Archive for the 'Krissy' Category

Last night after we had shoveled and sifted many wheelbarrows full of dirt Krissy got to work sanding the small table we have at the entrance of our apartment. She wants to stain it a dark cherry or walnut color to match our other furniture and the white stain on it had to go. It was amazing how much effort it took even with a power sander. I think she was outside sanding of over two hours! She just doesn’t know when to quit. But, it’s mission accomplished and the sanded table is back home ready to be stained. We thought we already had stain but realized after getting home that we only have finish-restoring liquid that isn’t powerful enough to stain on its own. I guess it will just have to wait until Monday or Tuesday.

Krissy has been doing a lot of Christmas shopping online. She and I both suffer from a disorder that makes it very difficult for us to stop ourselves from buying something if it appears to be priced well below its value. On the bright side, order at least our Christmas shopping is almost done!

This one is pretty close to the road if you know where to park. We came here from the Taylor’s Quarry cache and so we just followed the trail all the way out here. It was 0.33 miles according to our GPSr. When we were within about 800 feet of the cache there was another entrance from the road to the trail we were on. Oh well, we needed the exercise anyway.

The cache itself was a lot of fun. We were standing on top of it and I kept looking under the bushes for it. It was hidden under a rock so well that you would never even think of looking under it. The coordinates were dead on, but it still took us a while to investigate that one inconspicuous rock. We walked back to the car on the road and got to see a lot of fun Halloween decorations. What a fun day caching!

Krissy and I found this one without too much trouble, although it has some of the best camouflage I’ve ever seen in Geocaching. There was a Spiderman Travel Bug action figure inside, so I thought this one would come with us to either Las Vegas for Thanksgiving or to Georgia this Christmas.

Krissy and I rarely order pizza, but on kind of a fluke we’ve ordered pizza twice in the last two weeks. The first time we ordered was for just the two of us. We both like Pizza Hut so I decided to check out what sorts of specials they have at pizzahut.com. You have to create an account at either site before you can order. I was impressed that they were able to find my address and which restaurant services our apartment because it is in a relatively newly developed area. The controls for ordering made what could have been very complicated process rather simple while still allowing for maximum flexibility. I was able to pay for the pizzas using a credit card online. All I had to do once they arrived was sign the receipt.

Lst night we ordered pizza for the family we’re taking care of. They usually buy from Dominos, so I hopped online to see if I could order using dominos.com. Their interface is a little bitty clunky. It looks like a website designed in 1998. It failed to find both my home address and the address of the family we were with. It isn’t surprising that our apartment wasn’t in the database, but this house has been here for years! I don’t know how the credit card processing works because we paid in cash. They were very fast and prompt delivering exactly on time. I take off points, though, for popups used for no reason.

If you want to order pizza online you can choose whichever you like best, but I think I’ll stick with Pizza Hut.

Krissy and I have spent the last few days taking care of another family while their parents are out of town. It is amazing how complicated things can get when you are trying to get multiple children to and from all of their activities. On top of that, each of the children are different and have completely different personalities. Some of them are very helpful and cooperative. Others are more difficult and don’t want to help. It’s been a lot of fun and it’s given us insights into our future. It’s not exactly the same because they aren’t our children and I know that makes a big difference, but it sure has opened our eyes!

After the mud run we decided that we ought to take a trip out to San Francisco since I had never been there. Tommy and Elizabeth have become quite adept at touring the major spots in San Francisco since they’ve taken so many of their family and friends out there. The drive is not all that interesting. Much of the drive is waiting for your turn to fork over $3.00 for the privelege of driving over the bay bridge into the city. It seriously took an entire hour just to get to the toll booth. After that things moved rather well.

Parking is horrendous and some of the streets are crazy with incomprehensible intersections. Once we parked we tried to figure out how much we would be charged by reading the ticket they gave us. The parking garage had all sorts of confusing pricing plans based on the time of day, the length of your stay, and whether or not you had eaten at any of their partner restaurants. Once we got out of the car, though things started to get interesting.

There is no shortage of street performers in San Francisco. Some people were singing or break-dancing, and others were acting like robotic statues all painted up in silver or gold. Many of the performers looked like they were making about $100/hour. Maybe I just saw them at their best time of the day. In any case, it certainly appeared that one could make a living off of performing and relying on donations from passersby and onlookers. I didn’t take their picture because I assumed that they would expect money for capturing their poses.

We didn’t go out to Alcatraz, but from the area around Pier 39 there is a pretty good view of it. Nearby there are seals that have some protected area where they sunbathe. A few of them were in what appeared to be a rather playful mood. I couldn’t tell if they were wrestling for fun or to actually hog certain areas and claim them as their own territory. The wind was so strong that the pelicans in the area were unable to always fly in the direction they desired. Many of them were not even flapping their wings and were just hovering in the air above our heads waiting for a break in the wind.

Nearer Fisherman’s Wharf there are about five different restaurants with street-vending open on the outside of their restaurants. They all sell about the same food, but they are fiercely competitive with one another often competing on one or two cents difference from their neighbors. Elizabeth was trying to find the cleanest looking setup while the pigeons, no longer afraid of humans, dive-bombed my head. I didn’t actually get hit by any of them, but they were not making me feel comfortable. Once Elizabeth and the rest of us agreed on where we should go to get ourselves some fish and chips we walked around to see their display cases. The cleanest one appeared to be selling minced fish shaped, breaded, and fried. It looked like it came out of a box and it wasn’t what we were after. We walked along and stopped at a moderately less clean-looking stand run by a group of Asians. They had the best looking food, so we decided to order from them instead. While we were waiting for our turn a man asked for a sample of their soup. The cook, who was very busy, took a plastic spoon and, without looking up, dipped it right in the large cooking vessel and handed it to the man who was very surprised and started telling his friends about it immediately.

After we ate we got back in the car and headed over to Lombard Street, the windiest section of street in the world. There was a terribly long line of cars waiting on the incline leading up to the summit where the famous snake-like section begins. Tommy looked at the map and saw that there are three directions one could approach that particular intersection from, so he headed the direction that looked the least congested. When we got to the top and prepared to make a left on the street we were disappointed by a sign reading “No Left Turn.” No one was going, and Tommy was already sick of waiting, so he made a left anyway and we wound our way down to the bottom. We, the three passengers, were incredulous.

We visited the free sample-laden Ghirardelli Chocolate Company store. Tommy demonstrated that the people that hand out free samples either don’t care or don’t notice when the same person exits and reenters with an open palm. I think he got a total of four free samples of their dark chocolate filled with caramel while we were there. If it hadn’t been so crowded I would have enjoyed getting an ice cream sundae for dessert after our meal, but the Ghirardelli place was packed, so we headed out to our next stop: The Golden Gate Bridge.

It was overcast and the top of the Golden Gate Bridge was obscured by the low clouds. It was still an amazing sight. At a prime photo spot a large group of people of Indian descent was trying to get their picture taken together. Tommy negotiated a camera swap and he and Krissy took pictures with their cameras, then we switched. Tommy gave his camera to a man who appeared to be the Father or leader of the group. I gave my camera to a 16 year-old girl from the group. The Father went first. He took about 20 seconds to take the first shot. Then he spent another 20 seconds trying to figure out how to get the zoom to work on Tommy’s camera. Tommy helped him get it figured out. Then it took him another 30 seconds to finally take his second picture. When the girl with my camera’s turn came up she took the picture in about 2 seconds. The pictures on Tommy’s camera cut off Elizabeth’s chin. He had sacrificed us to frame the background perfectly. The picture taken with my camera came out almost perfect. We wanted a picture of our group, not the bridge. I guess he didn’t understand that the bridge was only there to incidentally show where we were at the time.

We had a lot of time on our metered parking space so Tommy convinced us to walk across the bridge. I’m glad he did! It was amazing to feel the strong winds out there. Many people from all over the world were taking pictures as they walked across this California landmark. Tommy demonstrated that it took almost 30 seconds for spit to reach the water below. The wind was so strong that after you spit over the side and after it had fallen below the level of the bridge the wind would carry the spit far out away from you and you could watch it fall all the way to the water’s surface. Right after we both did this a few times I noticed a sign that said it was a misdemeanor to drop anything from the bridge. I assumed that included spit. Strangely, the sign specifically included missiles. I would have thought that dropping missiles from the Golden Gate Bridge would have carried felony charges, but what do I know. It was now getting late in the day, but there was one more spot we wanted to see.

There is very little parking at the base of Coit Tower, so we parked a little way down the hill and walked up some stairs, the construction of which appeared to have been funded by donations. Tommy and Elizabeth had never been up to the top of Coit Tower. It’s not free, but Krissy and I wanted to go, so we took the four of us up to the elevator to the top. Although there are some amazing views up there, I was more fascinated by the international coinage that had been dropped through the edges of the windows and that had landed on the sills of each port hole. I also found a soccer field at one of the ports which seemed oddly out of place and somewhat suspicious. By the time we had seen all there was to see and had taken nearly a hundred pictures of Alcatraz trying to time it when the light from the lighthouse was facing us, it was starting to get dark.

I’m so glad that Tommy was driving because I was pretty tired. We had just driven for nine hours the previous day and were looking at a total of six for today. I don’t know why it is that sitting in a car makes you get tired when all you really have to do it not move much for hours on end, but it sure takes the energy out of me.

It was great to finally visit San Francisco even if it was for only a whirlwind tour all over the city. That’s one more place I can check off my list of places to visit!

Krissy had me find Superman’s logo so she could make a cake with the shield on it. The base coat of frosting is blue Cool Whip. The actual shield is made of red and yellow butter cream frosting. Krissy worked on this thing for about three hours total. She decided it would be a good idea to try and make the Cool Whip a little less squishy by putting the cake in the freezer. This worked out rather well. As time went on it got softer and softer, though.

Krissy then transferred the printed design onto wax paper by tracing. The wax paper was then placed on the top of the blue Cool Whip. She used a hatpin to poke holes in the wax paper. When you remove the wax paper then the holes are left in the top of the cake to serve as a guide. She used a star-shape to fill in the yellow and then the red parts. The original idea was to finish off the cake with very dark-blue lines to emphasize the logo and make it stand out a little more. We couldn’t get the frosting a decent dark blue color, and Krissy was afraid to screw up the cake with squiggly lines that were supposed to be straight. I think it was a good idea to stop when she did. The cake turned out great.

Incidentally, this cake was a poke cake or, what some people call a Jell-O cake. She used a single 3 oz. package of strawberry Jell-O mixed into one cup of boiling water. This was poured over a 13 x 9 in. white cake that had holes poked about three quarters of the way through the cake and spaced at one half to one inch intervals. Then you pour the liquid concentrated Jell-O mixture over the top of the cake slowly. Try to cover all of the top of the cake. Allow the cake to cool in the refrigerator. After the cake has cooled spread Cool Whip over the top of the cake, and you’re good to go!

The cake was a success and everyone at work was very impressed by Krissy’s cake decorating prowess.

This is probably the biggest surprise I’ve ever encountered in geocaching. This is a huge ammo box with (at present) tons of travel bugs in it. It’s really unusual to find such large, high-quality caches in the middle of the city. I wanted to come here to get some travel bugs to take with me to Arizona. There were a lot to choose from, but I chose NIKO, a metal dog looking to end up in each state before returning home to Idaho, and Jack the Pumpkin who seems to just want to roam all over the country.

This is in front of a small English pub called Churchill’s. The food smelled really good, although we didn’t go inside. It’s in a really tiny building, but it seems to be rather popular. I would consider going in, but since I don’t drink, I don’t think I’d fit in too well.

This is one I’ve been wanting to get for a while. I thought of trying to get some of the people at the dentist’s office where I go to come outside and get this one. It’s right outside the San Marcos City Hall and the dentist’s office is located in the same building as the city hall. I didn’t have time to do that, thought the last time that I got my teeth cleaned.

When Krissy and I got to the cache we found it right behind a large moving-truck. The truck provided excellent cover from muggles and had the added benefit of shading us from the late afternoon sun.

In the cache was the best thing I’ve found to date: a $2 off gift certificate to Baskin Robbins! We took that and left the Inspector Gadget we got a while ago from another cache.