Stayed home from work today to take care of Misti (who is sick) and the kiddos. Found the "Kid Cache" tonight, and checked out Bonny's new trampoline and Grammy's chicken soup. Read Matthew Reilly's "The Fate of Flight 700" eBook (yes, all 174 words of it). There's a girl in Primary that looks kind of like Uma Thurman. Downloaded the Adobe Reader 6.0.2 update.

Found the "52 Card Pick-Up" cache during lunch. Listened to Bon Jovi's "One Wild Night Live 1985-2001" and B*Witched's "Awake and Breathe" CDs that I checked out from the library. Neither one was all that great. Interesting to try and figure out what the plot is going to be in the next Harry Potter book ("Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince"). Grilled some hamburgers and hotdogs for dinner tonight on our little Weber Smokey Joe Silver grill. Mmm, tasty. Watched "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" (Woody Allen, Dan Aykroyd, Helen Hunt, Charlize Theron) tonight on VHS. Pretty funny.

Found the "Behind the View" cache at lunchtime. Glad to hear that Iraq is now sovereign again - two days early. Good stuff. I think it's hilarious that in the new version of Firefox 0.9 they forgot to update the browser string:


Oops! Watched "Solomon" (Vivica Fox, Ben Cross) on DVD over the past few nights (yes, it's a loooooooong film). Also watched "The Little Prince" (Gene Wilder) on DVD, too. This film was very strange indeed. I seem to remember liking a cartoon version of it as a child, and I'm pretty sure I liked the book ("Le Petit Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), but the film pretty much blows. In fact, the only thing I seem to remember from when I was a child was the elephant having been swallowed by the snake, and the little boy walking around his asteroid. Not much else even rang a bell.

Blogger's posting interface isn't optimized yet - a lot of room for improvement still. Got a haircut at Cost Cutters today. Watched "Stargate" (Ultimate Edition, Extended Cut) last night on widescreen DVD - that Jared bought me for Father's Day. Found the "Spartacus" cache yesterday, too (our third FTF ["first to find"]). This afternoon we took a nice, leasurely walk along the Truckee River and found the "FLUME RIDER" cache and the "Romeo" geocoin. Misti was able to finally get rid of a Chris Isaak CD ("Speak of the Devil", in the cache) that she's been wanting to give away for some time now. It was a beautiful walk - the weather was great, the flume shower was cool, and Becca had fun throwing sticks and rocks in the water. Jared, however, lost his pacifier somewhere near the cache site, but he's got a million more, so we're not worried about it. Stopped by the Port of Subs on Keystone and got some free ice cream from Baskin-Robbins. Score. Watched "The Majestic" tonight on DVD that I checked out from the library.

Finished "Cathedral" by Nelson Demille on abridged audiobook yesterday. Anyone want some Swedish moose cheese? I was pleased to see Hotmail run to catch up with Yahoo and Gmail, by eventually offering 250 MB of email storage for free accounts (not yet, though, but sometime in the next couple of weeks). It's too bad that they've adopted the same 10 MB attachment size limitation that Gmail and Yahoo have, though. (10 MB is really only 6.95 MB because of encoding overhead, which is a very low limit.) You're hatin' it if you're an AOL subscriber. The new Canadian quarter is very, well... interesting. Glad to hear that the Silver Springs Amber Alert victims are now safe. Hit the 6,200 mark in Seti@home.

Interesting to hear about SpaceShipOne's maiden trip (the first civilian craft piloted into space). The verdict is final in the Supreme Court case about Larry Hiibel: you do have to give police your name if asked. Watched "The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley: The Case of the Volcano Mystery" on VHS tonight. Mary-Kate didn't look anorexic at this point in her career.

Sucks to be you when your phone gets a virus. Like everyone's actually going to purchase anti-virus software for their phones. Not.

Jared is now officially crawling. He's been trying it out for a few weeks, but he would always revert back to scooting eventually. Now, however, he seems to favor the faster method of locomotion.   =)

Father's Day was great. Rick grilled some Chilean sea bass for dinner, and Misti made some wonderful brownies a la mode for dessert. Tropicana has some wonderful Peach Orchard Punch that was also very tasty. Becky had fun riding her tricycle out in the cul-de-sac with Bonny and Dara, despite a fall or two from trying to turn too sharply. We played some more croquet in the back yard, and I broke yet another mallet (my second recently). We finished up the night with intense rounds of Jenga Extreme and Pit.

I find it funny that neither the Orkin website Learning Center nor the Orkin insect identification guide have any information on cicadas.

Becky's got a cold today and she's losing her voice a little, and she now sounds like Demi Moore, it's quite hilarious actually. Watched "Miracle" on widescreen DVD tonight. Jared does this little yoga stance by sitting up with one leg on top of the other, it's very cute.

We're now back from a short vacation in Oregon over the past week to attend Nicolas and Miguel's baptisms. Found a few caches there, of course (grouped by city):

Medford:
The Concrete Wave
Watch your Step
South of the Border
Rooster's Restaurant
Names, Names, Names
A Place of Remeberance [sic]

Sweethome:
"Not Your Ordinary Birdhouse"
A Mothers Day Cache (FTF!)
Twin bridges big and small
North Side Nymph
A Pleasant View Two
Berry Hill cache
GlenMart's Sticky Cache

Newport:
no name cache
I'm Stumped
Yaquina
Jumpoff Zzzoe!!!

and also retrieved the 'World Star 2' travel bug, which hasn't yet seen Reno but shortly will.

We ate a wonderful breakfast in Medford at Rooster's Restaurant - missed the to-die-for cinnamon rolls, but had some wonderful coffee cake.

We also had fun on the Oregon coast. We visited Agate Beach with it's prophylactic jellyfish, the Oregon Coast Aquarium, and ate some wonderful nearly world famous clam chowder at Mo's Annex.

Caching in Oregon is really different than caching in Nevada: everything is wet, surrounded by slugs, underneath wild blackberry bushes (with thorns), and much more difficult than indicated. Every cache we tried was only a one-star in difficulty, but yet we couldn't find many of them. =(

Lots of the Erkez.B virus making it's rounds. Watched "Scooby-Doo! Meets the Boo Brothers" on VHS. Finished Terry Brooks' "High Druid of Shannara: Jarka Ruus" on audiobook. Watched "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" at the Century Park Lane theater.

I found it amusing that an unnamed person thinks I have dwarfish feet. Personally, I've always felt they looked a little more like hobbit feet, with the hair on the toes and all.

Another cache has kicked my proverbial butt: "SWINGING BRIDGE" in Wadsworth. Drove right to it (correct side of the river even), and searched for about 30 minutes but couldn't find it.   =(

Here's another computer vs. nonprofit acronym: "RNDC". "rndc" to a computer person is a Unix name server control utility, whereas "RNDC" in the nonprofit world is typically the name of another nonprofit group (like RNDC in Nevada or RNDC in Minnesota).

My new McDonald's happy meal "Go Active!" pedometer reset itself somehow (so I lost the mile I had already logged), and doesn't log some steps - thus I think I'm justified in saying that it's a bit flakey. Bummer.

Cool news and tools: modest clothing, Ruth goats, a ROT-13 encryption generator, and an RSA encryption (10-bit) email obfuscator.

Finished Terry Brooks' "The Talismans of Shannara" on abridged audiobook tonight. It was read by Rene Auberjonois (who also played Odo the shapeshifter on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"). Good stuff.

TVG (TV Guardian), ironically, has to be turned off for us to watch church movies, because it filters out words like "God", "Christ", "Jesus", "hell", and "damn", regardless of the context. Bummer. It is cool, however, that TVG also changes the captions while it mutes the sound, so words like "damn" appear in the captions as something like "dang". Funny stuff.

Watched "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" on widescreen DVD a few days ago. Sadly, I didn't like it as much as "The Two Towers".   =(

We celebrated Becky's 3rd birthday with a small family BBQ and Scooby-Doo themed party this past Wednesday night. She was extra excited about having both sets of grandparents there to celebrate. Also watched "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" and "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark" on widescreen DVD this week.

We spent Memorial Day at two family parties, the first at my folk's place playing a little croquet (with 9 wicket rules, as opposed to 6 wicket rules), and the second at Misti's grandparent's house for a BBQ. We spent this afternoon geocaching with Matt, Deanna, Kaylee, and Jacob in Carson City.

Found another URL shortening utility site, called 'bittyurl.com'. I still think, however, that 'snipurl.com' is the best I've seen so far. We finished reading 1 Chronicles tonight - ending with the coronation of Solomon as King of Israel, and the death of King David.

Another good thing that I've noticed about Diet Rite soda is that it seems to contain less carbonation than other sodas. This, of course, is great because carbonation might be bad for you, depending on who you talk to. We were saddened to hear about the passing away of Ronald Reagan today. On a lighter note, Happy Birthday to Brad, though!

I'm really getting tired of this AIM error message:



(For the record, I'm not logged in at three locations when this happens, just one.)

I was glad to find corroborating information that, in moderate to large amounts (like enough to sweeten a glass or two of Kool-Aid), Xylitol can cause diarrhea. Shaft. In small amounts, however, it's great for your teeth. I was, therefore, glad to see that sugar-free Trident gum now contains xylitol. Just don't chew too much of it...

I really wish that Minute Maid's Heartwise orange juice would come in the "high pulp" variety, instead of just the "no pulp" kind. Orange juice without the pulp is just a bit lame. What every Nevadan geocacher fears seeing the most.

Nice to see another article about geocaching, and a hilarious article about 'cicada envy'.

Hilarious quote from yesterday's SANS Institute @RISK security alert (Vol. 3 No. 21): "MacOS users who thought they were mostly invulnerable now may be rethinking that position."

Speaking of hilarious, here's a funny error message I got the other day:



(For the record, what I was trying to do was not "wrong" - the eAuthentication website has quite a few problems.)

Enjoyed watching the best new reality TV show yet: "Watching Paint Dry". Finally found the 'Just How Evil am I?' cache yesterday, along with Ben.

Don recently visited Shiloh (the famous U.S. Civil War battle scene, near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee), and brought us back a patch: