A Day in Eastern Racine county

With Mom and The Boy off at pre-Sunday School meetings, The Girl and I spent the day together. The idea was that we'd run a few errands. We headed off for the first item on the list: recover my never activated geocache.

Some months ago (Ok, it was over a year ago), I placed stage two of a geocache. I fully intended to place stage 1, and then submit it to geocaching.com. But, one thing led to another, and I forgot about it - until last week. That's when the emails started coming in. It appears that great minds think alike, for someone (Senior Searchers) had placed their geocache right next to mine! Of course, they'd submitted theirs for listing, so they have priority on the spot. The problem was, people kept finding my stage two cache and sending emails to me and the new cache owner asking WTF? So, we headed up to retrieve it, and hit the new cache, as well! And while we were there, might as well hit another cache a bit further into the park, hey? So that's how we spent the morning, traipsing through the mud, searching in thickets, looking at the lake from the bluff (fabulous!) and discovering a massive stand of bottle gentian (gentiana andrewsii)! I'd never come across bottle gentian before, though now that I've seen it, I don't know how I missed it. Lovely blue autumnal flower with strange, unopened flowers. I also spent some time training TG to recognize some of the local plants. Wild grapes were her favorite. They fit right into her current love for sour things.

The caches squared away, we headed home for lunch, then out to the library. Well, it turns out that the library opens at 1pm on Saturdays. Darn! Now we'd have to get coffe and biscotti at The Groundskeeper while we waited for the library time to approach. The kid read the Disney Fairies book that she'll be writing a book report on next week, while I caught up on the Shepherd Express.

When we got to the library (so that I could pick up the copy of the Anansi Boys audiobook that I'd put on reserve. It's supposed to be set in the same universe as American Gods - both books by Neil Gaiman) it was just about to open. Once inside, we made good time, me grabbing a couple of books on tape, the kid visiting her favorite books on the shelves. I also picked up a couple of copies of somw Wiccan magazines from the turn of the century - 2001 :)

And we've still got The Girl's soccer game to attend late this afternoon, and a Chili's gift card to use for dinner tonight! And maybe a stop off to price new floors for our kitchen/living room/great room I guess I'm not getting to those chores today, hmm?