(a)musings

We have our Jessie.

We went to meet auntie Lee Lee down in New London on Saturday afternoon. On the way we cranked a fair deal of The Refreshments, did some geocaching, saw a wedding party getting their portraits done at Connecticut College, saw a snake, saw coasties doing their marching thing all over the field at the Coast Guard Academy, and we went to Ft. Griswold and the monument in Groton, took a mess of pictures.

We had dinner at the Bank Street Roadhouse, and the hot wings were cooked to perfection. I'll be back there, I'm sure. The waitress tried to dissuade me from having the "hot" setting for the sauce, but with some beer and good dipping bleu cheese, it was just right. Very happy. It was a nice dinner, beautiful afternoon with the harbor and the sky and the sun... we met a K9 cop and his partner, General.

All told, even without the 10 geocaches we planned it was a red letter day.

Sunday dawned and we ended up heading out for some caches in Andover. Doug planned three in the Billerica area, but the one we did pissed me off and made me tired, so I threw in the towel when we got back to the truck. Top that off with Kinger giving up on the trail and refusing to walk any further, and I knew we'd had it as a team. He needed to go home... I just needed to get out of stupid confusing to drive around Billerica and Freaking Just as Confusing Tewksbury. Doug was not pleased with me for quitting, but I'd just had enough.

The thing that pissed me off about the cache we did was that we were required to walk about a quarter of a mile along the train tracks. There is a monument buried in the woods, where some six people who died as a result of smallpox are buried. It is a really cool historical spot, but damn -- the tracks and the gravel and the dust and the sheer knowledge that we were doing something illegal and dangerous by walking along the tracks really got me mad. There was only one good approach unless you wanted to wade through a bog or cross even MORE train tracks or walk through someone's yard. The cache itself was pimpy and crappy, and I was just pissed off by the time we'd finished. What a freaking waste of time, when we could be hiking in some nice woods somewhere.

I honestly don't know why anyone would actually make a cache out like this, or why my husband would choose it. He gets pissed that the kids don't keep up with him -- but he won't go out caching on his own when it comes to doing ones that really aren't good for the family as a whole.

Today, so far, we're hanging around here. Doug has managed to not speak much to me over the past 12 hours, so I'm not sure what our plans are. We didn't go see any fireworks this weekend, mostly because they're always too damn crowded and just not worth the hassle in the end. My neighbors shot off fireworks in the backyard for about an hour last night, and at about 10:30 I was just shy of going out there and yelling at them, but that's when they either ran out or decided to quit.

I'm slightly bummed out this weekend, because for the past three years we've done July 4th up at Aaron and Michelle's, and it wasn't working out for any of us this year for our clan to go up there. And in my heart of hearts I'm sad that we're missing that kind of funness. I was looking at pigroast pictures from last year, and fun pictures from the year before when we threw the second greatest party ever... and I really wish we were there.

Such is life.

Well. I've posted a ton of pictures up in the flickr gallery. I have to catch up on my organization into sets... if we don't head out anywhere today, I think I'll end up doing that and weeding the garden.