Monday, August 15, 2005

"I lied about being the outdoor type..."

G is for GeoffreyWhile geocaching at the Mystic River beach (Sandy Beach) which I presume is in Medford, not sure which town it is, we ran across this little grove with cement animal figures in it. They stand apart from the rest of the action, far, far away from where little kids are. Which is sad, because they were so damn cool.

There is a whole Flickr.com set of pictures of these animals and their one friend -- Geoff. If you want to go check them out. My girl "C" at work told me that on the Nahant Beach at the rotary there used to be this same little herd of alphabet animals, and she used to play on them. She has pictures of herself and her sister and cousin on the animals.

I would love to have one of these animals in my yard. The "G" had "ays" written after it on the giraffe's body. God Bless Photoshop. Or else I couldn't have taken the nice picture of my son I have here.

Are there more of these around the MDC parks? I should ask at Universal Hub or something...

By the way -- Geoff is looking totally "Lord of the Flies" lately. It is time for a sheering. C'mere Little Sheep! Buzzzzzzzzz


So indeed, as per usual, over the weekend we did a little geocaching. Yes, on Saturday especially it was hot, Africa/Monkey/Tarzan hot. You pick the adjective to describe how hot it was and it was most likely that hot if not hotter.

But we do not fear the heat.

We picked this series of Geocaches that run along the Middlesex Canal. There are 12 caches total in this series, and each cache is a multi-stage (meaning more than one stop) cache. We did the first two on Saturday. They start on the Medford/Sommerville line, and progress north to Lowell. The great thing about the caches is the hider(s) really put a lot of time and effort into researching the history of the Canal system between the Merrimack river and Boston, and they provide historical tid-bits for each stop on the caching hunt trip. Pretty cool.

We did two more on Sunday, only to have our hunting time called to a halt by a string of nasty thunder storms, and an attack of bees.

Yes. I was stung again on Sunday. So was Geoff.

We were in Winchester, at the final stage of Part 3 of the Middlesex Canal caches, and Doug was about 20 yards to the north of us. I was so convinced he was totally way way off, and Geoff and I were going through a pile of brush and logs that were set off the trail. Caches are often hidden under brushpiles. Which is lame and stupid, but I figured it was a good enough place to look. I've often found caches without the GPSr in hand, simply by looking at the "landscaping" around on the ground. This pile of rocks doesn't belong here. These several branches don't match this tree that they are under.

I looked at the ground after a while and there was this hole. And the hole seemed to be moving, bubbling if you will. They looked like little bits of fool's gold -- shining in the sun, wings reflecting the rays. I realized it looked like angry fool's gold. Then it suddenly dawned on my bear-of-little-brain mind that fool's gold doesn't fucking move.

They were bees. Very angry bees.

So I got stung while I stood there, and jumped and started running as I felt about ten more bombing my head. I ran past Geoff and yelled at him "Run!"

He turned to me and asked "Why?"

Now, let me tell you kids something. When you see a 200 pound old lady running as fast as she can out of the woods, you do not ask "Why?" Because the very next thing you will utter is:

"AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Like Geoff did, as I yelled "Bees, Geoff! Bees! Run run run!"

He got stung once on the arm, I got stung once on my fat roll on my back. Stupid mofo bees. I killed four of them when Geoff caught up to me and they were walking up his pants and shirt. I smacked them with my bare hands, left a big pink handmark on his poor belly.

And the retarded thing is once we got back to the truck, regrouped, and put ice on our injuries (always prepared -- we had a cooler with iced down waters) we drove closer to the spot where Doug was looking and he walked right up to the cache, found it, logged in, and wasn't stung once.

I lied about being the outdoor type. I have decided I'm staying in for the rest of my life and playing Playstation. Well. I'm pissed at being stung again, I don't know that I'm officially divorced from Mother Nature, but I'm not pleased with her stinging bullshit.

Alright, well... you know I'll be out there next weekend. I'm a sucker.

The super sad thing is I'm more angry that we didn't get the third cache of the day yesterday because that would have been #400 for Team Screamapillar... we didn't get it because of this:

thunderstorms

Grrrrrrrr. Bees and thunderstorms. My Sunday funday was ruined.
Mother Nature is gonna get my foot.


We were going to go camping this weekend but Jess had a sleep over party Friday night, and Doug doesn't like camping for one night because it's so much effort getting everything ready, set up, and then boom -- strike it and go home.

We've been talking about a long weekend trip in Maine, not to Aaron and Michelle's house but somewhere new that we haven't gone yet. We would need to leave on a Friday night, and drive and set up when we get there so we don't want to go farther than three hours away. Aaron will most likely be joining us the Saturday night after he gets out of work, so he didn't want to ride too far on his bike into the possible darkness... so it had to be somewhere not too far for both of us.

Doug and Aaron were on the phone Friday night brainstorming places for us to go.

Mount Blue State Park in Weld, ME seems to be the best place for us. Aaron can get there in about 3 hours. It is about an hour longer than I wanted to drive but that's okay as long as we can be 100% organized on Thursday night. All I want to have to do on Friday when I get home from work is pack the cooler with ice and throw the dogs and it into the truck and then go. We'll see how successful I am.

The place looks really cool. There seem to be a lot of geocaches in the area, a ton of campsites in the state park -- I can only hope they're not booked solid. That would suck.

So yeah, it looks like in two weeks we'll be making a major trek up for some tent camping and some Aaron time. I'm looking forward to it. Gotta buy more propane for the little burner. Woot!

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