Aug
19
I am getting old and cranky, which I suppose is mildly better than old and gaseous like our aging Lab, but now that I think about it I sit around ripping enormous farts delicate emissions every single goddamned time I eat cherries (WTF, cherries? What are they made out of, PURE METHANE?) these days, so great, I’m old and gassy AND cranky. You kids get off my lawn afore I blast you out with mah rump-trumpet.
ANYWAY. I’ve noticed that I am increasingly irritated by certain terms, which are perfectly benign when taken out of Annoying Person context, but once they’re wielded like a self-righteous lightsaber formed entirely of catshit, they’re damn near intolerable. For instance: vegan, organic, attachment.
Hey, I’m all for saving the earth. I like the earth, I totally live here and everything. I think people are awesome for deciding not to eat animals and choosing to use natural cleaning products and reducing their carbon footprints and happily wearing children strapped to their bodies 24/7, I really do.
BUT. If you decide it’s your holy right to give me a raft of crap for using paper towels or putting my kids in their own rooms to sleep or not wetting my pants over ingredient lists or eating a turkey burger, I swear it makes me want to cram a child-labor-produced formaldehyde off-gassing BPA-loaded cow-torturing environmentally-unfriendly bottle-feeding SUV right in your pious piehole.
(And by you I don’t mean you, duh. YOU are super. Are you doing something different with your ass? Because it’s looking so . . . so buoyant. Can I grab it, just a little? Just cup a cheek? One cheek?)
I think some of us are just getting a little hysterical. Seriously, when did admitting that you use fabric softener become a confession on par with “Oh, when I’m not performing unwanted sex acts on minors, I’m usually, you know, clubbing Harbor seal pups or defecating on religious artifacts”? It’s LAUNDRY. SHUT UP. If you’re running your yap in order to criticize, shut it UP about your bicycle, your Starbucks ban, your devotion to raw foods, your aversion to all chemicals, your intolerance for formula feeding, and your sustainably-harvested hand-woven baby sling.
Whew. See? Old, cranky. Someone pass the caffeinated phosporic acid. Also: Gas-X.
Aug
17
Ever since Dylan was born I think we’ve fallen into a rut of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work it takes to leave the house and so our family outings are usually short and close to home, but this weekend we were pretty active: visiting Alki Beach to wander along the water, heading out on several blackberry-picking expeditions, and embarking on a geocache route that took us — heaving along one stroller and one push-bike — through a long and winding forest path.
We haven’t gone geocaching in a long time, and I had almost forgotten how much fun it is. If you’ve never heard of this activity, you can read up on it here; in a nutshell the idea is to locate containers other geocachers have hidden outdoors, using a GPS. You log into the Geocaching website to find a cache, plug the coordinates into your GPS, and head on out. Caches can be big or small, and are often hidden close to trails or parks. A cache can contain a bunch of random little items — toys, pencils, sometimes even a buck or two — you can take something, and leave a treasure of your own behind. Or just sign the logbook that’s usually inside the cache.
I’ve found that part of the fun of this is that we almost always discover awesome places that we may never have known about otherwise, whether it’s a park, a trail system, or even just a hard-to-find area of a place we’ve been to hundreds of times before. Plus, there’s the fun of actually looking for the caches, which can vary in difficulty. We’ve done some that have been super easy, and a few that were so hard I had to email the cache owner (via the Geocaching website) and plaintively beg for more clues.
A cache can be a single hidden item or a series of items, each providing clues for finding the next step. That’s the sort of cache we found today: the first two caches were very small (plastic film containers) that only contained the waypoints for the next clue, and the final item was a large cache with the logbook and treasures.
Here’s JB plugging in the next coordinates after finding the first cache.
I’m pleased to report I was the one who found the second cache, so much so that I may have performed a peppy little touchdown dance when I spotted it. Note that it was hidden inside that culvert thing, which I foolishly stuck my hand in with NO REGARD WHATSOEVER to the presence of spiders, or extremely tiny zombies.
Here’s the second cache. If you’re wondering why in hell I was wearing a churchy-looking dress in the woods, that’s a good question. It about killed me, though: cotton from head to toe is fairly miserable when you’re producing your own personal sweat tsunami.
Final cache, filled with random stuff. And now that I’ve shown it to you, I’m sorry, but I’ll have to kill you. What? Those are the rules of geocaching.
Lastly, Dylan. Who gurgled contently the whole time, even when I almost accidentally let the stroller go flying off the trail to his doom.
The whole trail led us in a big loop, and I guess if I had known it was going to be so long and steep and muggy I wouldn’t have wanted to go (or at LEAST I would have maybe brought some water, and a bottle for Dylan), but it actually ended up being a fantastic time. Riley was in high spirits, galloping along and sometimes riding his bike, and Dylan remained happy throughout, despite the dog-breath heat.
I’m feeling totally re-motivated about geocaching, especially now that Dylan’s in that prime not-yet-mobile, not-needing-intervention-every-two-minutes age. It’s the perfect sort of thing for getting out of the house, having a great outing with the kids that isn’t totally lame for the adults, and it’s free. Next time, though, I’ll wear some damn shorts.
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