(no subject)

So last night I was nodding off to sleep, and suddenly I felt the bed start to rock. A series of small rhythmic jolting motions, and my immediate thought was "Earthquake!" So I got out of bed in a hurry, and went over to where Emmett was using the computer. "Do you feel that?" I asked.

"Feel what?" he said. Well. Apparently not. I was puzzled about what it might have been, and he suggested that perhaps it was the sub-woofer noise vibrations from his video game. "Yeah, maybe," I said, and headed back to bed.

And then I saw what had caused the rocking motions - my cat Branwen, vigorously giving herself a bath. Definitely not a kitten anymore... :-)

Looking up a mountain...

So today Emmett and I decided to find some more of the Pacifica geocaches. I printed out all of the ones that felt plausible - there are some others that are hidden a fair ways up the sides of the local mountain, and I didn't figure I'd be anywhere near up to trying to find those. My walking stamina has been improving lately, but it's not what one would call good, and hills remain hard for me.

We nabbed one cache in San Pedro Park, and Emmett suggested that we take the cache-hider's suggestion of following the scenic .1 mile mini-trail adjacent the nearby nature museum. Sure. So we set off. At one point the trail forked, and we chose the less-travelled looking one.

It didn't take us long to realize that we'd all ready gone more than .1 miles, and the trail wasn't showing any signs of ending. But it *was* leading in the direction of the next cache, .45 mi away. Well, what the heck, we were out there for the exercise. We continued on along the trail. It started sloping gently upwards, but I was handling the climb, and we didn't have all that far to go.

Then we got to an overlook point, and we realized that the cache was still .3 miles away - across a canyon. And our trail wasn't going to lead us there anytime soon.

But it was a pretty trail, and we decided to keep walking along it. I stopped to rest every now and then, but I did pretty darn well all told. We ended up making a 3-mile round trip of it, achieving an elevation of 635 feet (having begun at 127 feet). I haven't done anything like that kind of walk in... a long time. I am feeling pretty triumphant!

Those other caches, the ones that I didn't print out - those are further up in the same hills, at elevations of 1150' and 1600' and even higher. One of them even features a view of a 3-tier, 175-foot waterfall! I don't know if I feel ready to attempt them yet - but suddenly they aren't seeming quite so implausible. One day...