Geocaching in Hollenbeck Canyon

I knew I had New Year’s Day free, and despite my No-Resolution attitude, I did want to start out on the right foot (ha ha ha), so I picked a hike. I’d been curious about geocaching for a while, so I picked a hike in a group I belong to that went back to Hollenbeck Canyon (was just there last week), but would explore the geocaches hidden all over the park.

I haven’t hiked with this big of a group for a while…it was different…

It was a gorgeous day for it, though…all you people back East, it was about 75 degrees max, beautiful blue skies, light breeze…

We found about 17 geocaches during the whole trip, which was interesting and fun (well, for a while…). The first one (which I didn’t take a picture of) was in the parking lot, a microcache with just a log in it. The second one, though, had dropped into a deep crevice in the rocks and we needed a long curvy stick to get it out…

Which we did…ammo box with stuff inside.

Honestly, most of what was left in the caches was crap…there were a couple of decent things, especially farther out. It’s not surprising, because a lot of young families come here and they probably find the closer caches and so there’s lots of hairbands and plastic toys.

And expired Souplantation coupons (really?). The caches were in a wide variety of containers…this one was a mini-M&M container painted over…

Some just have logs in them where you can sign your name and the date; some have stuff. This one was a Bob Dylan theme…

And contained a book (not to take)…we had to struggle up a steep slope to find this one, and getting down it without poles was difficult…I guess I can see now why some people carry them.

I just slid down on my butt. This one was cool…each geocache has a name and this was Someone’s Watching You…and there she was…

The cache itself was hanging on the lower screw. There were a couple we couldn’t find and one we thought had been stepped on and broken. I was traveling with a group that were half veterans and half virgins of the geocaching experience.

This was Mike’s Star…

The same people didn’t find all the caches…and there were a wide variety of types and hiding places. I left some of my Shrinky Dinks in some of them but didn’t take anything in return. There wasn’t really anything I wanted.

One thing I will say about geocaching is that it is SLOW…it’s not a hike. It’s a lot of wandering around and looking, and then standing around, and the people with the technology are trying to find things, and it’s not necessarily the most interesting thing to do for HOURS. At least for me. YMMV. I could see doing it for a couple of hours with the kids. I did download an app onto my phone, the Geocaching Intro (which was free)…it was fine when there was internet. That’s the problem, though…there isn’t always internet, and it didn’t have all the caches. You can pay for a premium membership, which is only $30 a year, but you’d have to think that one through and decide if it’s worth it. I did log 15 caches (although I had to do some when I got home because internet was spotty and it wouldn’t show me all the caches even when I was standing on top of them). The app wouldn’t let me log two of them without the premium membership. The guys with the GPS devices were the most useful in this place.

This is what standing around waiting for the next PING looks like…

At least the landscape is nice, eh?

We spent about the first 3 hours geocaching (and stopping for lunch)…

I even found one…it was here…you can just see the corner of the plastic box poking out from under that rock…

Lucky find. I actually suck at this stuff…

Despite being a highly observant person. I think I don’t have the patience for it.

That’s Lyons Valley Peak…

Apparently there’s a crazy man on it with a gun who won’t let anyone up there.

A pill container for a geocache…

A heart-shaped box (I might have been the only one humming the Nirvana song when we found this one)…

Sandwich container…

Microcache on a fencepost (see, you can see a different person is finding them every time…it is a nondiscriminatory game)…

Around about here, we realized we were a good 3 miles out from the parking lot and it was getting late. I suspect a smaller group might move faster. Plus we kind of had the mentality that we had to find ALL the caches, which I think is crazy when there are so many of them…

So we lost a few people here who had to get back to somewhere…

And we sped up the walking part…love the old California oak trees…

Weather still good…

Meadows stretching endlessly…

This was the last cache we found…

And then we had some trail issues…it doesn’t seem to matter how many maps and devices you have…

Or how many brains, for that matter, because at some point, we went the wrong way…

and the trail ended. And someone said, “Hey, let’s just go to the top of that hill (mountain) and see where we’re at,” and then we were ALL climbing the mountain (it’s only 5 minutes…and 1000 calories burned…up that thing). So in this view, we’re at the top of the saddle (I did not go to the top of the mountain, just the saddle)…and where we NEED to be is through all that brush in the horizontal dark stripe about the middle of the photo…

So we bushwhacked…and climbed down into and up out of ravines (at least three) and avoided snakes and barbed wire and found an opening in a fence so we didn’t have to climb through barbed wire and eventually all of us got down the mountain. In the picture below, the mountain (OK, it looks smaller here) is in the middle…my group came over the saddle to the right…

So. What do I think? The hike was fun. I enjoy actual hiking more than geocaching. I would geocache again, but with an understanding of how slow it is. I don’t have a lot of geocaching stamina…it gets boring for me after a while. Now I know all these things…and at some point, I will realize that all hikes take at least an hour longer than I think they will, even after I add on an extra hour.

Not Resolving Anything…

So. New Year. I hiked…geocached actually…for the first time. More about that later…but it was supposed to be for a few hours and turned into the whole day…something about getting lost, an impromptu climbing of a mountain, some bushwhacking, and a much longer hike than we expected…but all good in the long run. The pro of long hikes like that is that they mostly occupy my brain, especially one that required some higher levels of thinking (well, sort of)…the con is that I’m not getting any art or other life crap done when I’m out there. It’s a balancing act. I have stuff I need to get done. But my brain needs the space. I haven’t figured out the balance yet. Ever? I think I will never find the balance. The other con after a long hike like that is pure exhaustion…I couldn’t get my brain to deal with ironing until really late in the day…um, night actually…so I didn’t get much done. I will have to be better tomorrow.

Worth it for that tree alone…

And these…

And for long stretches of this…the mood was definitely improved today. It’s not a mistake that I drag myself outside on these hikes so much…it clears the webby dark bits of the brain. Meditation helps with that too…I had to come up with a question for today. I cycled through a bunch, couldn’t get the wording right, finally settled on “Why are you still sad?” because the counselor had asked me that too and I couldn’t answer, and today on the way back from the hike, my brain was doing weird shit with hope and crap, and I kept thinking to myself, saying to that PART of my brain actually, “What the FUCK are you thinking? Why does that seem like something GOOD to you? Are you a fucking idiot?” Um. Well. Since it’s my brain, I guess the answer is yes, I’m an idiot. Great. Still got some work to do (no duh…anyone who spends any time with me at all knows that).

Yeah. Well, tomorrow the boychild turns 18. I really shouldn’t call him the boychild any more, but manchild seems weird. I guess he will always be my boychild. Erg. That was sickly sweet. Anyway, presents and cake for the boy…and Mexican food (it’s what he wants). He finished all but one college application today, with the last one not due until January 9. That’s a relief…presumably for him as well. Now we wait. Sigh. And hope. I guess I can’t make him do yardwork tomorrow. He’s used the apps as his excuse for days (really?)…so I’ll give him one more day. Friday he can be Chore Man.

The question of the last 24 hours, everywhere I’ve gone, has been, “What’s your New Year’s Resolution?” Um. Yeah. Not going there. Not picking an inspirational word for the year either, and I’m not setting any more goals than the ones I’ve been carrying around in my head for the last 6 months. I’ve graduated beyond “survive” to something more like “live,” with some codicils. “Happy” might be next on the list, but I need instructions for that.

Part of my problem with getting to the ironing tonight was that I had only a little bit of this book to go, Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep…

Good book…not horror…more fantasy…a nice sequel to the Shining story, and well-written. The man can toy with your emotions. So I finished reading it first.

I’m still working my way through all the library holds that came in during the last two weeks…I’m staying caught up with all the due dates for now, but I have 4 more books that have to be finished in the next three weeks (some I only have 10 days left on the reserve). Then I can start to read some of the books I got for Christmas. Hopefully. Luckily, I enjoy reading.

After I finished, I finally started ironing at about 10 at night…I started on the Maiden…

She went together fairly quickly…

I’m not sure if she has fewer pieces than the Mother (I think so)…

I’m about 6 1/2 hours in, 670 pieces ironed. Another 6 hours to go? Something like that. I’ve been remarkably inefficient this vacation in terms of getting art done. Oh well. It will get done somehow.

There. I resolve to get this quilt done. Soon. In time for the deadline. Easy peasy. Then I’ll do the next one. And the next one. And in between, I’ll go on hikes. Or to the gym. Does not sound hard. For now? I resolve to go to sleep…

Sideswiped…

I keep getting sideswiped…like 2-ton vehicles slamming past and pulling me with them, too fast, throwing me to the ground. I try to figure out the why, why now? Why today? Is it hormonal? Is there some reason for the mood change or the lack of control of the mood? Is there something that has made meditation become a weepy place again? He talks about not knowing your emotions, so looking at the frustration, the worry, the doubt, and trying to find the underlying emotion to that surface feeling. Dude. It’s sad underlying sad. It’s sad all the way down. It’s just plain sad. I don’t need help identifying the emotion. But I saw something today that hit the sad into overdrive…and it’s not something I have control over…it just is and I, as he tells me, sink my mind down into that emotion and just sit in it…just sit there, like it’s a big overstuffed beanbag chair, kind of sticking to the back of your legs and not particularly comfortable, making noise every time you move…I just sit. And it’s an ugly color too, and those stupid tiny white styrofoam balls? They’re spilling out on the carpet too, but you can’t find the hole. Apparently the emotion should move on at some point. I’m curious when that will happen. What am I sad about? When will it move on? What is the difference between grief and sadness? Tomorrow I’m supposed to have a question for meditation. One? That’s it? Will he magically answer it? There isn’t enough magic in my life.

Yeah. So I didn’t do well with the sleep thing last night, so it makes sense that I’m writing this past one in the morning. I’m not at all tired, wide awake really, wired. I suspect it’s the artmaking doing that. I didn’t get to it until late, but then I couldn’t stop…I did the 100 pieces of skelly…

dead bodies hidden in the ground. Then moved on to a few other things I buried underground in this piece…

This quilt has symbolism all over the freakin’ place. It’s like my depression got a home in fabric. It will be oh so fun to explain. The boychild quite liked this part…

He’s been writing college essays for the last two days and hopefully his mother’s art was not the subject of a huge number of them…he won’t let me read any of them. I spent about 2 hours with him going through and paying for all the tests to be sent to the various colleges, and then going through and sending all of the application fees. He has 5 more to finish, 4 before Wednesday and 1 later next week. Then we’re done…until the acceptances go out, no stress, and I still have to do the FAFSA and we need to try to hunt down some scholarships. It’s all very terrifying, especially when I look at how much money I charged to credit cards today for all the fees. Yikes. Anyway. We’re mostly done until next year, when we have to do it again with the girlchild.

I went to school in the morning to grade the last of the science journals…

I had to do it. I had put it off already for two days…but it was as depressing as I thought it would be. There are parts of my job that I enjoy, but the hard work parts of it just make the rest of my life seem so much worse…so I sat there for a minute, staring out at the empty room (they’re waxing floors on Thursday, so everything is up or out), and cried. Then I turned up the music real loud and graded and wondered what magic miracle was expected of me to get some of these kids to give a shit about their classwork, based on what I was seeing. I probably shouldn’t have done that class last…they are a bit challenging. But getting pressure from higher-ups that makes you feel like any F is a failure on YOUR part, and then going through simple assignments like this? Makes you want to quit teaching and go work for the Republican party. Yes. It’s that bad. It would be easier. I think.

Anyway…politics aside, I’m pushing through the grading best I can, because grades are due the week we go back to school. It depresses me to grade at the moment, so I try to do it in small amounts, spread out over many days.

I’ve been falling down on some of my jobs for an art group I’m in, so I tried to get my act back in gear today. I just need a routine. If it feels hard, I just put it off at the moment. I can’t handle anything hard. I say that, but I’m ironing a million tiny pieces down. Hard is relative.

I’m geocaching later this week, and I didn’t know what to bring to put into them, but remembered I had been given an Shrinky Dink oven and supplies many years back, so I pulled them out and started drawing…

Then colored them in and put them in the oven…

Which is powered by a 60-watt lightbulb…

They came out teensy weensy…

But I think that’s OK. The flame head folded over on itself a little and didn’t fully flatten. I’ll make some more tomorrow.

The boychild is interested in geocaching, so we might do that on his birthday. He’s turning 18 on Thursday, which is more than a little terrifying. Not as terrifying as paying for college, but close. His Christmas present included hiking boots (his request), so I’ve been trying to get them broken in.

We spent a few hours this evening picking up the kids’ dad from the airport; he’s been in Britain for 2 weeks visiting family, especially his mom. Part of my Christmas present came back with him. One thing that always amused me about British TV and books from when I was younger was how important tea was to their culture, but I didn’t really understand it until I lived there. It’s where I got addicted (and I still drink British tea with milk, thus confusing the majority of Americans, including all my students)…this mug was a gift from my ex-SIL and family, and entirely appropriate to my life at the moment…

Tea does solve many problems, simply by making you sit down and drink it properly. Sometimes a cup of tea perfectly brewed and at exactly the right temperature can bring an immense amount of calm to my troubled brain.

So I washed and folded all the red fabrics I bought yesterday (yes, some were NOT red)…

The one on the left was going to be the binding, but it lost out to one of the other ones, which I was lucky to have bought a yard of anyway, because that’s all that was left on the bolt and I had this niggling feeling that it was a better choice than the one above. I’ll try to get the binding on sometime soon so you can see it…but right now, I’m still on a roll with ironing…

I was going to stop after the bird, but the woman was calling to me…above, she is still in pieces…

Apparently she called quite loudly, because I got all of her ironed except for the head.

Which maybe is why I’m still up (but finally getting tired) at holy crap in the morning. Plus the girlchild is coming back from Pasadena, where she’s been working on one of the floats for the Rose Parade. I wouldn’t be a good mom if I didn’t wait up. Actually, if I’d thought I could have gone to sleep earlier, I would have.

Earlier today, Babygirl was helping me use the mouse.

Right before I took this picture, she actually was sleeping with her head on my mouse hand. Ugh.

Then Midnight was standing watch for a while too…

Actually, she spent most of her time sleeping.

Jake went home today, so the cats seem to feel more free to move around. Jake chases them, stalks them. Calli could care less.

Anyway. I’m hoping to iron more tomorrow…it’s taking me about an hour per 100 pieces, so there are about 8 1/2 hours to go. That’s a lot. Hmn. That might be unrealistic, when I look at what else is going on tomorrow. The ironing did distract me for a long time from the sadness that is lurking around and gut-punching me on a regular basis. Meditation made me think about something I had said or done that was positive, and I remembered making an effort to tell these two girls who are in one of my roughest classes that they were rocking science right now (they really are…and the other positive thing I had come up with just made me cry more, so I picked the girls)…they’re both kind of different and went into teen-girl glow mode when I said it. I was just thinking about trying to encourage girls to be more into science through high school when I said it, plus I wanted them to know I appreciated how hard they worked. I don’t get any happy glow out of it, though. I’m supposed to…for making them feel good. But that’s part of my job. Sigh. I think my emotional machine is out of order. It doesn’t react right. And I’m getting this vision of the Wicked Witch on her bike (broom? Wizard of Oz?) cackling that I will PAY, my pretty, I will pay. That I have been wicked somehow and I will pay.

I should probably iron a lot more tomorrow instead of spending close personal time with that part of my brain. It needs a vacation or something. And the sad? It can go fuck itself. I’m tired of it. If it’s going to be sad, be sad about something that’s real, that’s true, not something that was apparently bullshit and a lie. Oh if only it were so easy to direct the mind to be sad about the right things and to drop the wrong things. The creative mind…it kinda does what it wants. We can try to direct it all we like…it will decide how to be.

I’d like to decide to be asleep now.