After a lengthy lull in blog-worthy events we suddenly had a most blog-worthy weekend.

Friday night our house was taken over by approximately 15 teenage girls. They came over for a girl's camp practice (I guess). It took me all of 1.7 seconds to determine that I would not be spending the night at my house. I contacted Mike and we headed out on a geocaching adventure.

We decided to do the Mustang Ridge cache just as the sun was going down.

There was still quite a bit of daylight when we started, but by the time we reached the cache it was gone. We hiked back down the hill in the dark and Mike sustained a puncture wound to his leg on the way. While the sight of Mike's blood-stained leg wrapped in one of my socks was thoroughly exciting, my blood really got pumping when we accidentally snuck up behind two skunks with their tails in firing position. Rather than continue on with our night-caching adventures we decided to make our way back home so Mike could clean his wound.

On the way home, we stopped by Wal-Mart to get some batteries and refreshment. While there we decided to purchase a cheap-o movie. We went home and opened the movie to watch it, but the case was empty! The shrink-wrap was intact and the factory stickers were still in place, so it must have shipped sans DVD. Bummer. Fortunately, I was able to exchange it for an actual product.

I spent the night at my parent's house and slept on the floor. Saturday morning I went home and got ready for the Worldwide Leadership Meeting, which I was supposed to attend; however, I ditched the meeting and went to the church to work on the new computer system instead. The new system is nice, but requires a significant amount of manual re-entry. I worked on this project until it was time for the "clerk" meeting. Richard's dad was there, too. We were the only cool people there so we sat away from everyone else.

I left the meeting to go with Emilie's dad on an evening bike ride. This time we went up to ride the Flume Trail. The total ride was about 18 miles and was pretty crazy. Mosquitos were out in full-force, so there was no stopping. This was my first time on this trail, so it was particularly exciting. The ride up is incredibly steep, but once you reach the top of the first big climb the rest is not too bad. I couldn't help but wonder how many people have died riding that ride. The ride down was extremely fast and scary since it was getting to be mostly dark by that time. We reached the car just as the last ounce of sunlight disappeared.

While at church on Sunday I got a call from work regarding a virus that was hitting. I had to go in and work for a couple hours to help remediate the situation. We went to Washoe Valley to see Emilie's family and then had dinner with my family.

A lot of stuff packed in to a short amount of time. And I'm still covered with mosquito bites.

I was surprised to learn today that "geocaches range from microscopic items to large ammunition boxes." I'm not exactly sure what the best way is to find a microscopic geocache, but I'm sure it must be extremely difficult. Tools needed: GPS and microscope.

In equally bizarre news, I don't understand why some people insist on drinking high-pulp varieties of orange juice. It's called "juice" because it's a beverage. Beverages do not (or should not) contain chunks of things unless it's ice. If it was orange soup or something like that then it might be okay, but I don't like to chew my drinks. I fully understand that I'm the freak (I only drink "no pulp" orange juice).

I was disturbed to learn about the dangers of eating at Taco Bell.

In unrelated news, it looks like Winnemucca had it's decadal traffic jam.

Richard's posting about ankle socks hit close to home. I regret to say that Champion's socks exhibit the same problem. My feet are significantly larger than Richard's dwarfish size 8 - I'm size 9.5 to 10 - but I have the same problem even though I'm closer to the large end of the sock than Richard.

Sadly, I have to report that the frog no longer resides at the side of our house. This morning Emilie found the frog hanging out under the garbage can as she started rolling the can out to the street. I used a plastic jar to capture the frog, which was surprisingly mellow about the whole thing. I was able to pick the frog up and place it in the container without any struggle whatsoever. In fact, the frog actually climbed onto my hand from the fence when I grabbed it. From there, the frog was transported to the swampy marshes of Double Diamond where he was released. We wish the frog well and hope he makes some new friends.

Last night I went for a bike ride with Jim and Jason. We went up to the Galena area and rode from Thomas Creek to Whites Creek and back. It was about half the ride we did a few weeks ago.

Last Saturday we saw Shrek 2 with Holly and Mike. While the first half of the movie was mediocre, the second half was absolutely hilarious. Puss-in-Boots was the best character, in my opinion.

Monday we did our first fishing of the season. I caught two small fish, which I let go.

It turns out that one of my cow-orkers, Ray, has "low-money heartburn." I've never heard of this, but that's what he says.

If I don't say something then Emilie will. If it must be said, then I suppose I would rather be the one to say it. I went to get some jeans out of the dryer yesterday only to find that the clothes in the dryer were still wet. I removed all the clothes from the dryer and left just the jeans that I wanted to wear so that they could dry faster. Ultimately, the jeans never got dry enough to wear so I wore another pair. I put all the clothes back in the dryer and started it up again so that the load could finish drying. Once the load was done, I took the clothes out and put them on the bed to fold. I noticed that there were three fabric sheets mixed in with the load and I wasn't sure why Emilie used three sheets. As I continued to fold the clothes I found more fabric sheets. Then I found the box. It was empty. Apparently, when I put the clothes back into the dryer I accidentally put the box of fabric sheets in with the load. All told, I dried the clothes with 26 fabric sheets. The clothes smell great, are very soft - almost soapy - and show absolutely no signs of static cling. Woohoo!

On Saturday I went riding with the regular crew. This time we did the Emigrant Trail up by Truckee. The ride is about 22 miles and is a lot of fun. The downhills are great and the uphills aren't too terribly painful. It was a good workout, though. The trail goes from Prosser to Stampede and then back. There's still a lot of rides that I want to do - I think I'm going to try Peavine before the end of the summer.

I finally finished reading John Stossel's book Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media. I'm not sure what happened, but I was reading a different book and then just stopped and started reading this one. Anyway, it was excellent. He has some interesting viewpoints that I don't necessarily agree with, but he makes good points.

Once I remember what else I was going to blog about I'll add it...