My posting has been pretty erratic the past couple of months and for those of you who are regulars, I am sorry about leaving you hanging. While nothing major has been going on, I have been keeping pretty steady at home and work.
Work has been moderate to slow most of the time although figure it will pick up this week or next. Most of the issues I have been dealing with have been the same old things that keep cropping up, although I get surprised every now and again with a new issue I have not heard of before.
We were scheduled to receive our 3% cut in pay the first of March but that was delayed for a couple of weeks and then my boss (who has been against this cut from square one) thought he would do us a favor by "forgetting" to file the paperwork for it. Well his good intentions left me (and all the other on call people in my business unit) FIVE PERCENT short on my last paycheck. Needless to say that having my paycheck short that much really hurt and we are cutting it really close this month...and we still have a vacation to go on next week. We have not charged anything on our credit cards in over a year (the last thing was The Golden's knee surgery) and have been on a completely debt free vacation for the past four years. Go us! This year, while the beach house is all paid for, the price of gas and food will push the limits of our budget. I am glad I was able to earn a little money cutting grass on the side. That should cover the amount I lost on my last paycheck. Oh , I have been told that the missing funds will be on a future check. I hope so!
I have been geocaching here and there, picking up an odd cache or two at lunch and on the way home from work. Saturday when I went out I finally found one that just amazed me with the camo. I have seen hides like this before but this one was far superior to any of the others. I ended up getting 14 on Saturday, striking out on three (two of which I am sure are gone), one of those being a night cache. I got to the final area on that one but the area was too large to cover by flashlight. I will try to get it during the day.
I also was finally able to get a very hard puzzle cache that I started several months ago. The puzzle requires a lot of good basic math skills as well as a GPSr unit that will allow you to project a waypoint, neither of which I have. So I had to take my time to do the math and plot the course on a map with a protractor. While I had the general area, I did not have the exact coords that I would have had if my borrowed GPSr could project waypoints. So I wrote the cache owner and gave him my calculations and told him the general area that I thought was correct to see if he would "narrow the field" a bit for me since I am not up to date with the proper tools. He was impressed at my manual plotting and told me that I was very very close to where it was (I did have it with 30 feet...take that Garmin!) so he sent me the coords since I worked so hard on this one. That is the good news. The bad news is that when I went after the cache, IT WAS GONE! So I went back at night with a flashlight to check the area (one of the areas it could have been...and was is a favorite tactic of geocache hiders) and my suspicions were confirmed...the cache had been vandalized. I got home and wrote the cache owner but he did not respond for a couple of weeks (he had been overwhelmed with work) but yesterday he was able to get back to me and inform me that it was back on line. It seems that someone knows the cache is there and keeps vandalizing it when it goes back online. Well, I wasted no time and headed over this morning on my way to work and nabbed it. One more off my list!
I have mentioned that vacation is coming up. My wife and I will be going to Cape San Blas, Florida in a few weeks to enjoy a week of surf and sand. While money will be tight (thanx to work...) we will be able to enjoy the area and decompress. While the beach is not my personal favorite (gimme the mountains any day of the week) it is a nice place to visit. Besides, my wife LOVES the beach and I want to make her happy. Now since this is more of my wife's idea of a good vacation, I figured that the activities would be geared more towards her and I was ready to accept that. Imagine my surprise when she informed me that she wanted to stop overnight in Jackson, MS and we could go caching while we were there AS WELL AS when we make it to the beach. I was thrilled at the notion that I would be able to geocache in a couple of other states.
I went online to see what I would be able to find at both locations and was surprised to see that there are a number of regular sized caches within 15-20 miles of each area. Life is good!
I got an e-mail from my (pay attention...this may get complicated) ex-wifes daughter, who at one time was living with me and my ex (when we were married), making her (at that time) my step daughter. She is no relation to me now, but we keep in touch via e-mail every now and again. This daughter, whom I shall call Cindy, is now a Christian and it appears she is having a very hard time with her mother's drinking. Now Cindy does not live with her mother...Cindy is married and expecting her third child. Cindy went on to tell me how she thinks her mother, who is 40, needs to grow up and stop acting like a 16 year old. I was pretty shocked by that...normally Cindy defends her mother tooth and nail, but I guess that has changed.
Cindy also gave a report on her brother (my son) and his bad habits, but he is 20 and his own man, so to speak so he will have to deal with any fallout.
No comments:
Post a Comment