I adopted a Brittany Spaniel from the animal shelter in Payson today. Traci and I have been looking for a dog ever since we found and briefly cared for somebody else's lost Brittany last month. I checked PetFinder.com every so often, hoping to see a Brit up for adoption somewhere, and this Monday evening I found one in Payson. Traci and I drove up there the next day to see her, and we decided very quickly after seeing her that we wanted to take her in. We paid the adoption fee at that time (which included spaying and vaccinations), but had to leave her there until today so they could spay her. We've got her home now, and it's obvious that a lot of things are going to change around here because of her. We spent the last couple of days trying to decide on a name, and we finally settled on the name Torrey.

I've been doing a lot of geocaching this week. On Thursday I worked in Orem, and after work I found a few caches in the hills above that area (basically in the foothills of Mt. Timpanogos). I also found a few easy ones on the way home, mostly on US-191 between Emma Park Road and US-6.

Today, Mark and I found a cache that has been sitting unfound for eight months since it was placed. I can see why nobody had tried hiking up there yet--it was a tough hike. We started late in the afternoon, and I was a bit worried that we wouldn't make it down off the mountain before dark. The hike was four miles round-trip with 1,700' of elevation gain, and we did it in under 3.5 hours and got home well before dark. Here's my cache log and pictures, just in case you can't get enough of this stuff on this site. :P

Today is my ninth wedding anniversary, and I've now been married for nearly one-third of my life. Wow, that makes me feel older than turning 30 did. :) At least I've still got 12 more years to go before I've been married for half of my lifetime. By then Michael will be moving away from home and Bradley will be getting his driver's license. Now that is a scary thought.

I'm finally getting wound down from the weekend. On Friday evening, Traci and I dropped the kids off with her mom at Crescent Junction just north of Moab, then we headed back west on I-70 and down to the Temple Mountain area to meet up with the two couples we were camping with (DeViDe and J&L Lee). We found their camp trailers where they said they'd be, but they were out riding their ATVs when we rolled into camp. I had a problem with the jack on the tongue of the trailer--actually, I irreparably broke it. I had to use the jack for my truck to raise the trailer high enough to get it unhitched from the truck. If it hadn't been for that, we'd have had camp all set up when the others arrived back at camp. We spent that evening just sitting around the campfire and talking, and we turned in early.

After breakfast on Saturday, we hopped on the ATVs and headed southwest. We rode the Behind the Reef Trail all the way to Hidden Splendor, which was quite an adventure for my first ATV ride. It took the better part of the day, so we rode back to camp on the main gravel road through McKay Flat in order to make it back for dinner. We turned in rather early again that evening after some more campfire tales.

We'd planned a short ride for Sunday morning, but the other two couples decided to pull out of camp early, so Traci and I went solo and found a couple of geocaches while we were out. We weren't sure if we had enough fuel to make it to the second cache, but we went anyway and managed to make it back to camp with fuel to spare. After that, it was time to pack up and head back to Crescent Junction to meet up with Traci's mom and the kids, and the end of a great weekend.

It's yet another weekend where it's just me and the boys. Traci was supposed to go to her aunt's cabin in Joe's Valley for the weekend to do some scrapbooking, but the snowy weather on Friday stopped them from going up there. Instead, they're holed up just two blocks away at Traci's parents' house--and I still slept alone in my bed last night.

The boys and I went out geocaching today with Sam and Mark and their kids. We found a whopping six caches, which is quite a lot for this area. I guess springtime has brought a few local cachers out, and there have been a lot of new caches lately. There are still a few I haven't found, but I didn't feel like driving that far from home today. We drove to Helper, Wellington, and out near Hiawatha today, and even placed a cache while I was in the latter area.

There is, surprisingly, a 3.7-mile long volcanic dike just north of North Spring which I noticed when checking out the new shooting range several months ago. I know of no other evidence of volcanism anywhere in Carbon County, so I thought it'd be a great place for a geocache. Mark had to go back to Price for work, so just Michael and Bradley and I hiked about 1.4 miles round-trip to place the cache. The cold wind was pretty terrible all day long, and Bradley especially couldn't stand it. The promise of some hot chocolate when we got home was just barely enough to get him through the hike. It was still a good day despite the weather. We spent about six hours caching, and the rest of the day just lounging around at home (my favorite pastime).

Next weekend Traci and I are going, without the kids, camping with some geocachers back to the Temple Wash area where we camped two weeks ago. Traci talked her dad into loaning us an ATV (a Honda Foreman 400), otherwise I don't think we'd be going. I'm really looking forward to it. We'll hit some roads that my truck would never make it over, and there are plans for a hike to No Man's Mountain, which is just southeast of Sid's Mountain and actually uses the same trail to get on top that I've wanted to try since the last time I was there on a different trail.