Charge, Check, Cache in Hand!

I snapped this cloudscape pic Monday afternoon, and my first thought was that it almost made this place look beautiful...

...But then I thought, it's more like I'm stuck in the eye of some sort of anti-hurricane—where everything out in the iris is nice and bright and blue; but, here in the pupil, it's all oily and black.

Everyone else currently seems to have their panties in a wad about what Hurricane Lee might do in the coming days; so, I've decided to call this Antihurricane Eel.

Then I sat here like an inverted Mufasa and channeled the best James Earl Jones voice I could:

It's like being stuck in a low-rent version of The Truman Show.

And, in fact, the universe has decided to be so on-the-nose about it that Kitten and I have actually settled on an alternative house model called the "Truman," in light of this whole fiasco regarding will we or won't we be on the hook for $22,000 worth of stormwater management excavation and grading work when it comes time to beg the masters down at the township building for permission to build a house on what's ostensibly our property.

I spent an hour on the phone with our contact Brody from Clayton Homes on Monday afternoon; and, after hashing out a lot of issues, the Truman seems like the most sensible way forward.

Even if we do sneak by without having to do the stormwater work, the original house model we chose has a $12,000 delivery fee to be shipped up from its origin in Nashville... and then almost just as much more tacked on in "forced upgrades" to bring it up to code (since, down south, they don't have to deal with some of the things we deal with here—like the potential for a foot or two of snow sitting on the roof at some point).

Plus, those "forced upgrades" don't even get into any of the actual upgrades we're interested in: sliding patio doors off the dining room, a few extra windows around the house, and things of that nature.

And so, we've preemptively decided to downsize a bit, forfeiting a bedroom and ~200 feet of square footage. This shaves off a couple thousand from the price (though not as much as you might think, since you're essentially only hacking off the cost of some extra lumber—rather than any of the more expensive components like plumbing or fixtures). But, more importantly, the Truman gets assembled and ships from Lewistown, PA—only about 120 miles away, with a far lower delivery cost, and everything already built up to code :)

Monday evening, we were supposed to kill off some various leftovers to get them out of the fridge, but Athennia forgot and surprised us with fried chicken instead.

Midway through dinner we got hammered with a downpour, and then the sun came out—ensuring that there had to be a rainbow somewhere.

Duh.

Obviously.

That's exactly the sort of crap Antihurricane Eel would pull!

I snagged a few more cool pics while walking the chicken bones out to the dumpster later...

Things had blown over by Tuesday, and even the humidity was down under 80% for the first time in nearly three months.

I decided I felt like taking the opportunity to get outside for a bit; so, I called Athennia on her way home from work and asked if she'd be up for popping over to 5 Mile Woods (just a few minutes away, even in rush hour).

She said she was game—and surprisingly, Riley wanted to come too :)

So we drove three miles and checked out 5 Mile...

Despite the ton of rain Antihurricane Eel had dropped on us Sunday and Monday, the woods were definitely dryer than they could've been.

We decided to try our hands at geocaching! (Just keep reading. Or go check out Wikipedia.)

We pulled up the coordinates of a "cache" hidden about half a mile out in the woods somewhere, and we started making our way to it.

I was afraid Riley would be bored; but, she ended up leading the charge!

Charge!

...And I somehow got stuck as the liaison between the engine and the caboose...

Are you keeping up back there, Kitten? Or did we lose you?

Despite having our eyes largely glued to our phones to follow the GPS, we made sure not to miss the forest for the cache...

I actually jumped this creek to cut out an entire leg of the trail and catch Riley—which was admittedly pretty dumb and could've gone really bad really quickly.

Luckily though, it worked in my favor!

Eventually the GPS said we were within 20 feet of the cache.

The provided clue said "HOLE'd Your Horses"—which pretty much gave it away at that point, given the tree with the giant hole in it just a little ways off the trail...

Let's go check it out!

Check!

Riley got there first, so I called out after her...

I fished the thing out of the mud and cracked it open...

Cache in Hand!

We're new at this; so, we hadn't thought to bring along a pen to sign the log.

Judging from all the rattling inside the cache, it seemed there were a few tradeables inside—that is, little trinkets and other souvenirs meant for swapping.

Let's see what we've got...

It's customary to leave something of equal-ish value when you take a tradeable from a cache... But, again, we're new at this and hadn't thought that far ahead.

And, in all honesty, what almost-14-year-old hasn't nursed the dream of plucking a demented alien horse-looking creature from a crusty pill bottle hidden inside a rotting tree trunk to take it home to cherish it forever?

So, I told Riley to take it anyway... and the "equal value" part is just something we'll have to rectify in the future—because we had fun doing this, and I'm confident we'll be trying our hands at it again soon :)

Most importantly, we made sure to put everything back exactly as we found it, since this ensures that the cache will stay protected from the elements, and that future geocachers will be able to enjoy hunting for it just as we (and all those who preceded us) did.

By this point it was after 6:00 P.M.: We were rapidly losing daylight... and we had a long walk back.

We spotted some wildlife along the way...

And of course we all got some artsy shots.

Here are Riley's...

And Athennia's...

And mine...

That yellow leaf isn't so much an "artsy shot" as it is my way of taunting Kitten that autumn—and more importantly, cold weather—will be here before she knows it! (And Riley and I will finally be comfortable again, for the first time since April.)

Our little junket into nature was over far too quickly; and, next thing we knew, we were out of the forest and back in the jungle...

On an unrelated note—though not really—I forget if we're on Day 2 or Day 3 of this nonsense...

The bulbs are fine: It's 100% faulty wiring.. The left one comes on about 8% of the time, and the center one blips on for a microsecond every now and then for special occasions.

If you look closely, you can see Bloody Mary's ghost hiding behind the shower curtain. (I asked her take on the matter when I got up to pee in the middle of the night last night, and even she agrees that these atrocities are beyond excessive at this point.)

So...