I Smell A New Family Hobby Brewing

This weekend we tried our hands at a little outdoorsy adventure with some friends and the kiddos. As they have gotten a bit older, daddy has been chomping at the bit to get them outside and into the wilderness, to re-enact all of his days of scouting and tromping through the woods. Visions of backpacking, hiking, camping and "roughing it" have danced through his head for years now.

When the boy entered scouts last year the excitement started as a dull humming, but has consistently built to a near deafening roar in the last several months. Insistent that we stay true to his childhood memories, he has scoffed at all of the new fangled conveniences that have come onto the market to make "roughing it" more like "temporarily-relocating-your-fancy-modern-ass-outside-ing it". Not surprisingly, he has long contended that GPS devices are one of the great evils of the world, and that we should all throw them out and just learn to use a *&^%$#@ map.

Seriously. You would not believe the long winded rants that this man has embarked upon for the singleminded purpose of extolling the many flaws and evils of the little box with the voice on the dashboard.

Some of his sparklier gems of wisdom include:

"That thing will tell you that you can drive from here to Paris if you let it!"

"If it told you to go off a cliff, would you?"

"It can't even pronounce the street names correctly!"

"All of you GPS users are lemmings!"

Many a time have I been severely chastised for either using a GPS, associating with someone else who uses one or even doing something as depraved as printing out and using directions from Mapquest. But then I am just an ugly sinner like that.

But I digress...

It seems that we have finally found a place in his world for GPS. We went geocaching with some friends yesterday and had a blast. Our local council scout camp has a geocaching course that is open to the public, so we hopped in the car and drove up...

using a dashmounted GPS...

which, (wait for it)... kept giving the wrong directions...

making the hubby simultaneously crazed and smug...

and leading him back to his original assertion that we should just use a compass and a map...

which threatened to turn this first foray into a torturous endeavor.

Thankfully, he was quickly taken in by the ease and simplicity of just following the darned directions. (One has to wonder if his own constant mantra to the non-computer Geeks of RTFM was echoing somewhere in the back of his head)

Armed with the trusty handheld GPS of our fellow treasure hunters and dear friends, the kids were able to uncover many a fine treasure and even a few trackable items. For the uninitiated, geocaching is a form of modern day treasure hunting. Cachers post coordinates of a cache box on the geocaching website, and intrepid hunters then embark on a journey to find said cache. Inside there can be any number of items, including a log book, where one can record their visit to the cache, small items that you can take, as long as you replace them with another similarly small item and even numbered items that can be tracked on line, and delivered to other caching locations around the globe.

The kids found many small things, such as a baseball, a sewing kit and an emergency flashlight. The also uncovered a couple of trackable treasures, one of which was a rubber ducky, that is a "travel bug". Cindy Duck has been stealthily making her way around the globe since 2006, and comes to PA from the Netherlands originally. This was, for the kids, the single coolest thing that could possibly have happened!

Seeing how many miles this simple toy has traveled and checking out the points on a map was a great (fun) lesson in geography, and one that they are excited to be a part of. We have plans to go again, and I can see this quickly becoming a part of any family roadtrips in our future.

Of course the next time that we go, we will probably not use the dashboard GPS to get us to the general spot, since it apparently can't read a map.

The Birds Are Back

And with a vengeance.

Those of you that have been following for a while, are familiar with the great bird saga of 2008. Those of you who are not, may go and get caught up here and here and here and here and finally here.

Last year, I thought I would outsmart those persistent pains in the arse by skipping out on the hanging baskets altogether. Which seemed to have genuinely done the trick, though making me a bit sad in the process.

Much to my dismay I launched into this spring sans beautiful hanging flowers, just to avoid such antics again.

I am t-h-r-i-l-l-e-d to announce that it is once again Robin mating season in the PA and apparently our yard has been voted one of the top 10 sexiest places for robins this year.

We have nests. 4 of them at last count. Each complete with eggs and babies.

That is one on the front porch, ON THE RAILING(!!!!!!), two in the tree in the front yard, and one in the forsythia bush around the side of the house. In the dog's yard. Where the nest can be a constant source of temptation, frustration, confusion and anxious whimpering for three 100+ lb dogs. Excellent.

The front nest has already begun hatching, and I frankly have neither the energy, nor the courage to investigate the others. On the upshot, at least my neighbor with all of the 100's of birdhouses that go vacant each year can hear and see the birds, and at least *pretend* that they are living in her avian housing development.

Message to a Long Lost Friend

I understand your silence and can forgive your unease. I know that the actions of my youth caused you great pain. I reach out, not to bring you back to that dark time, but instead to reach beyond it.

Every chance encounter, every acquaintance, becomes a part of our individual story. I know that I am a part of yours, just as you are a part of mine. I bear a permanent mark to remind me of that, in the most literal of ways, as do you.

There are facets of who I am that simply would not be, had I not met you, all of those years ago, and for the most part, I am glad to have each of them.

I am sorry to intrude upon your personal distance, but I just want to know where life took you, and who and what you have become. When I knew you, I had every intention of being a part of the rest of your story, but a few plot twists here and there, and I wrote myself out of the story.

I suppose it is somewhat selfish to assume that I have any right to know, but I guess on some level, some part of me feels a sense of responsibility in shaping at least the next road that you took, and I wonder what awaited you there. I hope whatever greeted you, whatever new adventure beckoned, led you somewhere wonderful, because it is what you deserved.

"A pistol shot at 5 o'clock

The bells of heaven ring
"Tell me what you done it for"
"No I won't tell you a thing

"Yesterday I begged you
before I hit the ground -
all I leave behind me
is only what I found

"If you can abide it
let the hurdy-gurdy play -
Stranger ones have come by here
before they flew away"

I will not condemn you
nor yet would I deny"
"I would ask the same of you
but failing will not die

"Take up your china doll
it's only fractured -
and just a little nervous
from the fall"
- R. Hunter

Teachable Moments

As a parent, I sometimes see our day to day lives as little more than a string of teachable moments, held together with moments when we can attempt to live out those lessons. At times, I try to seek out as many teachable moments in our days as I possibly can. Sometimes though, it is the moments that you don't even see coming that are the best.

Our church is very involved in community outreach programs. One such program is a produce outreach, where low income and needy folks in our community can get fresh perishable food goods on a monthly basis, in the parking lot of our church. This happened to be the day that those goods were distributed.

Today is also the day that my daughter's Daisy troop meets at the church. I happened to have both kiddos with me when we arrived to a very full church parking lot. My children surveyed the scene and marveled at the sheer number of cars. Seeing a small girl with her parents, my daughter asked if this was another new Daisy, come to join our ranks. I explained quickly that no, these were people coming for the fresh food outreach.

My son, playing the older and wiser sibling role immediately attempted to translate for her and explained "Yeah, those people are collecting food for the needy..."

I gently corrected, "No honey, actually those people *are* the needy."

To which he looked up at me with wonder and surprise in his soft brown eyes and said simply, "But mom, they look just like us."

There is no better lesson that I could have hoped to teach my children today than that: there is nothing that separates us from those that are less fortunate but luck and circumstance. There is no "us" and "them". No superiority. No distance.

I only hope that message can stick with them as long as it will stick with me.