Back To The Grind..... Or Not

It is amazing how many things can happen in a month, especially when you are not home. I called my boss to find out what the story was with work... Turns out they did a lot more than they had expected and the other people that were hired to work with me were just finishing up their work as well. So basically the major work is done and our services are no longer needed. However, he did inform me that he has a few more jobs around Missoula in the coming months and he might need some temporary help again. So in the mean time, I am going through my 'to do' list I have here at home and crossing off odd jobs around the house. I picked up our pile of mail from the post office yesterday and unpacked a few more things from the trip. I think that about finishes the unpacking and now I need to just finish organizing where everything belongs.

I thought I would share a wonderful experience Laura and I encountered while we were geocaching around Cheyenne last week. We had the Subaru, or as my family has dubbed it Canubaru (Canoe-Baru), and we were driving around trying to find a place to get to the cache about a mile away. We determined the cache to be out in the middle of a large field which is owned by the state of Wyoming, meaning it is accessible to the public. We found a road in, and at the bottom of the hill the road had some deep ruts which I didn't think the Canubaru would be able to make it through, so I decided to go to the side of the road and go around the ruts. Turns out the road was actually built up a little so as not to flood I guess - anyway, there was a nice drift and..well... oops. I think it is evident from the picture that we were not exactly close to town, and we were not going to be finding any help readily available. Even though the Canubaru is All-Wheel Drive it has trouble driving through 18 inch snow drifts which are thirty feet wide. Good thing we carry small extending shovels in the vehicles, and this is actually the first time we have had to dig the car out. Oh, and by the way, we didn't find that cache, it was still about half a mile in and if you examine the picture a little more you can see that there are some drifts as you go up the hill in front of the car.

Laura and I were looking forward to finding all the caches we could, so we would be closer to that glorious 1,000 mark, but as I said yesterday the weather just wasn't in our favor. Anyway, we had been passing a few cachers here in Montana who also are working on the 1,000 mark and we had moved up to the 6th spot overall in Montana. Well, in recent days, they have been traveling and now we are back to 8th and actually behind by well over a dozen finds. That's okay though, it's not a competitive game and you really get nothing more than self satisfaction for finding caches. Actually, on Saturday evening Laura and I are going to be attending a geocaching party and they everyone will be there, I am sure there will be talk of the close race we have going and some good humor over the issue as well.

That does it for me today. Until again

-=Nolan=-