10-Year Clearwater Event

In honor of Geocaching's 10-Year Anniversary, this is the first of three "10-Years Of Geocaching" events we attended this weekend.

This one was held at a sports bar we had never been to before.

Just as Luann was going to take this group photo of the geocachers that had arrived at this location first, this coral-shirted 'flasher' jumped up. And she didn't think Luann got the shot...

Ok, this is how the picture was supposed to be done.

Then we had more people show up...

...and more people show up...

...whew! I think that's the last of them...

Here is ww.wilma, signing the geoevent's log book.

We had a nice time, talking about our escapades while hunting for geocaches and such.

Will ya look at that? Elton John's long-lost brother showed up at this geoevent!

Here is Montu rider and family, owners of many of the geocaches in Starkey Park & Preserve.

And here is Captain Biggins, striking up a Captain-y pose.

OldRocknMetal and I were discussing the finer points of our latest geocoin contest...

See, the Captain strikes this pose whenever he stops to talk to someone. It's getting to be something of an Errol Flynn habit...

And Biggins even provided a nice cake too. If this cake is lost, just take it to the coordinates written on top of it...

Time to serve up the cake. Susan, of Team SusanRon helps to hand it out.

At one point, Captain Biggins was given a rose and he struck yet another hands-on-the-hips pose. I just had to get that one with a camera.

Well, time to head out to the next 10-Year Event...

A Little Work Up North

We went up to the Ocala area to do some geocaching and stop by to help out Uncle Frank & Aunt Martha. Remember, Click-On-A-Pic to see a larger version of an image.

Of course, we also working on adding to our photo-catalog...

To begin with, we started putting one-gallon cans of paint into a 5-gallon bucket so the ladies could paint the outside of the building. Unfortunately, Karen was hit with a little 'kick-back'.

Yeah, this is what I mean. The neat thing though, is that she's still smiling. I cleaned up the bits that made it into her hair, then she cleaned up the rest, no big deal.

Since the 3 gallons of paint weren't exactly the same color, we had to mix it with a paint-stirring tool on the end of a drill. Gotta take it slow, or everybody around me will get a paint-bath.

In the picture above, you can see a window and this is how everything was stacked up against it inside. Looks like we're ready for just about anything...

As we were finishing up the mixing, Karen added the last of the gallon of white paint, which made for a nice coffee-tan color for the walls.

Here is the end of the 'painting party', as the 4 ladies went at it with gusto and made it all the way from one side of the building to the other side in about an hour. In this shot, front to back, is Luann, Aunt Shirley, Karen, Aunt Martha, and Uncle Claude in the blue shirt way back there.

The ladies went so fast that even the kitty-cat that was doing the lower trim around the base was wiped out. Uhm... hey! Can we have that brush back before the paint dries out?

Since there was painting going on, the cars were parked a little bit over from where they were working.

While the painting was going on, I worked with Uncle Claude and Uncle Frank putting up sheet rock inside the building. As you can see, since Uncle Frank was injured from a serious accident a bit back, he takes his supervisory position quite seriously.

And I just know that he was watching me somewhere nearby while I was making the cutouts for the outlets... But seriously, we got quite a bit done before it got too hot to be working in the sun, so Karen & I went to find a geocache near the property and I brought it back to be signed. After lunch, we said our goodbyes and headed out to a nearby park to hunt for a couple of caches.

It was nice to get out into the scenery, taking pictures and using billion-dollar satellites to find tupperware hidden in the woods (geocaching).

It's especially fun when the person who hides it, takes the time to put one together like this one. When I reached down into the hole in the root-system of a tree, this lion was staring at me and I have to admit, I jumped back when I saw the critter.... ROAR! Nice cache.

And we snapped a few pictures of the flora and fauna as we discovered it.

We could go this way... Or we could go that way... I know, let's go the other way!

Ok, so we're all a bit tired and sore from our work day. Thankfully, I found a tangelo tree nearby, climbed it and picked some fruit to give to the girls. That seemed to help a bit, but seriously, it was time to head home...

Surprise! On the way home, we were stuck in stop-&-stop traffic due to an accident. Here is the result of a rear-ender in the left lane. This one is so 'fresh', the glass is still scattered across the roadway.

Here's a side-view of the poor car that used another car in front of it to stop.

Yeah, that was an ouch! The strange thing about this was that we didn't see hide nor hair of the other car that received the 'vehicular enema'. Maybe it was a reverse hit & run, where the car that was rear-ended took off because he wasn't driving legally in the first place.

Freedom Doesn't Mean, 'Free For All'

We recently received a shorter version of the following message, provided by Dr. Adrian Rogers. This piece consists of Page 138 from his book, Ten Secrets for a Successful Family (details below). Although we don't necessarily subscribe to the biblical part of this, it still rings true as to how we feel about what has been happening in our society today. It brings to mind the person we saw being interviewed in the news after coming out of her polling precinct, all aglow with the belief that if her chosen candidate makes it into office, he will "Help pay my mortgage and pay for gas for my car".

We are in an era of entitlement, which is where people constantly worry about "What's in it for me?", rather than "What can I do for others?" We hope you understand our frustration, as we feel we are forced to watch what may very well be the beginning of the end of American society as we had once known it to be...

- BEGIN QUOTE -

By, Dr. Adrian Pierce Rogers.

Let me say a word here that may sound political. I hope not, because I believe it’s moral and biblical.

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don’t multiply the wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else.

Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don’t have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don’t get to enjoy the fruit of their labor.

Something very sad has happened in America. The hippies and flower children of the sixties – who went around smoking dope, crying out about peace and free love, and urging kids to “turn in, tune in, and drop out” - took off their tattered jeans and their beads, trimmed their hair, put on suits, and went to Washington.

But they took with them their hippie philosophy that the only dirty four-letter word is WORK. So what we have is the biggest cultural revolution in America’s history. We raised a generation that did not understand or value the work ethic. And they turned their philosophy into legislation.

The result is that America is still suffering today from the lack of a biblical work ethic. And even many of those who are working are not working for the pleasure and joy of cooperating with Almighty God. They’re only working to get enough money so they can stop working.

The socialists had the badly flawed idea that all you had to do was pool a nation’s wealth and turn everyone into a worker for the state. If you want to see the dismal failure of that philosophy, just walk the gray streets of Moscow as I have done and see Russia’s crumbling infrastructure.

When I was in Russia our guide told us, “You know what was wrong with communism? Under communism we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us, and everything went under”

Do you know what’s wrong in America today? We have created a society perilously close to that description, a society in which some people are better off by not working.

- END QUOTE -

Bibliography Notes:
Rogers, Adrian (1996). Ten Secrets for a Successful Family. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. Page 138. ISBN 1581340338

Our Third Geocoin Contest Is Doing Well

It looks like the competitors are at each other's throats though...

Actually, the geocacher (seeker name: Flyingbird) in the middle was searching for the coin with the two other guys and he located it first. On the left is Captain Biggins and on the right is ariaandasa, Flyingbird's son.

Here is a shot of my having dropped off the coin in the puzzle cache. You have to decode a cipher in order to find the container. This is one of the things I like about geocaching, there are so many things to do and learn.

We found several flowers in a field next to the cache.

We liked this yellow one...

And this purple one was kinda special too.

So, here we are talking with the guys only a couple of minutes after they had found the contest coin and were trying to decide what to do next.

Since they were stomping around in our general neighborhood, we joined forces with them as they went looking for another cache container to drop the coin into.

At this spot, we saw something peeking at us.

When we looked in the birdhouse, it was this red-capped woodpecker. After getting the picture, we closed the door and didn't disturb it any further.

Here is the 'Mighty Trio', signing the logsheet for the cache on the side of the birdhouse post. Thankfully, we didn't have to wrestle the geocache container away from the woodpecker.

And of course, they had to take pictures of themselves in order to post it on the geocache web page.

After they were done with that, they handed the coin over to Captain Biggins for him to hide too. We're curious where the thing is going to end up...

Still Playing 'Dodge-Cars' On The Way To Work

Just another slow-down on the way home tonight, (pics taken with a cellphone camera).