Geocaching

We had the most fantastic day Saturday! The weather was absolutely gorgeous. We packed a cooler, hooked up the GPS to my laptop in the SUV, and took off for a day of Geocaching. We headed up to Lake Pend Oreille... over around the east side of the lake and into Montana. It was an all-day trip and we hit 10 caches.

#1. Sunnyside Up. What a pretty area! We had a time deciding which was the "eagle tree" but we finally found the cache.

#2. Pack River Flats. What a beautiful view! Water level was awfully close to the cache, but it was still dry inside.

#3. Bridge Out? My favorite cache of the day! We saw a moose! We have lived here for 7 years... and this is the first time I've been close enough to a moose in the wild to get a picture of it.

#4. Fountain. What an interesting spot. We also wondered why the fountain was here... and enjoyed the view.

#5. Crossroads of Old and New. Had our picnic lunch here.

#6. Boo-Boo Cache. A very cool location near a historic Ranger Station.

#7. Big Eddy.

#8. Spring Creek.

#9. Ross Creek Giants. My second favorite cache of the day. In fact, it is right up there with the Bridge Out one. The cedar forest was like entering fairy land! The kids thought it was a great playground... and we expected to meet up with a hobbit just any minute!

#10. Thompson Pass.

Gardening

For the Roses by Julie Garwood is one of my favorite romance novels. Read it years ago. We watched the Hallmark movie that was based on it this week, so I had to dig the book out to re-read it.

Speaking of roses, they are just beginning to bud in my neighborhood. The irises are at their peak. I don't have either in my yard. I have one large pot of pansies and violas on the porch. I planted the pansies last fall and they survived the winter. They love the cool-ish spring weather and are just going to town... blooming their little hearts out!

I also planted 3 grape tomato plants in a large planter. They are beginning to bloom already! I was so late getting my tomatoes set out last year that they didn't do much. Hopefully I'll have better luck this year. Nothing like home-grown sun-ripened tomatoes! And I love the little grape ones that you can just pop in your mouth.

A friend gave me a start of spearmint that is just going to town in another planter. I'd like to get a piece of peppermint to stick in the other end of the same planter. The same friend gave me some "pungent" plants that were coming up in their garden... it's either garlic or chives. It will be interesting to see what develops. I stuck those in another planter. (Can you tell I lean toward container gardening?)

Let's see... what else do I have going? Oh, yes... a wheelbarrow full of strawberry plants! Our elderly next-door neighbor died last year. She was a wonderful gardener. Her son (our pastor) gave me the wheelbarrow of strawberries last fall. I threw leaves on top of it and pushed it up against the house. This spring I took the leaves off and moved it out in the sun. The plants are blooming! Maybe we'll have a few berries off it.

I do have one little flower bed by the front steps. I need to get some annuals to put in it. This year I'd like to just do a mix of 4 or 5 different things all jumbled together. I should do that this week. I'd also like to fix some hanging baskets of annuals for the porch. They are expensive to buy already put together, but maybe I can put some together myself for a fraction of the cost. We'll see.

Show-off Horse

Animals are so funny! I have always enjoyed the antics of cats and dogs... but I never realized how funny horses are, too. My brother raises Arabians. He has 3 stallions and several mares. We were visiting him last week and he decided to let one of the stallions out of the barn into a corral. The stallions basically live in the barn and take turns getting turned outside for exercise. Well, this was the "granddaddy" stallion... 20-some-years-old... but still whickering at the mares. My brother said it was a "wolf whistle"! The old feller didn't know that particular mare was his granddaughter, nor did he care! (Okay, I guess it was really a filly, rather than a mare, since she's only about a year old and has not been bred yet.)

So, he goes trotting out in the corral, happy to be out where he can kick up his heels. The first thing he did was lay down and roll over on his back, waving his legs in the air, rolling from side-to-side. That was hilarious to watch! I guess that was how he scratched his back. Then he got up and "played" with my brother. The stallion would lunge at Tim, then Tim would run and the horse would chase him. They were both having a fine time! My husband and I had started back for the house, but we were walking along the corral fence. We stopped to watch the "show", but we were a good ways down the fence from where my brother was. The horse would run the length of the corral, but never go near the fence except where we were! He would dash over and kick dirt at us and then go on! It was a riot! We decided that he knew we were watching him, and he was showing off for us. Tim told us later that was exactly what he was doing!

Exhausted!

We traveled nearly 1700 miles in 4 days last week. I set-up and took down my Sonlight booth 4 times, and spoke 4 times. I am exhausted! I'm grateful I have a 4-week break before my next 2 conventions. They are back-to-back weekends in June. And then I'll be done with conventions for the season. I do enjoy it, but it is tiring!

More later...

Free-Style Walking

We were invited to attend a "film festival" at a local high school this week. One of the guys in our youth group is a senior and was the one of the MCs for this event. He also produced 2 or 3 of the films shown in the festival. It was 2 hours of high-school-produced films... ranging from 3 to 10 minutes. Some of them were quite good... but oh, my!! Some were just excruitating to sit through! But, oh, the audience (mostly high school kids) was enthusiastic! I bet Hollywood movies don't get the applause at their premiers that these films did. It was hilarious!

One "movie" was about "Free Style Walking"-- something I had never heard of before. It was 4 or 5 boys--the "Free Style Walking Team"--basically jumping on and over anything they could think of... walking a step or two up a wall, jumping over a fence, running along a park bench... things like that. It was actually pretty interesting, and looked fun for the boys. I wonder how often they got hurt pulling stunts like that. I asked my husband if he could "walk" like that. He said he probably could have when he was their age. He was a pretty good jumper.