I usually pick up Krissy from work at about the same time every day. I try to get there a good fifteen minutes before she gets off work officially in case she gets out early. Today was no exception.

The sun was shining and it was even a little too warm in the car when the rain started to fall. There is a relatively new law in the State of California requiring all motorists to turn their lights on when driving in rain. This I did, as I usually do when it starts to sprinkle. When I got to Krissy’s workplace I turned off the engine and slid over into the passenger seat and laid back while listening to the radio. It was taking a little longer than usual for Krissy to leave the building and walk out to the car, so I reclined the chair. While I was thus reclined the radio went dead. I thought there might be an emergency alert that was preempting the program I was listening to, but it stayed dead for more than ten seconds. It was at this point that I realized exactly what had happened.

I scrambled to turn off any and all electricity sapping accouterments, including the headlights and then tried to start the car. The engine pretended for a moment that it was going to start, but the starter ran out of juice in the attempt. The sunshine had made me forget the lights were on, and I hadn’t opened the door when I arrived and never got the annoying whine telling me to switch the headlights off.

Dejected, I popped the trunk and removed the jumper cables. Another ten minutes passed in abject silence. When Krissy finally emerged I leaped from the car holding the cables over my head so she could see there was a problem. This turned out to be just another frustration in a long, difficult work day. We asked Marlon, one of her coworkers, to assist us in jump starting the car. Neither of us were really too experienced, but between the both of us we got the cars properly linked and started. Ready to congratulate ourselves on a job well done we started toward the cars to remove the cables from the batteries. That’s when Krissy saw it.

“What’s that!?” Krissy cried curiously. We both looked but saw nothing. She kept verbally nudging us until we both saw what she had seen. There was a little brown furry puffball in a little space wedged between the hinge of the hood and the body of the car. “I think I saw it move,” Krissy said, a little more cautiously than at first. As I looked more closely at this thing, I began to see what appeared to be little sprawling feet attatched to stumpy legs. I began to feel ill as I realized what I was looking at.

“Is it alive?” I questioned. “Are you sure that you saw it moving? I think it’s dead.” What’s worse than a dead rat, you ask? Krissy broke a branch off of a tree in the parking lot and tried to get Marlon to take it. Grasping for any reason not to go near the car again he came up with some lame excuse, and the branch was handed to me instead. I chose to approach from behind and to the side. I hit the side of the car, and the rat quvered, but maintained its supposed safe position. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I gave the branch to Krissy, and she came at it from the fron of the car.

When Krissy touched the little guy, he didn’t run out of the car as was hoped for, but rather, he burrowed in deeper and deeper until it was presumed that he was stuck. We could no longer see him and it appeared the he had dropped down behind the wheel well in front of the passenger door. Now I didn’t know what to do. Krissy was not happy about this development. All I could imagine was the rat getting stuck in there until it died and began to stink up the car. We wanted him out, so we called the best car expert we know, Randy. He didn’t sound too keen on dismantling the panels on the car, but he agreed to take a look.

When we got to Randy’s he came out and I lifted the hood. Randy poked his head around a whole lot closer that I ever would have, but didn’t see anything. He was convinced we should just wait it out and that the rat would leave our car after he ralized that there was nothing there for him. Just then, Randy spotted the rat behind the engine touching something called the firewall. The rat was obviously not trapped, and had proven that he could get out of the car any time he wanted to.

When we went back inside, Randy’s wife, Joanna, decided she would give the rat a name. After trying a bunch of different ones the name Firewall seemed to stick. As far as we know Firewall the rat is still perched happily in the engine cavity of the car enjoying its warmth and dryness.

Incidentally, while we were outside it began to rain a little bit, and there was an amazing rainbow over Randy’s apartment building. I didn’t have my camera for any of this, which upset me almost as much as foolishly letting the battery die. I asked Randy if he had a digital camera in the apartment. I ran back outside and quickly snapped a few shots in the rain.

I was a little uneasy going after this one becasue of the no tresspassing sign at the head of the service road we hiked on to get here, but Krissy charged forth without a second thought, so I followed after. This made for an interesting little hike. There appear to be a number of abandoned cars in the ravine adjacent to the road. they appear to have been shoved in and rolled on their sides or tops. Crazy looking, actually.

This was the biggest cache I’ve found so far. The reason for the name is that the cache mainainers, kawikaturn, Laa-Laa and Tinky Winky, put their items that they’ve failed at getting others to bid on on eBay into this bucket and request that geocachers take the largest item they might want with them to make more room in the bucket for more junk cool stuff.

On our way out I saw two men in the distance walking onto the road we were on. I told Krissy that they were probably geocachers. Sure enough, I was right. I didn’t find out until later, but they posted that they had seen what was probably us walking out as they were walking in. That’s the first time I’ve run into other geocachers while I was out.

There are these amazing flower fields in Carlsbad where, for $8.00, one can take a stroll and see them up close. If you’re broke like us, then you can go on a street just east of the flower fields and see them for free from nice lookout points.

This was the first cache that Krissy and I found together on our first try! She’s starting to like this so much that she requested we go today after she got off work. This cache was hidden just off of the sidewalk under a rock. There were tons of muggles around, so we followed the advice given by kawikaturn and pretended we were tying our shoes as we searched. The flowers were so pretty that we hung out for a while.

I left a token my Grandfather gave me for a “free gallon.” I still am not sure what liquid it was redeemable for, though. He gave me all sorts of random worthless tokens to hide in caches. He found them while searching for other things with his metal detector.

Dawn was really excited and didn’t want to go home even though we had already found the caches that I had brought information on, so I fired up the search tool on the GPS and had it point us to the nearest cache. With no details, not even a name, I was surprized that we found this one as quickly as we did.

As with other caches we found today, this one’s logbook was damp, but still signable. I woundered what people thought as the four of us milled about the front of the Wallgreens for no apparent reason and then walked away without going inside.

This was a fun cache that we could practically drive right up to. The ammo box was right in someone’s yard. As the name implies there were two dogs that came and barked at us quite a lot. Dawn said she wanted to hide a cache in her yard when she gets a house.

The cache owner came out and asked Christopher if we were geocaching. In the least enthusiastic voice he could muster, he told him we were.

Outside a tall black metal fence surrounding Taylorsville Park there lies a stagnant drainage canal overgrown with brush. In amongst all of this there is a large lone sprinkler head that almost no one would give a second thought to. We walked past it three times until Dawn voiced some concern over it being there and how out of place it seemed. She opened it up and found it to be the cache we were looking for.

Alas, it was not watertight, and everything inside was damp from the previous day’s rain. This was the most creative way to hide a cache that I’ve seen thus far. No one would suspect it unless they knew it was there and what it was.

We had some hours of daylight left after General Conference on Sunday. We statyed home to watch it because we didn’t have tickets for any of the Sunday sessions. Dawn wanted to see what this geocaching thing was all about, so off we went!

This was the first cache I was able to take my Aunt Dawn and my mom on. This one was hidden well and was a lot of fun for them to discover. I guess I hadn’t talked to them much about stealth around muggles because even though there were people criscrossing the area Dawn got really excited and was making all kinds of noise. In the excitement of it all people were staring at us, but none of them seemed very curious as to what we were doing.

I explained the importance of stealth, and we were able to proceed further without incident. Dawn took some ugly buttons that she had with these clouds and a rainbow. There were pretty big for buttons and we could only fit one in the cache. I guess one is enough.

This was the last cache of the morning that we were able to find. Well, since it was a virtual cache there was no physical box to find, but it was still fun. I’m confused as to how there could be a travel bug on this cache since it’s a virtual cache, but that doesn’t matter.

This cache consists of fifteen questions about temple square that you can find out if you walk around to the various buildings, statues, and monuments. Christopher and I had a lot of fun walking around Temple Square finding all of these. I overheard a conversation between a Sister and two men visiting from Germany. I was tempted to join in, but thought better of it.

It was on this tour that I came across the statue of Joseph and Emma Smith. Someone had put a bouquet of fresh flowers is Joseph’s hand as if he were giving them to Emma. I don’t know if this is something that people always do every day or if it was just for this occasion. Geocaching takes you places you wouldn’t go on your own, and I wouldn’t have seen this if I hadn’t been geocaching.

This one was an unusual cache to say the least. Christopher was getting thirsty already from hiking all around Temple Square. This was only our second cache of the morning, but I had forgotten the batteries on for my camera and was looking for a store that was open at 8:30am in the malls south of Temple Square. Well, I didn’t find any, and when Christopher saw that the description of this cache said there was free ice water, we just had to go here next.

This cache is placed in the Salt Lake City tourism office. The cache is out in the open with a lock on it. It has a description of what geocaching is and why the box is there. In order to open it you have to solve a little puzzle given in the description of the cache. Christopher got his ice water, and I got a few travel bugs. I took a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and a matchbox car called bluebird. Chrstopher said that the model of the car is Bluebird, so I guess that makes sense, even though the car itself is red. The car wanted to go to Japan, so I thought I would bring it to San Diego and see if I could help it along. The next day while traveling around the city I saw banners for a Japanese Culture Festival in Salt Lake at the end of April, so I am having Christopher take it back for me. The Ninja Turtle, on the other hand, is going to end up right near my apartment in San Elijo Hills. I left the Insanity and travel bug and the LLOT Selective Service geocoin.

There was a guy that worked at the tourism office who came over and talked to us for a bit about the cache. He said they get about 12 groups per month coming in looking for the cache.

Christopher took some silver earrings with some Navajo artwork on them to give to Dawn, and I put in the Yankee Stadium keychain from Heber’s Heavenly Hideout. There is a gift shop integrated into the travel office and I was able to get some overpriced batteries for use in my camera.

This one was quite interesting. This was the first geocache of the morning. This was also Christopher’s first geocache. My family had only three tickets for the Saturday morning session of General Conference so it was decided that Christopher and I would go geocaching in the vicinity of Temple Square while Dawn and my grandparents attended the conference. This was probably my favorite cache of the day. This cache is located behind some apartments just to the east of the Conference Center.

On our way there Christopher asked me if it was fun being a missionary. I told him that it was a lot of work, but that you get to do a lot of things you would never have a chance to do otherwise. Just as I was saying this we came upon a group of about twenty Elders standing in front of one of the apartment buildings. I walked up to them and asked if I might ask them all a question. I told them that this young man here would like to know if it’s fun being a missionary. All together they started cheering that it was great! There was one senior Elder who said that it is fun, “even at my age!”

We walked past the missionaries and into the parking lot they were standing in front of. The GPS pointed right up a steep embankment with a fence at the top. Christopher was considering climbing it, but I convinced him that there was probably a much better way. We walked back out of the parking lot and a little further up the street found a walkway between two buildings. behind the northern building we found what looked to be a small fenced-off park. This was the Kimball cemetary. Heber C. Kimball is buried there along with many of his family members and descendants.

When we arrived there were a few muggles looking at the monument in the center of the tiny plot. While we were waiting Christopher pointed out the “No Dogs Allowed” sign. I wondered aloud if anyone had realized that dogs can’t read. In the back corner we found the cache. Christopher got a kick out of the old rusty Altoids container that the loot was hidden in. The logbook was a little damp, but still signable. I took out of it a Yankee Stadium keychain and put in the Keeping An Eye On You travel bug that I got at the meetup on the last Wednesday in March. It was tough getting all the things back in the container, but Christopher got them all in. It still wanted to pop back open, so he wedged a couple of rocks in on top of the container when he hid it again.