A Look into my Life

Well, once again, it's that time of the month where P.J. has his monthly photo blogging challenge. This month's theme is "A Look into my Life." I figuredwith the amount of photos I took this past month, I should be able to come up with five photos that sort of personify me.

1. Geocaching and travel

As you all know by now if you've been paying attention, I love to geocache. I also love to travel which works out well since they go hand in hand with each other. Last month I attended two geocaching Mega Events, one in the Los Angeles area (Spring Fling) and the second one which was in Flagstaff over Memorial Day weekend (GeoWoodstockXX). Both of the events were put on by the same individuals, so there was a lot to compare and contrast but if push came to shove, I'd say the GeoWoodstock was Spring Fling on steroids. It was just bigger and better all the way around and that's to take nothing away from the Spring Fling. 

Let's just say over the course of five days in Arizona, I got to see a lot, find a lot of geocaches and just have a really good time enjoying this crazy hobby that I've been doing for over 23 years. With the two events and other geocaching excursions I did this past month, I found 430 caches, which was my second best month ever. 

I've said in the past and I'll say it again here; geocaching takes me to places that I wouldn't necessarily visit were it not for geocaching. I mean, I got to stand on the corner in Winslow, Arizona while the store across the street played "Take it Easy" in a loop all day long. Unless you make it a point, a lot of these interesting tourist spots just get driven right by, but because I have an interest in travel and geocaching, I've gotten off the main highway and done some scenic byways that I might have missed otherwise. Watch the Pixar movie "Cars" and I think you'll understand perfectly.

2. Hiking

I also really enjoy hiking along all kinds of trails, but I have a big interest in longer trails, trails like the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) and the Arizona Trail (AZT) to name a few. I've hiked portions of all of these trails in my lifetime and while my age is starting to become a factor in how much backpacking I can actually do, I haven't ruled out the possibility of doing some section hikes on any of these trails. I've just become more accustomed to the finer things in life, like an actual bed to sleep in when I travel as opposed to a sleeping bag and sleeping pad on the ground.

While in Flagstaff, I was able to hike a portion of the AZT. Once again, geocaching was involved. We'd gone up to finish off a geocaching adventure up in the mountains north of Flagstaff and we'd noticed this cache just off the road at a turnout. We decided to find that cache after finishing off the Adventure stop and I am really glad we did. We pulled off at the trailhead, then took a side trail, which took us down to the AZT, which then took us up to the junction that led us out to the meadow you can see in the distance. Eventually, we found another side trail, which led us to the geocache we were looking for, one that had been hidden in July 2001. It's always cool to find caches that are 23 years old. As time goes on, these old caches are becoming rarer and rarer and so they become valuable in the game for different challenge caches out there that want you to find old caches.

3. Photography

If you're still reading along, you're probably noticing a theme for this entire entry, but you knew that was going to happen anyway, didn't you? Anyone who travels knows to bring a camera along to record their journeys and refresh their memories when they get back home and I'm no exception. 

This particular shot wasn't taken on any trip I took, but I happened to spy this ladybug right outside our community center about two blocks away from our house. I really loved the large amounts of yellow and green with that little splash of red thrown in which made for a very pleasing image in my opinion.

My photographs tend to lean heavily towards the natural side of the earth as opposed to the cultural side of things and so I have lots of landscape type photos in my galleries and photo albums. I will also tend to have lots of animal photos both large and small. Looking back on this blog entry however, I think I've actually achieved a good balance between nature and culture this time around. Sometimes that's just how it goes.

4. Food

When I'm out and about traveling, I tend to lean toward more local cuisine, especially when I'm eating at the dinner hour. This trip to Flagstaff last month was no exception. We had Mexican food, we had Neapolitan Pizza, and then we had some American comfort food in the form of this Texas burger with sweet potato fries and a stout chocolate porter. And yes, there's bacon in there too. Just looking at that photo makes my mouth water. This meal, for the most part, was the perfect ending night of that weekend.

Please also understand that for lunch I'll usually eat at a place that's tested and true for fast food, mainly because I have an agenda that I like to complete. We ate at In-n-Out for lunch one of the days on this trip. It was quick and easy and I can now say I've eaten at the highest elevated In-n-Out at just around 7000 feet above sea level. In fact, it's the only in-n-Out I've eaten at where they didn't have the crossed palm trees (a corporate symbol) out in front of the restaurant. It's just too cold for the palm trees to survive. So it's fast food for lunch but breakfast and dinner are really supposed to be savored when I'm traveling.

5. Family

I really couldn't go an entire blog entry about myself without talking about my family and particularly, this little gem. I found myself getting to hang out with my favorite tiny human in the middle of the month in Paso Robles so her parents could attend a wedding there. We got to hang out all weekend together, play in the park, go to a farmer's market and then enjoy each other's company in the evening while her parents were at the wedding.

I don't know if you've ever heard the sayings about being a grandparent, but everything you've heard is definitely true. Being this tiny human's Papa is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. We're fortunate enough that we live only a half day's drive away from them, so I get to see her on a regular basis. That, plus the technology of the day where we can FaceTime at meals really allows me to see her grow up. And yet I'm still amazed when I look back at videos from six months ago and see how much she's grown. Let's just leave it at, I'm really enjoying this part of my life.

And there you have it, my take on the theme "A Look into my Life." Please feel free to comment and check out the other entries to this month over at P.J. blog.

Exploration

It's the beginning of the month and although it's a little late, it's time for P.J.'s photo blogging challenge for the month of February. The theme this past month was Exploration. After looking at my photos that I took last month, the explore theme fell right into my lap and the tough part was picking the photos that I wanted to represent each exploration, but I narrowed them down to five and so here we go.  This is my take on the theme Exploration.

First off, I want everyone to know right now that most of this post will be about geocaching, so if you're not interested in geocaching, then feel free to stop at this point in time. All of the photos for this month's theme dealt with geocaching in one form or another, sort of.

1. Exploring Geology

The first weekend in February I took a road trip to southwestern Arizona, most particularly, Yuma, Arizona. The geocaching group down there hosts a large event on the Sunday and there's all sorts of things happening the entire weekend. One of the things I like to do when I'm on a road trip is to get as many different icons (geocaching types) as possible. One of the types that I found that weekend were five earth caches, where you learn about a geologic phenomenon of some kind, then answer some questions regarding what you've seen.

This particular earth cache is located just north of the town square in Yuma. We actually had a little time to kill before heading down to the town square for a flash mob event, so we stopped off here to study the rock and answer the questions put to us on the cache page. Most geologists that I know always carry a coin in their pockets so they can use it as a reference marker for grain size of a particular rock, hence the photo of the quarter on this rock. We ended up finding five different earth caches that weekend, not a large total, but it was enough for us with all of the other things that we explored that weekend.

2. Exploring History

One of the newer types of geocaches are the Adventures. They are kind of a cross between a multi cache and a virtual cache. We did quite a few Adventures on our way down to Yuma, mainly because it was raining all the way down there and the Adventures tend to work better, because you're looking for information, as opposed to an actual container and so you can usually get the answer much more quickly.

However, several of the Adventures that we'd chosen to do that day were quite moving and we ended up getting pretty wet in the process. One Adventure in Cathedral City had a stop at a Cancer Survivor's Park, which, for obvious reasons, was quite emotional for me. I chose not to post a photo for that one, mainly because I didn't feel a got any really good photos and so I opted to post this second photo instead.

This Adventure was in Palm Desert and explored a huge park in the city. One of the stops along the Adventure was the Desert Holocaust Memorial. This particular sculpture was right in the middle of the spot and I felt the sculptor caught the essence of the tragedy of this event. I hope I was able to convey with my photo what I felt the sculptor had already done.

3 & 4. Exploring Food

In our local geocaching community, I have a reputation of liking my food and I also have a reputation that when I say I'm hungry, that's usually the signal that we need to stop very soon and find a place to eat, otherwise "Webfoot" is going to get hangry. And hangry Webfoot is not a pleasant individual to be around. On this trip, I don't think I ever had to worry about being hangry, or even hungry because we ate well.

We were in the Palm Springs area on the first day and my daughter, when she heard that we were going to be going through Palm Springs, recommended Sherman's Deli and Bakery. The menu was extensive and I eventually settled on Sherman's Philly, with brisket, peppers, onions and provolone. Then of course, I almost had buyer's regret when I saw the man at the next table get served his Reuben sandwich. Man, that looked good, but once my sandwich came, I was all in. I guess what this really means is I need to go back there again to try the Reuben. Yeah, I can do that.

We had an asian buffet later that weekend and the last night we were there, we had fantastic Mexican food at this place that used to serve up from a Taco truck, but in the past year or so have found a brick and mortar building to serve great food. After we finished there, I mentioned that we really needed to go get some ice cream and so we ended up driving up to Mooos Creamery.

The wait was a little long, but the ice cream was worth the wait. My friend Kami had already decided when we walked into the place that she was going to sit on the ice cream bench as opposed to a booth, and so that's why we ended up there.The place had so many choices, that this is one of those places where you're going to have to go back more than once to really enjoy yourself. I had two different flavors and I could have probably chosen six or seven different ones; they all looked so good. Once we were totally satiated with that, as always, we checked our geocaching apps and realized there was a geocache right behind the building, so we walked out and around to the back of the building to score one more find before the night was done.

5. Exploring Geography

If you don't already know it, then I should tell you that I majored in Geography in college. I ended up taking a physical geography course while in community college and I was off and running from there. I'd found a subject that really interested me and I took more and more courses there and when I transferred to Humboldt State University, I continued to take courses in Geography pursuant to my degree.

I can honestly say that most of my hobbies revolve around geography in some way or another. I discovered Where's George? the dollar bill tracking web site. You enter your dollar bills, mark them in some way telling people to come to the website and then you spend your money in the hope that it will show up again. This hobby led me to Geocaching and although I still find Where's George? interesting, it's more of a passive type of hobby since you can't really control where your bills go.

Geocaching, on the other hand, you control what you do.  You want to go on a road trip to find geocaches? Go for it. You want to find urban micros? Go for it. I guess the point I'm trying to make is you can decide how your geocaching hobby works for you and that's why I like it so much more so than Where's George? I think that I like geocaching so much more because it involves all sorts of the different types of geography that I studied when I was in college, physical, historical, political, and many others.

Geography in general is a combination of different fields that sort of overlap. For instance in this last photo, we can see the physical geography of an area, what the lay of the land is doing and how those mountains in the background might be influenced by the river that you can't quite see behind me (that's an irrigation canal directly behind me). You can also see the political and human implications if you explore more deeply into this photo. I found this photo interesting from that point of view. Here I am, exploring my hobby of geocaching in Arizona, with California over my left shoulder and Mexico over my right shoulder.

And there you have it, my interpretation of the theme for this month Exploration. Please feel free to stop by P.J.'s blog and see how he and others interpreted the same theme. Please feel to comment here. I promise, I won't bite.

Snap Away!

I haven't participated in P.J.'s photo blogging challenge in a couple of months, mainly because I don't like to force my photography, rather I like to let my photography happen and see if anything might fit the theme for that particular month. Needless to say, nothing in my photography in the last couple of months has really fit recent themes, but this month's theme was Snap Away! and I figured anything I took this month would probably work and I've got a few nice shots that I can write about. 

Hopefully, this will get me blogging again as it's been almost two months since I've written anything here too. Got into the doldrums with not being able to do much of anything and just didn't really feel like writing anything. I have a variety of subjects I still have in the back of my mind that I want to write about, most notably I'd like to finish up my 2017 road trip. When last we left our intrepid explorers, they were in Abilene, Kansas. But that's for another entry. This is for the photo blogging challenge.

So here we go.

Bobcat Fire

As anyone knows who follow the news at all, the west coast of the United States has pretty much been burning out of control. This shot, which was taken on September 9th, is looking over my garage. The Bobcat fire started on September 6th, so it was relatively new at the time I took that shot, but it just exploded over the past three weeks. As of this writing, it has burned 114,000+ acres and is now only 63% contained. And this is just one such fire in California, let alone the rest of the western states. If you click on the link and back out of the map a little bit, you can get an idea of what the fire situation is like in the western United States. It's brutal and we really have just started fire season now!

Mushrooms

Mushrooms don't seem to last very long in an urban area. People like to kick them over as soon as they come up. These particular mushrooms are actually creating a lopsided fairy ring. Unfortunately, the groundskeepers at our local park mow the grass on a regular basis, so the mushrooms don't last very long. The day after I took this shot, most had been kicked over, probably by kids, but they wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway because the grass was mown about two days later. Still it's interesting to see how the grass to the right, and inside the fairy ring, is slightly greener and always taller than the grass on the outside. I'm not sure if this is a product of the mushrooms providing extra nutrients to the soil or not, but I enjoy watching them pop up.

Watch where you walk

Last week, I went on an extended hike for the first time in awhile, due to the excessive heat we've been having here in California. We're having more right now, but this is sort of a "last gasp" of summer before it really gets cooler. Earlier, it was just damn hot, triple digit type of heat.

The reason for this shot, is more of a public service announcement more than anything. I've already posted this shot on Facebook for my friends and hiking buddies, but everyone should consider this shot. First, if you look closely, you will see that this is a baby rattler. How can you tell? First, there is little to no rattle, but it has a nice triangular shaped head, so I knew is was a rattler right away. Second, if you look at the footprints, you can see the snake is very small, compared to the footprints. Adults will get several feet in length. This one was no more than a foot long, just sunning itself in the middle of the trail.

When I hike, I usually scan several paces ahead of me, just in case I encounter something like this, so I was aware of it and stopped short. People not paying attention might have stepped right on this one. Once I got my shot, it decided that I was bigger than it was and it turned tail and headed back into the bushes and I made a wide berth around it on the other side of the trail. Thing to note is, not more than 100 yards (meters) to the right of this shot are residential houses. We live in their homes, so we should not be surprised if they show up in our back yards.

Embrace the shaggy

My last haircut was on February 12th. For those of you keeping track at home, that's 7 and a half months, for a guy who usually keeps his hair closely cropped, it's pretty much out of control at this point. I haven't felt comfortable going back to my barber to get it cut and so it continues to grow. This shot was taken on September 1st, so it's had another month to grow since then and it's almost as long as it was when I was in college, when it was "fashionable" to have long hair. I've been told to embrace the shaggy and I have done that, but my wife still likes a clean shave as opposed to a "Grizzly Adams" type of look, and so I still keep my face shaved for her sake.

I have had a beard from time to time, but the last time was the year before I retired. I shaved it off on the last day of school 2018 and haven't had one since. A co-worker said I reminded her of the movie character Benjamin Button, because it appeared that I was aging in reverse as I approached my retirement. Whatever works I guess. I wonder if it still looks like that however?

My better half

I took this photo when we were celebrating my youngest's birthday. My daughter ordered Ding Ding Dongs from a local bakery. We used to live right next door to the owners, so we're trying to support our friends and some local businesses at the came time. Cucamonga Cakery has a Facebook order form where you can order and then pick up on Saturdays, so if you live in our local area consider supporting a local business. Now after my shameless promotion, back to my better half.

She has become harder and harder to photograph over the years. I'm not sure what it is, but I used to be able to get, what I considered really good photos of her, but recently, I haven't, which is why I'm very pleased with this shot as it's one of the best photos I've taken of her in probably five years or so.

And there you have it. This is my five shots for P.J.'s photo blogging challenge for the month of September. Please stop by his site and check out how others interpreted the same theme. I hope you enjoyed my shots and I have to admit, I really enjoyed going through the shots I took this month to come up with five that I could really write stories about. Here's looking forward to writing more about more of my wanderings.