It's Been a While...

Yep, we haven't been posting on here much. Let me touch on a few of the things that have been going on lately...

We had cousin Kim and her family come by for a visit to the Tampa area, so we had a barbecue on Picnic Island near MacDill Air Force Base. We brought out the sailboat and canoe, did a little sailing (I did some swimming when I fell overboard from the canoe while we were getting everybody on board the sailboat from the beach), and we even went 'treasure hunting' for a couple of geocaches on the island. It was a bunch of fun. Unfortunately, since I was the one who took a dunk, I didn't take any pictures of the event, but Luann and Kim went to the second cache and took some pictures of the trek. Uhmmm, I'm still waiting for the pictures from your cell phone, Kim...

Anyway, things have been tough at work. The industry has been in a slump and there have been some layoffs. The plant is relatively quiet now, compared to how things were before the layoffs. Things are beginning to look up though and it looks like the slump is beginning to lift. Luann is doing real well, she has been promoted to a computer engineering job, so now poor Katrina has to deal with both parents having the word 'engineer' in their job titles. I've been traveling with work still, having made a trip recently to New York City, in order to provide equipment maintainance and operation training at the biggest waste water treatment plant in the United States (oh yeah, THAT is worth bragging about).

Soon, I am scheduled to spend another week in Tennessee to provide similar training to Square-D employees. From what I understand, this time they plan on giving the lesson plan that I had provided on the last two visits so they could train their own employees. We'll see how that turns out.

As for our outings, we are still visiting parks and beaches and stuff. We're doing this so we can get out of the house and get some exercise, because if we don't have a reason to get out, we don't go out. So we blame it on geocaching...

Anyway, here are a few pictures of the 'terrible' things we've been doing to our poor girls.

Here is a picture of Jaime on Easter morning. Since the girls are experienced with using a GPS unit on our geocaching forays, I decided to have a different kind of Easter hunt. We had bought the girls Easter Bunnys and Easter Baskets, but decided they needed to work for their goodies.

I re-wrote a Geocaching webpage so it looked like we had created official geocaches for the girls and handed each one two papers. Jaime is in the front yard, looking for her bunny with the given GPS coordinates and a hint that read: "This home is a neat place to hide things around. It's not in the back yard, that's for sure. Try the East side and looking up is a waste of time. Don't get 'tired' looking for me..."

She finally found the bunny wrapped up in a pink bag, under the car cover of my 65 Volvo, right on top of the tire.

As for Katrina, she was busy in the back yard with our other GPS, looking for her bunny based upon this description: "We've been wanting to hide a cache around this area for a while. By the time we finally got this one hidden, we had to find a bathroom quick or water would be running down our legs."

It didn't take Katrina long to look behind the waterfall in the back yard.

For the Easter Baskets, the girls had to go to opposite ends of the yard and use their second 'web pages' and search in different areas. Jaime was using the GPS and just couldn't seem to get a lock on the coordinates.

Eventually, something clicked and she figured out the description: "We felt it was about time this yard had some caches hidden in it, so we decided this one just had to be placed, 'all decked out'." A quick look in the sailboat, and there it was.

Meanwhile, Katrina was in the front yard, pacing off the differential on the GPS, then finally re-read the description: "This cache better not be found by anyone but Katrina! If somebody else tries to snatch it, I'll grab my shotgun!"

She figured out that riding 'shotgun' in the truck could mean a good place to hide an Easter Basket behind the passenger seat.

So, we had some fun Easter morning, watching the girls looking for their Easter goodies, realizing this will most likely be the last time 'our little girl' would be searching for an Easter Basket.

Katrina is growing up real fast and we are growing old just as quickly. Her mom just about had a heart attack when Katrina came home with her driver's permit from school. Now, I have to start work on finishing my Volvo, so she can start driving the truck, which I promised her when she was old enough to drive.

Here are some more pictures of the things we have seen while geocaching:

The girls were good at finding gecaches hidden within trees. Here is Jaime retrieving a container that looks like a giant pill capsule.

And here is Katrina going after a pint-sized bottle nestled in a palm tree (hiding a cache in palm trees is called a "Florida Hide").

Those things can be hiding anywhere.

Flowers 1 - 6

We even found a geocache concealed inside of a dummy book on the shelf of a public library. We spent a little time here and were planning on checking out a few books with Luann's library card, but had to leave before that. This was because Jaime said she was not feeling well and laid her head on one of the tables while we were filling out the geocaching log (the irony though, was that within a couple of minutes of getting back into the car, she was once again happy, chipper and said she was fine). This was strange to us because Jaime said she wanted to go to a library, yet she didn't seem to want to be there... Oh well, there's no pleasing some people.

When we were outside of the library, we saw these birds hanging around outside.

Here is an Oleander Moth we came across at a cache positioned behind the St. Petersburg Times Forum, home of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team.

We attended a geocaching Meet-N-Greet and the girls got a chance to learn how to paint up some camouflaged containers. Here they are, hard at work with some spray cans.

And here is the result of their work. It looks like they got as much on them as they did on the containers.

This is a building called Solomon's Castle that was completely built from recycled materials.

Here is another view of Solomon's Castle. We decided to stop here for our 100th geocaching find. The next picture is the certificate we placed into the cache.

A view of Tampa Bay as we begin on a nightime series of geocaches we called, 'Vampire Caching'.