s'more fun & games...cache me if you canister!

the remainder of Christmas break was excellent. the drive was long, but worth it. once i got home, i rested a bit, went to the beach for a hammock day, but i had to get a towel and fleece from the car because it was a bit breezy, so my hammock became more of a cocoon! yes, florida got a bit of a cold snap like the rest of the country- it dipped about 15 degrees lower than normal for this time.

for new years eve, i ran some errands, then met friends at the old salty dog for an early dinner. later that evening i met up with shea and jason for s'mores and an early countdown!

 and then the next few days i spent with the hot hands in my pockets and the heating pad on my lap and finally gave in and turned the heat up, i set up the mini-travel humidifier that my brother and sister-in-law got for me-which will be especially nice when i travel, and then watched the sandal wind-chime my mom got for me, not realizing that it changes colors and is solar powered! i'm the coolest kid on the block!

life saver!

if you look carefully you can see the air!

see the color change?!

i also got to do my first webinar last week, and it went well-fortunately it was a small crowd- good way to ease back into work!

this weekend we were trying to think of something different to do, so we stopped at the sea haag-a shop where they have some fun trinkets, art, all things nautical/mermaid, and outdoors it's mostly salvage-yard of the sea-goods.

from there we went to find the peacocks on longboat key! we may have spent more time than necessary taking way more pictures than required...but they were just so beautiful! as we were leaving, i stopped an older gentleman walking his dog and asked him about these birds. so he gave me the history. apparently, they have been in the neighborhood since about 1912, when perhaps some circus-folk brought them down (all the exotic animals weathering in florida), and the 1 male and 3 females multiplied and at times the flock was overwhelming, so from time to time they ship birds up to sanctuaries in atlanta and i'm sure elsewhere.

surely the homeowners were like, 'please, get off our lawn already!'

this doesn't even do justice to the neon greens and blue!!

since we were down in that area, and it was too cold to go to the beach, i had downloaded the geocache app, because i have been wanting to try out this little adventure they call GEOCACHE! a very fun little treasure hunt! if i had a family, it would be one of our favorite things to do!! so i talked shea into trying our hand at it! first off, geo because the caches are hidden in fun, pretty areas, or areas with special intrigue that you may not notice if you weren't looking for it! the park we ended up at was a community park, and we really didn't know exactly how to use the app, so we were going in the wrong direction, and once we turned around and started to figure it out, things went fairly smoothly! we found all three caches in the park, and the park was bigger than expected-took us right out to the bay and looped back around!

one of the cool things about geocache-ing is that if you find a cache with little treasures, you can take a treasure and etiquette is that you replace it with an object of equal value, sign the log, and put it back in place carefully!

contents and logs, this one had logs back to 2014

one of our treasures!

these are some fun treasures i plan to use...i created little boxes because it makes the treasures even more fun! but i also have some small trinkets that will be box-less.

so, our first adventure was a success, they suggest finding at least 20 before creating your own cache so that you can get ideas and create long-lasting caches that can be visited for years to come. now i just need to start saving up canisters to use as caches! if you are looking for something fun to do, and have a nancy drew, encyclopedia brown mind, you should definitely check into it, because it is great fun, and it will expose you to beautiful areas that you may not notice otherwise!! www.geocaching.com so yeah, check it out!

have an adventure!
julie

handlebars belong on a bike. period.

i know, it's been a few days. this week has been an un-interesting week and i've had writer's block and nothing has seemed incredibly inspiring or deserving of being written about. i think it's a mixture of feeling a little let-down by the summer school thriving minds program this year and trying to figure out what's up with bruno.

the best part of today was going to north park for lunch at the food court and seeing this man with his handlebar mustache...see it off the left cheek (sorry i didn't get a better pic) it was pretty creepy.

the worst part was waiting for panda express to get my chicken egg roll done. (obviously it didn't phase them that i was standing there in front of the straws handing them out to every customer because my tray was in the way and i must not have had my best 'i'm annoyed' face on because the promised 3 minutes turned into about 7. jerks). shoulda' gotten the fajitas.

ok, i never win anything, so you can imagine my surprise when my name was drawn today at the training and i got to choose my prize. hmm. it was between a math book and a reading book-guess which one the reading teacher chose. it figures that i would win a boring prize (it's just a comparison of elps and elar-if you're confused, it's ok, join the crowd)

they're good at trying to fool you by creating an intriguing, fun cover

this is a legit sampling of the book-every page is comparison-boo. boring.

i wouldn't have won anything, but 2/3 of the class did not return to our session today, so they called about 10 people who weren't there and finally my name. lucky me. if i get a chance i may look for some little nuggets of goodness and see if there are any gems hidden in the rough, but i have a lot of summer reading which will take priority.

right now chaco is trotting back and forth all over the house looking for a place to cache his rawhide...he just yelled at me, "momma! stop watching!" as if i was planning to dig his rawhide out of the folds of the beanbag to chew on it while he's off at the vet or something... he's a puppy on a mission.

well, if you meet up with a man who has handlebar mustache, don't try to grab it and drive away-that would be considered assault.

julie