Seven Souvenirs

"The Socializer" event in Reidsville — geocachers a-plenty!

What does a geocacher do on a long weekend? Go caching like there's no tomorrow, of course. Actually, most of last week I was hard at it on the geocaching trail, taking on several tough and/or otherwise invigorating hides, including a couple of mentally challenging puzzles (for some of us lacking mathematical prowess, "difficult" might be a more apt term), one way up in a great big tree, and a caching event held in Reidsville, hosted by 3Newsomes, a.k.a. Shannon. On Sunday, Robgso (a.k.a Rob) and I cleaned up in Mebane, and, yesterday, Suntigres (a.k.a. Bridget) and Rtmlee (a.k.a. Robbin) made short work of a geoart series called Final Approach, the geoart being the shape of an airplane formed by cache icons on the geocaching.com map.

It may be a stretch to call them "perks" from Geocaching.com, but parent company Groundspeak awards virtual tokens, called souvenirs, to geocachers for various accomplishments in the field. For example, last August, you received a souvenir for each day of the month you went caching, and if you logged finds on all 31 days, you received a special "31 Days of Geocaching" souvenir. This year, during the month of August, you received a souvenir for logging the various types of geocaches — i.e., an "Explorer" souvenir for finding a traditional cache, a "Sightseer" souvenir for find a multi-stage cache, a "Nature-Lover" souvenir for attending a cache-in, trash-out event or finding an Earthcache, and so forth and so on. If you logged all six specified types over the course of the month, you received a special "Seven Souvenirs of August" souvenir. Yes, I managed to accomplish this perhaps not-so-astounding feat, but hey, it made for a fun little personal geocaching goal. Kimberly says it does enhance my status as a geek, so I guess I'll just go with that.

But, apart from caching, what's a long weekend without a couple of hot dates with Ms. B. and some wine to go with it? No worries! On Saturday, Kimberly and I joined up with our friends Terry and Beth Nelson to visit a few wineries out in the Yadkin Valley. The weather was hot, muggy, and downright uncomfortable, but since there was wine involved — some of it quite good indeed — we forced ourselves to make the best of it. On Sunday, after the geocaching event, several of us went to The Celtic Fringe, a superb little pub in Reidsville. And for afters, Peter Jackson's Bad Taste was on the menu, and it's really bad, but in the best possible way.

On top of it all, I managed to finish up my most recent work of short fiction, titled "Red Rage," so it's ready to go off to the editor of the anthology who requested it. So now it's back to the grind, and boy, there's some serious grinding going on.

Be sweet!

A rough gang at Raffaldini Vineyards

Throw them into the cooler! The women chillin' at Raffaldini.