Finally got around to placing my first geocache. James went with me to walk the dogs and find a cache, and we stopped at Sam’s on the way home to pick up a few things. I stayed with the dogs in the car, and to pass the time I made a cache container by pulling out the innards of a Bic pen that no longer wrote. I found some paper and rolled it up tight into the pen cylinder (I’m not clever enough to have thought of this on my own – someone has a cache like this) and I put it out nearby and captured the coordinates in the GPS. It finally was posted to the site this morning, and somone found it within two hours and posted this comment:
The Power of Music
A very close friend, Ian, posted a really great thought about the power and beauty of music, and how important his music is to him. Well, music has always been very critical to me, too, and I commented there about this Elton John song.
So there are a lot of songs that mean a lot to me, and that’s probably true for a lot of people, and maybe periodically we can talk about them on our blogs. I’ll mention one that is a good song, but not necessarily important to me, but really illustrates dual (or multiple) meanings of songs. Jimmy Buffett recorded “Savannah Fare You Well,” written by someone you’ve never heard of named Hugh Prestwood. The author grew up in Savannah, Georgia and wrote the song about escaping the constraints of a dying relationship and the town that represented it. Read the lyrics in the link with that in mind. The imagery is very strong, and the meaning is clear.
Meat Orgy
Today, lunch was shared with my boss and a colleage at Texas de Brazil. You have a salad bar and then the gauchos bring you meat. Lots of it. All kinds: several kinds of beef and steak, chicken, pork, lamb and sausage. Yum! The gauchos are strolling waiters who wander around carrying skewers of meat. You have a coaster on your table that is red on one side (stop) and green on the other (go). If you have green facing up, each gaucho will stop by your table to offer whatever meat he is carrying. Let’s say it’s lamb. Well, I don’t care for lamb, so I say “no thanks.” Then another one comes by, and he might have sausage. Well, I’ve already got some sausage on my plate, so I say “no thanks.” Then another comes by with steak, so I say “yes, please.” He slices a piece of meat off the skewer and you grab it with little tongs each person has as part of their place setting.
Pleasant Company
Today was a day with some very pleasant company. I had lunch with my dear friend and former Chubb colleage, Gary. We meet for lunch every so often and it’s always a marathon – about 2 hours. And it’s not enough time for us to talk about all the things we want to say. We (and our partners) are having dinner next Wednesday, so I’m already looking forward to that. As a bonus, he went with me about 5 blocks from the restaurant to get a quick geocache! It was a beautiful day – sunny and cloudless and 80 🙂
Tonight Bobby and Ian came over for dinner and a nice chat. I had to run by the store so I was a little late but fortunately James had already started dinner, so that went quickly. I made chocolate-chip cookies to make up for it. They turned out a bit thinner and crispier than usual but still yummy. Bobby and I were discussing how nice it is that despite having just spent 3 days with each other in fairly close quarters, we are still wanting to do dinners and now we are already thinking about another trip in the fall. We really do get on well and are more like family than anything else. Thanks for coming over, my brothahs!
Campin’
The Eaglebend Lane crew has just returned from a weekend of “camping.” Understand that what this means is that we rented a cabin in the woods. In this cabin are beds, sheets, a shower, a fireplace, a refrigerator, a microwave, a stove and oven, a sink, etc.
We also dragged along 3 iPods and a set of speakers for them, a Sirius satellite radio and jam box, 2 GPS units, at least one Palm Pilot. I didn’t see a laptop computer, but there might have been one. We all had cell phones but no service. I like it that way 🙂 Music is important, phones are not.
But, it’s a tremendous amount of fun. We went to Beaver’s Bend State Park in SE Oklahoma. We reserved our cabin about 5 months ago so there has been a bit of build-up. It did not disappoint. We all had Good Friday off, so we left after work on Thursday and got there about midnight. We got up at a reasonable hour on Friday, had a fantastic breakfast (I love the smells of coffee and bacon out in the woods) and set off to hike. We probably walked about 5 miles in total and spent most of the day outside. The dogs had a great time roaming around and playing with Bobby & Ian’s dogs. More details of our trip are at James’ blog.
Birthday
It’s my birthday – not for play-play but for real-real!
I wasn’t going to be so self-serving as to post a comment about that, but James let the cat out of the bag on his blog, so now it’s official – for the first time in a year, I’m older today than I was yesterday. Wait a minute…