It already feels like this has been a good vacation, and I've still got five days before I have to go back to work. I spent yesterday driving and hiking around the far northern edge of the Swell in the Grassy Trail oil and gas field. I took a lot of pictures, and I took a few rocks home with me too. It was hard to find rocks there that didn't contain fossils of some sort. Most of them were ordinary shells, but there were a number of small ammonite fossils (about 1" in diameter). According to this website, much larger cephalopods are possible but rare in these rock formations. Someday I'll spend an entire day out there with my rock hammer, and hopefully I'll find something worth keeping.

I placed a new geocache while I was hiking. I got word that a couple of people from the SLC area were down here yesterday and placed a few caches, but they haven't showed up on the website yet. When they eventually do, it'll give me something else to do rather than sitting around being bored like I am right now.

The kids could sure use the opportunity to get out of the house as well, since it's been too cold to do much outdoors lately. It's supposed to snow today, but I don't think we'll see much of it. It did snow briefly this morning, but it all melted and dried out quickly. I'm not sure if I'd rather have snow so we can all go tubing, or if I'd rather it stayed dry so I could do some more hiking.

With all this cold weather, it's really starting to feel like winter around here. I felt a cold coming on last night and I woke up with a sore throat this morning, and now I remember how much I hate that part of winter. I took some DayQuil, which didn't seem to help with much of anything, so I made some very hot salsa, and that's really helped with the congestion in my nose and throat. Actually, I'm breaking out into a sweat as I eat it right now.

I tried going for a short hike today, and I felt like crap when I got back home. I think this weekend is going to be a waste. Luckily, starting Thursday, I've got a week off from work and I hope to make good use of my time off. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet, but I'll bet it'll involve four wheels and a GPS.

I woke up at 6:00 this morning, hit the road by 6:30, and made it to work well before 8:00. With all the fatal traffic accidents on US-6 during the past week, I'm glad traffic was light this morning.

I went into work because our entire department was going to lunch, and I didn't want to miss out. We went to Tucanos, which has a bizarre way of serving your food, but the food was excellent. Every couple of minutes a server would bring out a different type of meat, vegetable, or fruit, all grilled on a metal skewer, and you can simply take your pick of what you want and how much. The salad bar was nice too, with green, pasta, and seafood salads, and everything you could want to go with them.

Work itself went by surprisingly fast. I got a lot accomplished, which doesn't happen much when I'm in the office because I usually end up chatting with people who I don't see often.

After work, I stopped at Sam's Club to fuel up the car. $2.09 for regular unleaded! I think it's still above $2.40 here in Price. After fueling up, I headed home, but stopped to find a cache at the Moark Junction. I tried finding the same cache earlier this year, but I just couldn't find the damned thing. I almost gave up again today, but I finally found it a ways off from the listed coordinates. I get frustrated with caches like this one--just dumped in some random bushes along the side of the road. I got to add another number to my count (I'm up to 241), but I'm not sure it was worth 30 minutes of my time.

I think I've written more on this website about the things that I want to do than the things I've actually done. Well, tonight is no exception. I've spent the last week thinking about the San Rafael Desert. I saw part of that area earlier this year when Mike and I ventured south from Green River to Moonshine Wash. Now, I want to start on Highway 24, near the Goblin Valley turnoff, and head east into the desert. The southern half of the desert seems particularly interesting, and especially barren. There are surprisingly no geocaches there (a condition which I hope to remedy), so I assume it's not well-travelled. There appear to be several short (less than a mile long) slot canyons near the Jack's Knob (heheh) area, and that's where I'd like to start exploring. I doubt I'll get there before this year's over, but you never know. It's hard to justify burning $75 of fuel on a trip like that. Springtime will probably be more picturesque, and I could even haul the trailer down there and make a weekend of it. That sounds like a good plan, hopefully I can stick to it.

Yesterday's trip was awesome. We found twenty freaking caches, all in the Richfield area. I didn't think we'd spend so much time there, but we were having so much fun that we didn't care about all the other caches we'd planned on finding along US-89. We met the Hunts at their house a little after 10:00 in the morning and cached with them all day long, and didn't leave until well after dark. Considering the number of caches we found (which is about twice as many as I'd previously found in a single day), and that everybody had a lot of fun, I'd say it was a productive day. Luckily, several of the caches we found were at city parks, so the kids had many opportunities to break up the monotony of riding in the back seat of the car.

There was one cache along Richfield's main street, and not surprisingly, Bradley was a handful there--he repeatedly tried running out in front of passing cars. I'm not sure if that's worse than last weekend when he tried jumping off the top of Dutchman Arch. That kid's just the opposite of Michael--he's got no fear and no sense of danger, which for a two-year-old spells disaster. I think he's going to be our "Emergency Room Kid," much like I was as a child. :)

I never leave the house without my handgun strapped to my waist, but in the past couple of months, I've forgotten my wallet twice. It's even more embarassing that I didn't realize I forgot my wallet until I was at the checkout at the store with a cart full of groceries. Maybe I should stow an extra $20 or so in my holster for emergencies. :)

It's looking like we're going to do a short (~300 mile) road trip this weekend, driving the loop down SR-10, across I-70, up US-89, then back home on US-6. Actually, that last part depends on how we feel when we get to Fairview. I might just skip part of US-6 and drive Fairview Canyon to Eccles Canyon to Scofield then home. We are going to make a side-trip to Richfield, which is only 18 miles out of the way, but we can bag 16 geocaches while we're there. We're also planning on meeting up with some new friends in Sigurd for some caching and lunch. I think it's going to be a very long and tiring day, but hopefully worth it.