Someone called the police.

Yesterday Erin and I went geocaching. [I'm so sorry that all of my blog posts are about caching lately! I promise that I actually do still have other hobbies! After this I have one more story to blog about that is half geocaching related, and then I'm done.]

I got a new phone which is really awesome because it lets me access the normal Internet from anywhere. Great! So the idea was that we would go to an area that I hadn't found much in, and then just look up stuff to find as we went.

We decided to go out by the Provo Town-ey Centre. And since we drove up behind it, we chose a particular cache in back to look for, and started looking. It was a BYOP cache (Bring Your Own Pen), which means that it's usually small enough for there to be no pen inside. Great. So it was probably going to be tiny.

The coordinates led us to a big power box out in the back of the mall parking lot, next to a kind-of busy road. There were also a couple trees the cache could be in, if it was really small, and really camouflaged, and the coordinates were a bit off, so we searched them too. Mostly we searched the power box, though, because it just had to be there somewhere. The difficulty was rated 4/5, which meant it was pretty hard, and someone had commented that it was clever.

We looked and looked, and didn't find it. And finally, right before we were about to give up, Erin found it. And it was clever.

And we walked back to the car, and I pulled up some nearby caches on my phone. And then we saw a police car going around the bend. "Oh, great," we thought. The police car pulled up near us, and the policeman got out and came up to our car. "What are you up to today," he asked after I opened the door. The mall security police van pulled up next to the police car. "Geocaching!" I told the policeman, and I held up my GPS and phone. He didn't say anything for a few seconds. "If it would make you feel better, I can show you where the cache is, " I offered, grinning.

He did want to see it. It was lucky that we'd found it, because otherwise I couldn't have shown him. He and I walked across back to the power box, and I showed him. "Do you get a lot of calls for geocaching?" "Quite a few. We had someone leave one in front of the police station, and of course if people leave a box in front of the police station, you don't just wonder about it. You call the bomb squad...." He told me about one time there was a cache out at Utah Lake where they had opened the box and were really confused with the contents "there's a deck of cards...and some papers and..." It was pretty funny. The police seemed to have gotten a big kick out of it just being geocaching.

Someone had reported us tampering with the power box, and they thought that maybe we were trying to turn out the power for the whole mall.

(Why would anyone even want to do that?)


Our final cache that we found yesterday was also exciting. It was one that required hiking. It took us about an hour to find it and get back to the car. Mostly because we didn't realize that there was parking about 50 feet from the cache. So we hiked a long way up the dried, rocky creek. About when we reached a big, fresh, bloody, furry deer carcass that smelled awful, we realized there was a paved road right along the creek on the south side. But it was too hard to climb out of the creek on the south side, so we climbed out on the north side instead. And then to cross the creek we had to hike up to a trail about 100 feet above us, at a very-upward angle. Then back down and across the whole thing at a part with a real trail.

I think if we had parked at the right spot it would have probably taken us 10-15 minutes total. Ah well. Hiking is good. And the weather was great.

Geocaching in Sacramento

This weekend I went to San Francisco to visit Jess.

We didn't actually go to San Francisco because I've already been. I went there when my choir went on tour in 2001, and when I went with them we did all of the touristy stuff.

Instead, Jess and I went to Sacramento. I thought I had never been before, except that Jess reminded me that we drove through Sacramento on the way back from Canada one time when we were little. Oh, right. I guess we did. It was worth visiting again, though.

I wanted us to go geocaching in Sacramento, but we didn't have a ton of time, and most of the ones where we were going to be were teeny tiny, so I chose a virtual one for us to do instead.

Virtual caches are things where there's no tupperware to find, and instead you find a "treasure" that is already there. For example, the Golden Gate Bridge probably has a virtual geocache. It's stuff that's just cool to see, without you needing to be enticed by plastic soldiers, marbles, and old Christmas ornaments. Usually with a normal geocache there is a "log" to sign. You write your name on a piece of paper, and that proves that you found it. With virtual caches, since you're not going to graffiti someone else's treasure, you prove that you found it by answering a question from a historical plaque or by posting a picture of you in front of the cool thing.

The virtual cache I chose was "California's Treasures" which was right across from the capitol building. The cache was a building that had two statues of California's treasures, and when you were walking to look at them you were also standing above a 280 ton concrete and steel vault with millions and millions of dollars worth of stuff in it.

Jess and I used the GPS to find the right spot. (Across the fountain was another building with two statues; it was dedicated to fallen officers.) Jess was really confused by the whole thing. Especially because the statues were naked.

"Naked treasures?" she asked me.
"Yeah," I said, nonchalantly.
"That's weird."
"Not really." Providence is often represented by a naked woman.

We went up and found out who the building was dedicated to, and Jess and I kept talking about money and stuff, because of the vault. And how weird she thought it was that they would have naked treasures. I wrote down the name of one of the treasures represented, "Mineral Wealth" and had her take my picture with him. And I think that was about when we realized that she had misunderstood-- she thought the statues were supposed to be of treasurers.

AWESOME.

So our conversation had actually gone like this:

"Naked treasurers?" she asked me.
"Yeah," I said, nonchalantly.
"That's weird." (Treasurers are usually dignified people that would not be sculpted naked to be put in front of a building. Even one with a big vault.)
"Not really." (?!!)

It still makes me laugh.

In which the protagonist finds herself attached to everything, and not emotionally

I've been making geocaches lately. Fun, fun.

I found the perfect containers when I was shopping at the man mall. They're called Viewtainers, and the little-ish ones are just perfect for someone like me who is getting started. So I got a couple green ones, and got green wire to go in the two little holes on the top. And I bought green electrical tape because I couldn't find camo duct tape, and CLEAR duct tape to go on top of the electrical tape if it seemed like it would be messy.

And it was messy, so instead I bought camo duct tape from some outdoorsy store. EXCEPT it turned out that it wasn't actually duct tape, and instead it was removable cloth tape to cover my gun during hunting season. I thought clear nail polish would make it waterproof anyway. It just made a mess.

And then I had the perfect idea. I could just superglue the little slit on top closed. It would be so much simpler. And why didn't I think of that sooner?

So, I went to borrow glue from Jess, who isn't home, and found it right away. I knew she had superglue. And it wouldn't take much and if it did I would happily buy her more superglue.

So it was perfect, except...it seemed like the top of the glue may have been superglued on.

So I tried to open it a bit, and then decided that it would probably break the soft metal tube below the top if I kept trying to twist it. So instead, I decided to use pliers on both of the halves of the plastic lid, in opposite directions.

And then, somehow it burst anyway, and all of my fingers started to burn just a little, and started to stick to each other and to the tube of glue. And thankfully, not to the pliers.

So I went to wash the glue off, but of course it doesn't come off, and a couple times it felt like when I was trying to rub the glue off I was actually about to stick my fingers to themselves.

Nail polish remover was not helpful.

Now all of my fingers except my pinkies feel like they don't have fingerprints. They're covered in dried glue. I can't feel the things that I touch. It's weird.

When I set the glue down on the counter while I washed my hands, glue oozed out onto the counter. I got a toothpick and used it to seal the top of my geocache-to-be. It's beautiful. It worked so well.

And then I tried to use some tissues to pick up the ooze of superglue on the counter, and it mostly worked, but left a big piece of super-tissue attached to my thumb. (Great.) And after a few minutes of it not washing off I managed to get all of it off, except for the part that was most attached to my skin.

My evaluation: I would give having superglue all over my fingers 2/5 stars. I give the experience two stars because it's kind of a funny situation, and a strange feeling to not be able to feel the things you touch. My experience especially merited those two stars because I did not ruin any clothes, ruin my pliers, ruin the carpet, or get stuck to anything (which may have been painful, or painfully embarassing). I don't think superglue goes into the same category as inhaling helium, though, because it doesn't seem to go away quickly, and the annoyance seems like it will far outlast the novelty/fun.