Moved "STOP AND GO,GO,GO 3" to a better, more 'consistant with the cache owner's intent' location today, and also found the "KITTY LITTER" cache. Was dismayed to learn of the existence of the Travel Bug Graveyard. We passed the 50 caches found mark this weekend. Woohoo!

Since the nearest Wal-Mart DVD rental warehouse is in North Las Vegas, it takes less time for movies to reach us than with Netflix.

Here's an awesome recipe that I have invented (but not yet perfected - still experimenting):

1 scoop - Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate with Marshmallows
1 tbsp. - Aspen Valley French Vanilla Sipping Hot Cocoa Mix
1 squirt - Blackburn's Butter Maple Pancake & Waffle Syrup
8 oz. - warm tap water

Stir until smooth. Microwave on High (in a 2000-watt oven) for 40 seconds to get steaming, yet comfortable. For an extra bold twist, grab a bigger mug and add 2 additional ounces of hot water, a splash of 2% (homogenized cow's) milk, and 1 tsp. of 6-year-old Family Canning Hot Cocoa (best if used within 5 years). Mmmm.

Skimmed the current copy of "Toiyabe Trails" that I picked up recently at the Patagonia factory outlet store. B-b-b-b-oring. Of course, it was the election issue, and since I don't care about the elections, it was pretty much a waste of time. Hopefully future issues will be more stimulating.

Well, baby Jared is getting chubbier - he's got a double chin now.   =)

We're currently trying out the Wal-Mart DVD rental service - seems faster than Netflix, and they seem a little more 'honest' about their pricing, too. Watched "Star Trek Nemesis" and "Pete's Dragon" so far. Wal-Mart gives you a free month, whereas Netflix only does two weeks. I'm thinkin' Wallyworld is the better service...   =)

Becca got the flu, but got over it quickly. Had a fever of 103.7°F, and about 24 hours of puking (no, not constantly - duh), and she was feeling better the next day, fever came down, and kept her food down. Out geocaching and eating M&M's today again.

Had a wonderful Thanksgiving at Gene and Ronda's dwelling. Didn't know a lot of the people around the table, but the food was great, despite our rough entrance (we lost a pie due to the increased gravity of Gene's porch). Watched about half of "Finding Nemo", but I can't say I'm all that impressed with it.   =(

Found three more caches today:

"Putt's Mormon Station Park Cache." (in Genoa)
"Putt's Cemetary Cache" (Genoa)
"A Capitol Idea" (Carson City)

and checked on the roaming cache "STOP AND GO,GO,GO, 3" (we were the last to hide it, and no one's been able to find it again in a month, so I figured it was too hard, so I'm going to move it to an easier location).

Another cache found: 'Alphabet Rock'. I also placed my first Travel Bug ["Ancestral Quest (pt. 1)"]. Took a Mac G4 into the shop for some retrofitting - getting OS 10.3 (Panther) and OS 9.2.2 installed (for the Classic Environment), after having struggled with OS 9.1 and OS 10.0.3 for long enough - Software Update didn't work quite right, programs wouldn't install, hard drive crashed (key failure), incompatibilities, networking problems, the only browser it liked was MSIE 5.1 beta (!) - Neither Netscape, Mozilla, nor Safari would even install, etc. Not a positive Mac experience, let me tell you.

Sure a lot of Mimail.J's going around, and when is Klez ever going to die? Read a hilarious book that Lynn gave me, entitled "Walter the Farting Dog" (it's a children's book by William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray, illustrated by Audrey Colman) - quite funny.   =)

Been doing some video editing/finishing lately at work using Windows Movie Maker 2. Pretty cool program, actually, and it only takes a couple of hours to become fairly proficient at it.

Thought it was a little funny that the word "McJob" is now an actual word, despite McDonald's wishes to get it taken out of the dictionary.

Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks that CPanel 6 (used by many web hosting companies) really sucks. The password changer doesn't work (although maybe that's just the host's setup problem), and it's really not that user friendly, despite it's seemingly friendly appearance.

And what's with Symantec's MD5 checksums not matching those on their beta files? They are accurate on their final releases, but not on their beta ones. If you're not going to support checksums on beta releases, fine - but don't pretend to (just remove them). Weird.

Baby Jared, asleep in his carseat:



Caches found this weekend:

'Skate Parks'
'GBES Poker Run' event cache, and Silver Springs card cache
'Sign Here - The World's Smallest Cache?'
'Goat Girl's Geocache'
'Santa's Cache'
'thoughts of home'
'Churchill County Museum'
'September 11th Remembered'
'Center of Town'
'Sir Vi ver'
'I-80: Painted Rock'

Traveled on Friday to Fallon and Dayton for work to nab a bunch of photos of apartments complexes that we own. Parking lot repaved - pain. Recently bought 'Kermit's Swamp Years'. Recently rewatched LOTR 1 and 2, courtesy of Gene and Ronda.

Birthday "multi cache" for presents - 'Daddy Day Care', Christmas cactus from work, 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' audio tapes.

Mapquest is now broken, when you print, it prints the wrong level of map -

Brad's lip/magnet incident - hilarious

retiring some of my original Gs that I've had since 1989 - pathetic, I know -

finished "Daisy Miller" by Henry James

LaPriel's funeral and wake in Seattle (Bellevue/Issaquah) - flew in Sunday morning, flew out Sunday night

Met some more family - Celia, Pat, Stormy, JoAnn, Chad, 'Cornface', Jason, Dove, Ron, Steve -

Alaska Airlines - no peanuts on first trip, only 11 people on return flight - empty private jet

Visited Melissa's nice lakefront house in Carnation

Becky's favorite song "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!" by Shania Twain.

Ate some 'Bottle Caps' at work on Friday while everyone else was getting sick from their flu shot immunizations.

Went out to some caches today: "Fernley Fly-In Fast Flat Stash and Free Car Wash", "Another Fernley Flat Stash", and both the Reno and the Fernley parts of the "GBES Poker run" cache.

For those working with HUD's income eligibility guidelines, you've probably noticed by now that MFI and AMI are not the same - despite HUD's and HUDUSER's explanations to the contrary. If you're using the 60% and 80% figures, for example, please note that these really aren't mathematical percentages at all - they're numbers that originally started out as percentages but have since been adjusted for several external factors and then rounded up or down to the nearest $25. Thus, you can't strictly use them as mathematical percentages. All this, of course, is different than the DHHS percentages of poverty guidelines, which are, in fact, real percentages, and can thus be manipulated in mathematical formulas in spreadsheets, etc.

Baby Jared went in for his 2 week appointment on the 10th and he has grown a bit! He has gained 25 ounces since leaving the hospital and has grown almost 2 inches. He's going to be a big boy. The doctor was very impressed. He said they like it if the baby gains at least 1 ounce a day but baby Jared is averaging about 2 or more a day, so he's doing very well. He's a hungry little dude. He's now, at 2-1/2 weeks old, about the size Becky was at 7 weeks. =)

We finally succeeded in finding the physical 'Reno View' cache, with some extra family members along for the ride (Rick, Bonny, Darlene). Reno's very smoggy when you get out and above it all. Yuckka.

Heard that LaPriel passed away on Tuesday. Very sad - heart attack in her sleep. Not sure when the funeral is going to be.

"Staci's Mom (Has Got It Going On)" by Fountains of Wayne is a hilarious song. A little overplayed, but kinda catchy. Hillary Duff's song "So Yesterday" is also kinda catchy.

Found some info and photos of Terry and Antoinette on the web. Good to hear that they're doing well.

Rotating billboards with slats really suck - always stuck, wind-blown, or just plain broken. Cool in theory, lame in reality. Played a hilarious few rounds of "Mad Shark" at Shockwave.com.

Found some more caches this weekend (surprise, surprise) - 'Rusty's Revenge (Don't take any wooden Nickels.)', 'MEET ME AT THE GLEN FOR A FREE ICE CREAM CONE', and 'GBES Geocachers Reno Travel Bug Port', as well as the 'Little Red Motorcycle' travel bug. This was our second attempt at Rusty's Revenge. Both times, we made the trek with Brad and Emilie, and we found this very creative cache quickly on the second trip. I feel bad, though, because Mike started out going with us on this second attempt, but because we were so late getting started, he ran out of time before having to leave for a prior engagement. It's all my fault - sorry Mike.   =(

We ended up in Carson City on Saturday (for the ice cream cache), and decided to grab a quick little something to eat whilst there. Ummm, the ice cream was great, but the rest of the food could use a little improvement. You have been warned.

Well, the Primary program is finally over. I thought I was done with Primary when we moved, but, alas, I was called into our new ward's Primary to play the piano as a substitute. Thus, I had the honor of playing for yesterday's annual Primary program in Sacrament meeting. There was some pressure because I've come to find out that almost everyone in the ward plays the piano (thus they're potentially more attentive to how the accompanyment's played). But it went very well, actually. One funny thing I noticed is that key #32 on the piano (yes, they're numbered [under the cover]) at the Robb Drive chapel seemingly hits a string of its neighbor's, so it sounds a bit muddy.

I appreciated Brad's excellent reference to Occam's Razor - from the 1997 film "Contact" (with Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, and James Woods) in one of his recent blog entries. And who says that movies aren't educational?

Learned a few XHTML/CSS tricks the hard way today at work. If you have overlapping DIVs that you hide and unhide, don't use relative positioning, use absolute instead. Of course, using absolute positioning causes the dreaded 'text selection' bug in IE6, but only in standards (CSS1Compat) mode. Solution? Force IE6 into quirks (BackCompat) mode using the XML prologue. All the tutorials I've read have mentioned *not* using the XML prologue because of the IE bug. In this case, however, it's actually *beneficial* to the site in question in helping solve some rather unpleasant problems. Nice.

Surpassed the 5,200 WU mark on Seti@home. Mike had an interesting question on theNug.net about why leaves actually change colors in autumn. After doing a few minutes of research, I've come to the realization that it's a very interesting subject indeed. The shorter periods of sunlight during autumn commence halting the production of chlorophyll (green pigment) in the leaf, and cooler temperatures at night inhibit the movement of pigment-laden sugars to travel out of the leaf after being created during the day, causing other pigments to become dominant. Here are three supporting and informative documents on the subject: one, two, three.

We all hear about computer virii so often that sometimes it's refreshing to hear about a good, old-fashioned, physical virus once in a while. This one, a highly contagious gastrointestinal bug called a norovirus, made an entire cruise ship start puking, and the ship's guests were denied access to Spain because of it. Cool.

Milky Way Caramels are the bomb, as are Mentos Mixed Fruit chewy mints (The Freshmaker, The Chewy Mint) in the box. Joshua 24 and Judges 2 are hilarious - Joshua dies twice. Joshua 24:15, famous verse: "...choose you this day whom ye will serve...but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD". Judges 4:21 - nail through the head. Ouch!

Marie Calendar's boxed lunch sandwiches are really bland and dry. No matter how much mayonnaise and mustard you apply, it's still a dry sandwich. I had expected more from Marie Calendar's.

I don't know how it happened, but we somehow missed the World Beard and Moustache Championships in Carson City this past Saturday. It's an international event that has never been hosted in the U.S. ever before, and it was right here in our backyard. It is held bi-annually in various countries around the globe, but it won't be returning to the U.S. any time in the near future.   =(

Halloween was anticlimactic this year. Becca was a cute little cow (moo moo), but as Brad so aptly noted, the weather got oddly cold outside - all of a sudden - just for Halloween, making for some cold, pink, little noses. It was 36° outside the night of the 30th at 10 p.m. while we were out for a little shopping at the newly remodeled Wal*Mart Supercenter on Kietzke, and 30° outside Sunday morning on the way to church, with a crisp sheet of snow covering the hills. The forecast for the next few days shows the temps dipping down to 20° at night. Brrrr. But although it was a snowy wet Halloween, Becca still managed a good haul for such a small, little person. Jared, however, was obviously too little to enjoy the festivities, so he and his mama stayed indoors, but with a sinister combination of sugar, hard plastic car seats, and the lateness of the hour, we ended up with one screaming child and one whining/crying child in the car on the way home. That's always nice.   =(

I, and many of my co-workers, found it funny that HIPAA is causing such widespread confusion. Anyone that's tried to understand this law knows that it's about 600 pages of pure crap. And I thought CSS was hard to implement... sheesh.

In food news, I tried the new Cheez-Its 'Cheesy Sour Cream and Onion' snack crackers, and they are wonderful, although they too contain the dreaded MSG. I also have determined that Hormel's Mary Kitchen brand Roast Beef Hash is not as good as their corned beef hash. Jared's poor mama is the queen of Lansinoh lanolin and nursing pads during this first two weeks of feeding. It is fortunately starting to get better now, though, and will hopefully be pain-free within the next few days. By the way (note to self, in case I ever forget) - Wal*Mart's Great Value brand 'Black Cherry with Chocolate Bits' ice cream is the best ever made. I highly recommend it if you don't have a problem with purple ice cream.

Found parts of the 'Secret Lunch Cache' and the 'Spanish Springs View' multicaches Saturday afternoon (the clues only), along with actually physically finding the 'Steamboat Cache' along with Becky - she grabbed a small pinwheel from the cache that was just the most exciting thing in the whole world to her. And speaking of cute, baby Jared has the cutest sad pouty lip. Becca loves using the 'puter' now to play online games. She loves the videos, coloring pages, learning activities, and Flash games found at sesamestreet.com, pbskids.org, bearinthebigbluehouse.com, and thewiggles.com.au. And although she has nearly mastered the mouse (which would be an accomplishment anyway for any 2-year-old), she is apparently just as comfortable using the mouse with either hand! She'll play computerized Yahtzee on mom's computer with her right hand, and matching games on dad's computer with her left hand. She'll be hacking by the time she's 6.   =)

Misti found 'grumpys cache' on Sunday afternoon (I had previously found it), and we all physically found the 'Secret Lunch Cache' today, including The Doctor of Rockology's 'The Adventures of Monty and Willy: Kokopelli' travel bug. Neither the evil cell phone tower nor the bees were a problem for us on this cache. After finding the secret lunch cache, we naturally got hungry, so we ended up at IHOP, which turns out to be Jared's very first restaurant visit. I managed to catch the movie "Broken Arrow" (Christian Slater, John Travolta) on TV (the milder, edited-for-TV version). Pretty cool.

We tried a Kwencher Orange creme enhanced water drink for the first time today. Mmmmm. Saw Katty Blatty (Kathy Blattman) and her kids at the Kietzke Super Walmart today. Speaking of the new store, here are a few observances:

1. The 'check the price by scanning your item here' pillars, umm, don't have any scanners.


2. No Wal-Marts in existance seem to be capable of keeping the 77¢ popcorn in stock, so when you see some, you have to grab as many as they have left in preparation for the famine.


3. The 'pancake mix' aisle doesn't actually, umm, have any pancake mix. It can, however, be found in the syrup aisle. Hello.

The plumbing industry should be ashamed of themselves. Why haven't they developed some sort of a priority system yet for regulating cold water usage? In other words, why is it that when I'm taking a hot shower and the toilet is flushed, that the toilet gets priority for cold water flow, and I'm left with no cold water - which just happens to disturb the delicate balance between hot and cold in my shower mix, thus scalding me? Apparently, there is virtually no plumbing research taking place at any level, whether at the university level or in the trade. Shame on so-called 'modern' plumbers.