Ben's Birthday and Chambers Bay Love Lock Bridge

Since we went to bed late the night before we got up really late the next morning.  We heard Trish, Brad and Amy get up for work pretty early.  When they use the showers we could hear the water rush through the pipes since we are in the downstairs bedroom.  It woke me up a few times but I got comfortable again and ended up falling asleep for a few more hours.  When I finally got up, I used the restroom and headed upstairs to use the computer for a while.  I went back downstairs and made Ben get up because it was getting late and I wanted to know what he wanted to do today since it was his actual birthday.

I went back upstairs and continued what I was doing.  It was well beyond breakfast time and we needed to find some food soon whether we made it at the house or went into town and grabbed something.  Amy would be home soon from work.  For the past few months she has been driving herself to and from work in the truck.  It saves Trish a lot of driving back and forth to her job to take Amy to and from work.  It was nice to see that Amy could do it for herself to save Trish a lot of time from missing work and having to make it up.

Ben finally came upstairs and we chatted a bit on what we wanted for food.  We both decided that it was a bit late for breakfast so we got our shoes on and headed into Bonney Lake to get sandwiches from Jersey Mike's.  I got a turkey and cheddar and he got himself a club with everything on it toasted.  I am glad we got there when we did because a million people decided they wanted sandwiches too.  We paid and headed back to the house.  We had tortilla chips and drinks at home so we didn't need that extra expense. 

We sat at the table and a few bites in Amy showed up from work.  She immediately went over to the pantry and ate some sort of a breakfast type bar instead of having an actual lunch.  We gave her a hard time about it.  Meanwhile I checked the internet to find out how to get to the park at Chambers Bay.  I wanted to put a lock on the fence for Ben's birthday.  We had asked Trish if she had any extra locks we could have.  She found two and we spent some of the morning decorating them with dates, names, etc.  They looked pretty good using Sharpie instead of nail polish.

Ben asked Amy to turn the TV off to talk about her boyfriend, Greg.  We just wanted to know more about him.  She took offense because their relationship became pretty rocky up to this point.  We knew he was lying to her based off of the information we have received from her so far.  We asked her a series of questions and she did not want to answer any of them.  She kept yelling PLEASE! Then would shut down and stare at her phone.  We both decided not to press the situation any further.

It was getting late and it still was getting dark around 5.  I told Ben if we wanted to go to Chamber's Bay we would have to start getting our stuff together to leave.  I went downstairs and started putting our stuff together.  I made the bed and took everything upstairs and put everything into the Escape.  I got him motivated to go so we could stop at the park on our way home.  I knew it was going to get dark soon.  We told Amy bye and we would see her again soon.  We took the DVD we borrowed from Redbox back before we headed down the hill into Sumner.  We got onto River Road in Puyallup and followed it to I-5.  We took the appropriate exit and followed Nuvi's directions to the park. 

Chamber's Bay was the location of the US Open golf championships back in June 2015.  I was so thankful I was not working at the hotel at that point.  The previous month I was let go and never looked back.  I wasn't sure where to go when we got there so we followed the signs and drove down a long hill towards the Puget Sound.  I saw the parking lot and found a spot to park.  I grabbed our locks, phones and keys and headed out towards the bridge.  The weather could have been better but it was late winter and this time of year the weather is very sporadic.  It was a light rainy mist and in the upper 50's.

We walked the bridge to find a good spot for our locks.  I had one and Ben had one.  I told him he could put it anywhere he wanted along the bridge.  I found my spot.

We walked further down the bridge to find a good spot for his lock.  He found a corner and locked it in place.  We could see Fox and McNeil Island from the end of the bridge.  The rain had subsided the rest of the time we were at the park.  It was nice to not be rained on but the daylight was going away fast.

I wanted to go explore the grounds.  The park featured some really cool structures that I am glad they didn't tear down when they converted the land into a golf course/park.  The structures were pretty cool.  One of them reminded me of Star Wars.

We saw there was a cache nearby, 4 Leg Monster (GC1WMFV) and headed over to it.  It was near some ruin looking cement structures and we started looking for it.  We didn't end up finding it because it was obvious that it was missing.  The last time it was found was during the Tacoma Cache Machine in January.  We will have to come back to find it when it is replaced.

It was getting dark and the facility would soon come by and close the gate.  We didn't want to get stuck here.  We walked back to the Escape and headed home through Steilacoom and the back way through Dupont.  We got onto I-5 there and got off at Marvin to head towards home.  We got home just before 7, made a quick dinner, started a load of laundry and got ready for the new week.  The weekend was fun but I know Ben would have liked to do something else besides geocaching and hanging out with his family.  I'm hoping next year we could do plan some sort of trip instead.

Next Adventure:  St. Patrick's Day Paint Night

Geocaching in Bonney Lake and Iron Chef

We got up late and were hurting because that mattress we slept on made us feel older than we actually are.  I must have been really tired because I didn't get up at all through the night.  I did get too hot though in the wee hours of the morning.  I ended up taking my socks and sweat pants off.

I couldn't lay anymore so I got up, used the restroom, got cleaned up a bit and headed upstairs.  Trish was already up, sipping her coffee and getting everything ready for a French toast and sausage breakfast.  I went back downstairs and finally got Ben out of bed so we could eat some food.  I was getting hungry.  I brought my computer upstairs and did some internetting and looked at some of the geocaches I haven't gotten around the area yet. 

Food got done really fast and Amy finally got out of bed.  She was having a rough weekend because her boyfriend was being distant and sending up some serious red flags.  Amy was pretty mopey most of the weekend.  We got the table ready and dug in.  It all hit the spot.  I asked if we could have a small birthday party after breakfast before we all get busy.  Trish said sure.  After breakfast we cleaned up, I grabbed Ben's gifts and Trish went and wrapped hers.  Amy grabbed the card she had ready for him.

We sat in the living room and he opened his gifts.  He got a gift card from Amy and his mom, she had also gotten him some Seahawk chip clips that are also magnets.  I got him his 35 lb. kettlebell he had asked for a few months ago, some athletic shorts and Irish Death beer.

He went outside to fill in and fix some of the landscaping the septic tank contractors messed up.  He was out there for about an hour raking, shoveling and moving rocks.  I asked Ben if we could go geocaching for a bit after he was done.  He said sure.  I asked Trish if she wanted to go and she said yeah, I could get out of the house for a while.  I got onto the computer and looked for a few to go get in the area.  I solved two puzzle caches, one at the library and one near the actual Bonney Lake.  I made a list of about 10 just in case we had time to find them all.

He finished with the front yard, I got my warm clothes on, Trish put her warm clothes on, Amy decided to stay home, we got into the Escape and headed out to the first one, Della's 8-25 B-Day (GC15EK9).  This one was located off of the Old Sumner Buckley Highway.  The road was somewhat busy but we managed to find a pullout near some concrete road partitions.  The short dirt road off the main road could take you to the backside of the Target. I let Ben and Trish look for the cache.  I knew it was going to be underneath the cement structures.  Ben managed to find it quickly.  We signed our names and headed to the next one.

Bring Your Library Card (GC2EXJ3) was the first of the two puzzle caches I solved today.  We got to the library and I had to explain to Ben and Trish what a library cache was.  I told them that they are all different and I have found at least five so far since I've been caching.  My first one was at the Yelm Library back in 2011.  It has since been archived.  Earlier I had to figure out some numbers based on the Dewey Decimal System.  However I forgot to solve for H which made the search harder.  I took a few minutes to solve for H and found out which section of books we needed to look in.  We found the "book" and signed our names.

We drove to Main Street, not even a quarter of a mile away from the library, to get our third cache of the day, Main Street (GC6239FZ). I looked at the hint and knew it was going to be on the stop sign somewhere.  We parked in a lot across the street from the sidewalk and the sign.  We ran across the street and luckily Ben was tall enough to reach it or we wouldn't have been able to get it as easily.  The hard part was getting the darn log book out of the nano screw.  It took us forever because we didn't bring tweezers with us.  I used to bring all that stuff with me when I went more often than I do now.  Trish went and got her Seahawks Swiss army knife and we managed to finally get the log out of it.  We saw Brad drive by in his truck as we were signing our initials on the book.

We drove onto Hwy 410 and turned onto Myers.  We took the first open driveway to park the car and walk the remaining 100 feet to the cache site.  It took us a while to zero in on the cache.  The power lines above did not help the situation.  We Left the Good Hands (GC2HAA9) was a tricky one.  Trish ended up stepping on it and noticing a container embedded into it.  "Is this it?" She asked.  "It sure is!"  We signed our names and Ben made sure it was put back with some leaves and tree debris over it for the next set of cachers.

We walked back to the Escape, turned it on, put the coordinates into the Nuvi to the next one and Trish exclaims, "Did you guys just hear that wreck?  It just happened."  As she is pointing to where Myers merges onto Hwy 410.  Neither Ben or I heard anything.  Ben gets out and calls 911 and walks towards the wreck.  We are still not sure how it happened but it involved a huge pick up truck and a small Honda Civic type car.  They were smashed pretty bad and the car was smoking.  The Civic driver was an older Asian woman who basically walked away uninjured and the truck was a 35+ guy who was uninjured however his daughter in the backseat had a possible broken arm.  Ben helped while the fire department and the ambulance was on their way.  Once they got there, he explained who he was and they took over.

We headed up the hill as we were still trying to figure out who hit who.  Our next stop was Myers Road #1 (GC69QVP) and apparently it was hidden in plain sight.  I pulled over near a driveway into a housing development and of course a giant motor home wanted to turn right where we were.  It was lame but we were way out of the way.  We searched the side of the road the Escape was on and couldn't find anything that was magnetic.  We jogged over to the other side to expand our search zone.  I looked on everything that was metal that a small cache would stick to.  Apparently I didn't check one spot.  I was getting to the point where maybe it was missing?  Then Ben and Trish walked over and Ben says "Here it is!  It's in plain sight!"  I'm glad we didn't have to mark it as a DNF.

We stopped by Allen York Park to look for 10 Years! - East Pierce, WA #2: Plateau (GC27PBY) and could not find it.  We had a great walk in the park though.  We walked back to the Escape and headed to the actual Bonney Lake where the second puzzle I solved this morning, Love My Harley (GC4DYZ0), was located.  The loop around the lake was one way so it was weird navigating around.  We found where the cache was hidden, pulled over, I had Ben grab it and sign it for us and he hopped back in.

We had time for one more before we got ready to go out to dinner for Ben's birthday.  I found the closest one that was found recently and it brought us to the Bonney Lake Dog Park (GC59JND).  We parked near the elementary school and walked to the gate.  I was telling Ben and Trish that I came here a few years ago with Bob and Bev and we could not find this one.  We really thought it was missing because we should have found it right away due to the hint.  We walked down the trail and crossed paths with a guy who was walking his dog.  He asked, "aren't you guys missing a dog?"  We chuckled and told him we were geocaching.  He just continued walking by.  We made it to the section of the trail where some of the trees were down and a place I spent a half hour looking with Bob and Bev a while back.  Trish literally walked over to the crossed trees, picked something up and asked if this is what we were looking for.  I said, "it couldn't have been that easy! We spent a long time looking and came up with nothing the last time I was here!"  We signed our names, put it back and walked back to the Escape.

We headed back to the house and on the way we let Amy know to get ready because we didn't want to wait for her.  When we did get home Trish changed and put on some make up, I changed my pants and shoes and Ben did the same.  Brad didn't want to go so he stayed.  We ended up taking the Escape because it was parked behind everyone.  We drove to the South Hill via the back way through
McMillin down in the valley and up the hill to Puyallup.  We went to a Japanese steak house called Iron Chef.  We got in quickly and sat with some strangers.  Our waiter took our drink order and which dinner we wanted.

I had the steak and chicken.  Our chef messed up and ended up giving me fried rice that I didn't ask for so Ben ate it.  Both times I've been to Japanese steak houses we really haven't had a fun chef.  In fact both were pretty blah.  They did the standard tricks with the knives, egg juggling and the onion volcano.  Amy was drinking tea and her tea kettle fell apart and she was very embarrassed.  Our hostess brought her a new one.  We ate way too much food, paid way too much and headed back to Bonney Lake the same way.  We stopped at Fred Meyer to pick up another movie and this time they had the newer Ghostbusters movie. 

We got back to the house and had a birthday cake for Ben which was an ice cream brownie cake.  It was delicious.

We watched Ghostbusters with everyone since Brad's kids, Grace and Christian, were at the house for the evening.  I did some internetting at the table while I watched the movie. 

I stayed up until about one and decided I was done for the evening.  Today was pretty eventful and I hope the weather starts getting better so I can go out and geocache more.

Next Adventure:  Ben's Birthday and Chambers Bay Love Lock Bridge

SE Thurston Relay for Life Kick Off

I started doing Relay for Life with my mom and her office back in 2013.  I've been involved with it every year except for 2015 because dad was in the hospital for his heart attack and we were out of town that weekend at Mount Rainier.  This past September I decided to join the leadership team so I could be involved more and I could do stuff with mom since I was on her relay team anyway.  She was on the accounting team and I was on the social media team.  I have been posting pictures, events, links and shout outs to the SE Thurston County area and the people who follow.

I have been attending the Leadership meetings that are held Mondays at the end of the month at the bowling alley in Yelm.  We have relay rallies every first Monday of the month at the bar and grill by the golf course in Yelm, everyone who wants to attend can come to those.  We were at the Christmas in the Park parade and had a booth set up at the event at the park.  That pretty much sums up my involvement so far. 

February is basically when we kick started our 2017 season.  In fact, our event was called the SE Thurston County Relay for Life Kick Off.  I heard last year not a lot of people came because there was a horrible accident on I-5 that shuttled people around through Hwy 7 and 507 to avoid it.  It took people a long time to get through and made people really late getting to the event.  The event was community supported through fundraisers and donations.  NW Chevrolet in McKenna donated the space for our event, UpTown Lounge supplied the food and beverages and our county supplied the entertainment and prizes.  We were hoping to have a lot of people show up and find out what we were all about and possibly register a team to walk around the track this upcoming August.  I was excited to see how this event went down since this was my first one.

I got there around 4:00 and helped our volunteers set up.  We got it thrown up really fast...I mean, I hardly had to do anything we had so many helpers.  I walked around and took pictures of our team setting up the photo booth, our DJ, the food, Plinko, bra pong and the registration/information tables.

Our decorations were pretty cool too.  Since our theme is Dr. Seuss someone had the brilliant idea of taking pool noodles and adding tissue paper to the end of it to make it look like trees from the book series.  We had a Grinch cutout and one of our own dressed up as the Cat in the Hat.

I went live with Nichole while we were setting things up.  She expressed interest in doing it during the event.

It began at 6 and we had quite a few people show up.  I ate some food before it got too busy and before the kick off ceremony started.  Ben and I got in line for some shrimp cocktail (I'm not a fan of shrimp so I skipped it), pulled pork sliders, raspberry vinaigrette salad and cheesecake with raspberry drizzle were on the menu for tonight.  It was pretty tasty.  We sat near the Plinko board and watched mom give out prizes and sign their passports.  If they got all of their spaces blacked out they went into a drawing for the end of the event for a prize.

Around 7 I remembered that I had to go live on Facebook to film the event for the people who couldn't make it to the kick off.  At one point I had four people watching it live.  I received a few comments and a couple of shares.  It was kinda cool going live.  The only hard thing about it was holding it up for almost 30 minutes.  Nichole wrapped it up and thanked everyone for coming. 

We spent about a half hour cleaning everything up and put into various vehicles to be taken back to where we borrowed it from.  I was amazed we got everything done that fast.  We helped mom put the Plinko board into her car.  From there, Ben and I headed to Bonney Lake for the weekend.

We rolled in around 9ish.  We stopped at Walmart quickly to pick up some popcorn and drinks.  We got to the house and unloaded our stuff into the room downstairs.  Ben started a movie, The Avengers:  Civil War and I made popcorn on the stove.  Trish gave me a pot with a lid and it had a hole in it.  It made for an interesting experience trying to keep the popcorn in the pot until it was done.

There was a lot of laughing and carrying on.  We ate the popcorn, internetted and watched the movie.  We talked a little bit to Brad and Amy.  I got tired so we went to bed around 1ish.

Next Adventure:  Geocaching in Bonney Lake and Iron Chef

Superbowl LI and Snow

I was really hoping that the Seahawks got to go to the Super Bowl again but sadly we lost to the Falcons who beat the Packers to play for the NFC side.  The AFC side featured unfortunately the Patriots again.  With the deflategate going on and the stupid nonsense of Tom Brady I thought it deemed appropriate that the Patriots got to play in Super Bowl LI (lie). 

As soon as we found out who was playing we really didn't have plans for Super Bowl Sunday.  We thought about just staying home and chilling.  Ben talked with Wendy and she was having some people over for the game and celebrating Walter's upcoming birthday as well.  He told her that we would be happy to come over and hang out.  The next day or so, Ben's mom called him asking him what we were doing for the game and we said we were going to go over to Walt and Wendy's house.  We asked if she wanted to come and she said no because Brad and the kids were over that weekend.  He said a few days sooner and we would have come over.  She understood that Wendy asked us first.

Ben got a hold of Wendy again to find out what we needed to bring.  She said some sort of dessert.  He also found out that we could have a dining room table and a set of 6 chairs if we wanted it.  She was going to sell it to us for $350 bucks.  I said sure.  We each gave them $50 bucks to start out with.  We owe them now only $250.

We decided to make football shaped brownies.  We couldn't find a cookie cutter so we made one out of some cardboard.  We headed to Safeway and bought some mix and a couple of other things, made some dinner and made the brownies so we didn't have to do it the next day.  We saw how many brownies it made and we were concerned that we wouldn't have enough.  We really didn't know how many people would be coming to the party.

We didn't have to be there until about 3ish so we slept in a little bit, I've been having rough Fridays at work so sleep was magnificent, got cleaned up and made sure we had everything before we left.  We told kitty we would see him later and we headed out.  I wanted to get there somewhat early just in case traffic was horrible.  Plus we were suppose to get snow today and we had no idea when it was going to start.

We stopped by the Safeway on Canyon to pick up some more dessert and some drinks.  We really weren't sure how many people were going to come and eight brownies weren't going to do it.  Ben said that Wendy was making finger foods for the party and didn't say what they were.  We got there just after 2.  She had us help her with making food.  We had these tator tot hamburger thingies, nutter butter referees, chips, salsa, guacamole, cupcakes, fruit, carrots, cookies, brownies and drinks.  We found out none of the people they invited were going to come.  We had a ton of food and desserts to eat up.

Then it started snowing.

It was nearing game time so we all loaded up our plates, found places to sit and started watching the game. 

The Falcons were absolutely dominating!  It was so much fun to watch Brady and the Patriots struggle.  The halftime score was 21-3.  I sure hope they kept this up.  There was a lot more football left to play.  We watched Lady Gaga's halftime performance.  I am not really a fan of hers but she put on a good show.  I was impressed.  The commercials didn't really live up to the hype of previous years but there were still some funny ones.

The snow continued.

The third quarter began and I should have placed a bet.  I called overtime.  The Falcons went into the locker room like they've already won the game and when they came back out they felt like they had a good lead.  They didn't play the same way.  They were not confident, they made mistakes and the Patriots capitalized on them.  I've played and watched a lot of sports over the years and I know the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose...they are distinct.  The Falcons were playing not to lose especially in the 4th quarter.  One play determined the rest of their game.  If they weren't pushed back out of field goal range the game would have been over instead the Patriots got the ball back and sent it into over time.  I can not believe I had just witnessed a huge let down.  This was the first super bowl determined by an over time which was totally bogus by the way...he never crossed the plane.  The Patriots didn't win the game; the Falcons lost the game.  It was not a comeback but more of a melt down and the media is giving the Patriots way too much credit.  It was a melt down that is what sealed it for the Patriots.  The Falcons did not come to play in the second half.  Period.

The snow continued and it was piling up fast.  When we were getting ready to leave the snow was around 4 inches.  Our journey home was going to be interesting.

We gave Wendy our checks while Ben and Chris put the table and chairs in the Escape.  We didn't think it all was going to fit but magically it all did.  We thanked them for the table and chairs and inviting us to watch the game with us.  We brushed off the Escape, put our stuff inside and headed home.

The side roads were worse than the main roads and the freeway...the plows had gotten to these.  The Escape drives pretty good in the snow and I wasn't worried.  We called Trish on the way home to bother her and to see what they thought of the game.  They were pretty upset too.  She told us to be careful. 

We got home around 9ish and took some pictures of the snow.  We even got our sleds out and slid down our small driveway hill a few times. 

Then we brought in our table and chairs and assembled it. 

I got a shower, got my stuff ready for the work day and headed to bed.  I wasn't worry about my commute to work but I was worried that no one was going to come to work the next day.

Next Adventure:  SE Relay for Life Kick Off

Rat Catching

A few weeks ago I was throwing some of our recyclables into the bin out in the garage.  As soon as I opened the door and turned the light on I immediately saw something large scurry down the side of the wall.  Dude! That had to be a rat! 

Since we were making dinner and Ben was in the kitchen I told him what I saw.  He said he hadn't seen anything like that in the garage since we moved in.  Neither have I until a few seconds ago.  I really hoped the rat hadn't gotten into anything important.  I went in there a few minutes later and checked our sleeping bags...we really didn't need rat nests or rat babies inside our camping gear.  We did notice there were two spots in the garage where something had been chewed.  One pile was plastic chards and the other was some sort of black foam bits.  I looked around for something that resembled those two things and I couldn't.  I have no idea where they were coming from.  Possibly the attic?

In the next few days I bought some traps.  A large one for rats and some smaller ones for the normal sized mice.  With my experience, which has reached expert level living out in the country, I have caught many mice and rats in my day.  One summer, many years ago, we caught over 40 mice...true story!  We have found out that your basic cheese does not work.  Some use peanut butter but I use chocolate.  You melt it just enough to where it's pliable so you can adhere it to the trap, it hardens and the rat can't walk away with the bait.

Earlier in the week Ben set the traps.  We hope that we could catch the little turd before he started getting into something else.  We checked everyday to see if we had a dead rat body.  No luck.  After the third day I was getting frustrated that we haven't caught him yet.

I stopped checking when I went into the garage the next few days.  It was getting hopeless that we would catch him.  We were making dinner again and I was tossing some of our glass jars and paper boxes into the bin again.  We turned the light on and Ben noticed we got him!  We finally caught him!  Yessss!  He was huge!!

Ben grabbed a bag and we posed with it like we had just caught the biggest fish in the lake.  It was awesome!  The thing weight at least a pound and a half and his tail was like 10 inches long!

We cleaned up the mess it made.  When the trap snapped on its head it gushed blood all over the floor.  It was cold so some of it froze to the garage floor.  I threw some hot water on it and then bleached it just so we knew the area was clean.  Ben tossed the rat body in the garbage can.  We were very proud that we destroyed the rat that could have eaten some of our camping gear or Ben's work gear.  We will have to keep an eye out on more of them.  I'm sure there are more rat and mice adventures in our future.  Until then.

Next Adventure:  Superbowl LI and Snow