an improvisational play in the University District. It was a small theatre group, and they put on a terrific show. The play was a murder mystery. Phillip's suggestion for an unusual room in a mansion - "the walk-in dishwasher" - was used in the play.

Because of the play, I missed yoga class on Friday evening, and made up for it on Saturday morning. It was an odd sensation for me, doing yoga in the morning. I'm so used to the concept of yoga as a wind-down for the week, instead of the start of the day. It was a good session, but I kept getting distracted by thoughts of what I was going to do for the rest of the day. Then, for the rest of the day on Saturday, I didn't do much of anything. I didn't even leave the apartment after returning from yoga class, except to get the mail - and when I opened our mailbox, I remembered that it was Veterans' Day.

I completely forgot that today was Writers' Group. Or, more accurately, I remembered it being scheduled for next Sunday. I've been working on a piece about our experience on the Long Beach Peninsula. It wasn't until we returned home from geocaching and grocery shopping today that I discovered Barbara's email, sent yesterday, reminding everyone about the group. I feel really terrible about it.

We looked for, and found two geocaches today - finds 406 and 407 for us. The first one was an extremely difficult puzzle cache (the puzzle was rated four out of five stars) that Phillip and I have been working on for a week, and finally turned to both the cache owner and one of the three finders for help. I finally solved it this morning, and had the solution confirmed. It was supposed to be an easy find, but we came too close to logging a DNF. Phillip had given up searching, but I kept going. It was too frustrating to me to have spent all that work solving the puzzle, only to be stumped by a simple hide right off a trail. Finally, though, I admitted defeat and gave up. As we walked back toward our car, however, a good hiding spot caught my eye and I decided to look. There was the cache, about fifty feet away from where our GPS receiver told us it would be. (I blame the GPSr, not the cache owner. Our GPSr gives us bad readings in the woods. It was giving us an accuracy of 28 feet, so we had been searching an area of about 40 feet.)

We went to Grocery Outlet this afternoon, and bought four bags of groceries and a six-pack of beer. One of the things I enjoy about shopping there is the abundance of bilingual - Spanish/English - packaging to be found there. It's like a practical Spanish lesson for me. We did buy one especially odd thing today. It's a jar of Best Foods "Mayonesa con jugo de limón." There's a translation in smaller text on the label: "Mayonnaise with lime juice." There's also a picture of a lime on the label. What struck me as odd was that I was pretty sure that "limón" is Spanish for "lemon" - not "lime." I checked with my dictionary when we got home, and I was right. "Lime" in Spanish is "lima." Oh well, Best Foods: "Dales los mejor"™ - "Bring out the best"®.

That doesn't seem like an overly busy weekend, so it's weird that it feels like it's been so much longer that it was.