Oh boy...everyone in my family is sick or getting sick. Michael and Bradley both had a bout of vomiting, and while Michael's lasted just one day, Bradley had it for four days. Now Traci and I are coming down with colds.

I haven't done much the last week or so, except the usual. We had a nice Thanksgiving at my mom's place, and other than that I've been at home either working or trying to keep busy otherwise. It's been too cold to do much outdoors, but I hope to change that this weekend. Not that it'll be any warmer outside, but I want to bundle up and go hiking on the San Rafael Reef on Sunday. Winter hiking is my favorite for some reason--I spent a lot of time in that area last November, and it was some of the most fun I ever had hiking. Hopefully this weekend is similarly fun.

Friday sure was an exciting day. The excitement actually began Thursday evening, when "The Team" posted their Fall 2007 Contest Series. Every year, these guys go out into the Utah desert and bury bottles, each with instructions on how to proceed to find another bottle or numbered tag, usually with some crazy math or geographical projections involved in finding the next step. I'm teamed up with some guys from up north, and since I already had Friday off work, they sent me down early that morning to find several of the bottles. I found a couple of them easily, but others were nearly impossible without either a metal detector or a better 4x4 vehicle. I started out near the Wickiup, quickly found the bottle there, then proceeded to the San Rafael Reef south of I-70. I spent almost two hours there looking near some old uranium mine shafts, but came up empty. The canyon through the reef was simply awesome, and even though I didn't find the buried bottle, it was the most rewarding stop of the day. After that, I headed east on I-70 and found another one just off the interstate, then proceeded farther east toward the town of Cisco. The road was rough and rocky, and eventually I came across a washout that my truck couldn't get past. The sun had gone down by then and it was too late to try another road. I got a call on my cell phone from two of my teammates who had arrived in Green River that afternoon, and they were going to take their metal detector to the San Rafael Reef location to try to locate the bottle that I couldn't find earlier in the day. So, I headed back toward Green River while they looked, and I had time to do some geocaching there while I waited for them. Eventually they found it and returned to Green River, and two other teammates showed up around that same time. We spent about two hours at Ray's Tavern eating dinner, making plans, and just bullshitting. Their plans for Saturday included a lot of driving around the Moab area, and I would have just been tagging along for the ride, so I opted to head home instead of fueling my truck up (at $3.55/gallon!) for another full day of driving. That should leave me with enough cash for another weekday run down that way, which should put our team ahead of all the others competing for the prize money.

Now that "camping season" is over, I've unfortunately been settling in to the same old grind. Besides working Monday through Thursday, I've been doing various small projects around the house and yard, with a little bit of close-to-home geocaching in between.

I decided to defer the work on my garage roof until next spring. The roofing company said that they'd have a difficult time squeezing me in to their schedule this year, and I'd prefer that they did the work during warmer weather anyway so that the asphalt shingles adhere to each other better. Besides, now I won't have to drain my savings account to pay for a new roof, and Christmas will be much easier with a little extra money. I had to do a quick and dirty patch job on a hole in the roof that was leaking between the main garage and the add-on shed. Whoever built the shed made the roof out of particle board, so you can imagine what happens when it gets wet--it expands and disintegrates. A 6' section of the eaves is sagging and is about to fall away completely, but I don't think I'll get around to fixing that.

Mark and I drove up Spring Canyon after dark yesterday and found an awesome geocache, the White Lady Night Cache. We followed our GPS units to the starting location, then had to shine flashlights around until we located the first in a series of 10 reflectors, each with a number written on it. After finding and hiking to the first, we stopped to shine our lights around to locate the second, and so on. Spring Canyon creeps me out for some reason, but hiking around there at night wasn't as bad as I'd expected. After finding all 10 numbers, we put them together to form the coordinates for the starting point of the next leg of the cache, which began 2.5 miles down the canyon. There, we had to go through an old tunnel under the abandoned railway, then work our way through the bottom of a wash, up a hill, and through the trees and boulders to find the actual cache container. It was a lot of fun in the dark, and it would probably be fun to retrace my steps in the daylight just to see what the area is really like.

I spend a lot of time using Google Earth, and several months ago I created some desktop wallpaper using the satellite imagery (all in Utah) from it. All the images are 1280x1024, so they should work for just about anyone using that screen resolution or smaller. The colors are untouched from the Google Earth imagery, though I'm sure most of it has been color-enhanced from the originals.

With all this time off work, I'm having a difficult time keeping track of which day it is. I got home from the camping trip on Monday--I cut it short because it would have been pretty boring out there (mostly) alone for another couple of days.

I left home last Thursday after work, and arrived at the campsite literally a few seconds after somebody else had pulled into the spot I wanted. He was pulling a 5th-wheel camp trailer and a flatbed trailer loaded up with ATVs. I was just thinking I had the worst luck, missing out on my intended camping spot by mere seconds, but I went and talked to the guy and he let me have the spot. He was actually a geocacher, but he wasn't there for our event. He knew we were going to be there, but thought we'd be in the next spot down the road. We actually went for a short ATV ride to find him another spot, and he came back the next day and we had a beer and bull-shitted for a while.

The first day and night there was boring. It was just Bradley and me, and we stayed in our camp most of the time, only leaving to put up some signs so our guests could find us. Traci was the first one to arrive Friday after getting Michael out of school, and then slowly everyone else started showing up after dark. We ate dinner and sat around the campfire until after midnight, and then a few of us decided to go for a hike by the light of the full moon. We hiked more than two miles and found two geocaches, and we didn't need our headlamps for most of that time.

We got a late start on Saturday, but we loaded up 14 people in four vehicles and drove to the Wedge Overlook and Buckhorn Wash, finding all of the caches along the way. Several more people showed up that evening for a potluck dinner, and we spent the rest of the evening around the campfire again.

We did a potluck again for breakfast on Sunday, then headed out for some more caching and hiking off the beaten path. We hit Hamburger Rocks, Ghoul Gulch, Hambrick Bottom, and the MK tunnels. After a full day of more adventures, almost everybody packed up and headed home. Only my family and my sister's family stayed at camp for another day. We spent Monday driving along the old railroad grade (which is a fun drive), then found another new cache after a short hike. After that, we broke camp and went back home.

Halloween this year was relaxing compared to previous years. In the past, we've always driven our kids all over the county to see relatives and trick-or-treat at their houses, but this year we stayed home and let them trick-or-treat in our neighborhood. Traci and I carved some pumpkins, and we just enjoyed the evening while we watched TV and passed out candy.