Lachs, Geocaching and Bears, OH MY!!!!

While the coast burns and Arnie declares a drought, Ms. Sarah and I hopped into the ever trusty and fuel efficient Toyota Corolla and drove into the back country of the Sierra into Tahoe National Forest to go on a Geocaching adventure up at the Lach Leven lakes. After driving about 10 miles of forest roads, I have to give mad props to the 'Rolla.... given big props to the West Side for my sis-n-law.

What is geocaching you might ask? Well it is hands down the most fun you can have with a GPS unit! Scattered across this crazy world are hundreds of thousands of little ammo boxes, mint tins with magnets glued to them, and bar code stamped items traveling the globe... all right under our noses! Geocaching is fun, its free, and takes you to all kinds of fun places! Check out the link to the website and learn more!

Our first Geocache stop was at Lake Huysink. I thought for sure we'd get a FTF (first to find, highly coveted) but someone had been there first! *sigh* It was still great to bag our first find of the day! Here I am showing you how intrepid explorers work.

After a quick detour BACK down the road a bit to grab some industrial strength bug spray, we set off across the ridge bound for Salmon Lake and our second cache of the day. It was a relatively short hike at 2 miles or so, but the acrid air was pretty rough on our lungs. Still, even in the haze, the early summer in the Sierra's is beautiful!

Our second find of the day was a bit off of the trail at the far end of Salmon Lake from where the trail splits off. We thought we had been scooped yet again that day on the find by some people we saw, but it turns out they were only muggles (non-cachers) looking for a good place to camp. After walking right over the thing a couple of times we managed to find the cache, and in the process a beautiful view! We also picked out our first TravelBug, "the RAMbler"!!!


The third cache of the day was a THREE PARTER!!! This means that you get the coordinates for the first caches, which gives your the second which gives you the third! What a hoot! The first one was pretty easy. The second one taugth us a valuable lesson in GPS use... mainly, give it a second to catch up. After scrabbling up and down some good size hills, the second site turned out the be in a spot that we should have cut over to about a half mile back on the trail!! Never fear, we found it and went on to track down the third and final cache! Our GPS brought us to the edge of a lake, indicatig the cache to be about 150 feet from shore. WHAT?????!!!! We were prepared for this and jumped right in! SUCCESS!!!! We signed the log, left some Costa Rican money and swam back to the shore to enjoy a tasty lunch of salami, cheese and bread.

Last week my sister-in-law posted on her blog LoveYourMotherEarth an entry regarding the vicious and wild world of suburban California. Namely, squirrels. I guess when you live in So-Cal (as the cool kids call it) squirrels in your backyard is about all you can expect, apart from and occasional mountain lion who has so much mercury in his brain from pollution that he wanders into a retirement community, causing mass hysteria from the walking dead and eliciting a hunting party to kill off one of three wild animals left down there..... but I digress. As we were coming down the mountain, and incidentally as I was thinking bringing a bear box wasn't really necessary when hiking around there, what should bound across the road, but a bear! He stopped not too far into the woods to take a good look at us, and we stopped to check him out. Talk about cool. Take that Mistress of the Squirrels!



All in all, another wonderful day to be alive! We're planning some overnight trips with all the great gear our family and friends got us for the wedding and will be sure to document that whole circus too!

The Best Bike Ever

Well its official, I own the coolest bike ever made. I picked up this beauty from a Craigslist posting after missing out on three others by minutes! With gas prices what they are, people are starting to learn the value of a good bike.


With my new job down the street this makes my commute about 5 minutes and about 3/4 of a mile, as opposed to the 125 miles away that my prior job site was! The new job is great, but it starts at 0600 hrs! EEP! Well I CAN ride the bike and drink coffee at the same time, but I thought I'd see if I couldn't do a little better than that. I'm no philistine after all....

I had an old bottle cage hanging around my garage that seemed to fit my mug perfectly. I drilled out the holes into the handlebars, which stay nearly upright in all but the most aggressive turns, secured it with a few loose parts I found at the bottom of my tool box and PRESTO! It doesn't look too secure in this picture, but I've road tested it and will stand-by the passing grade I've given it.

The sweetest thing about this bike is the way cool paint job. I have no idea when this thing was actually made, but I am guessing late 80's??? Further deduction places its previous and intended home at a Florida trailer park, given the name. My nana and grandpa had one of these things when they lived in Florida, and I remember riding it like a maniac, jumping the speed bumps and doing power slides on the shuffle board courts.


For my purposes and more grown up sensibilities, I've added a few other modifications. It came with this wimpy little wire basket, that just would not do. I had an extra plastic bin kicking around and mounted that on the back instead. It holds my big boat bag from Beans full of groceries with room to spare for a few other items. I originally just mounted it right to the frame, but I added a couple of pieces of wood to create a more solid mounting surface today, and it seems more stable now. As you can see, I put the reflector back there too, in a nod to safety concerns. In that vein I have a orange flag to warn people I am on the road.

Future modifications I am hoping to make are:
1) Adding a three speed hub--> as it is now, you max out your speed pretty quickly.
2) Lighting, possibly recharged from a mounted solar panel like the one I have that lights the flag in the front yard.

Stay tuned for future updates on the bike, stories of our Geocaching adventures and Sarah's new bike!

WEDDED BLISS!!!!

Well FINALLY we have some of our professional wedding pictures in! Here's a sample of the awesomeness. We have right around 5,000 (WTF???) pictures, so going through all of them to pick out the best is going to be time consuming, but here's a few I dig. You can see more pictures at the photobucket website we have set up at www.photobucket.com Username: JasonandSarah_2008 Password: wedding. Enjoy!

ps. Wanna see the best wedding dance ever? click here!











Sarah is at a scrapping retreat this weekend, so I have been left with the task of going through all of these! I thought I had plowed through them all until I posted this and realized that I missed two whole DVD's worth of pictures! On the upside, I've been riding my new three wheel bike all over the place this weekend and am planning on settling into a great East vs. West NBA finals game this evening with my team the Celtics on cusp of greatness! Adios! GO CELTS! BEAT LA!!!!!

Introducing Miss Silvia

One of the best presents we got for our wedding was from my buddy Roger, the People's Gourmand, who made note of my drooling over his very nice espresso machine a month or so ago. So he purchased us Miss Silvia! A fine piece of Swiss engineering sold by Italians!

The learning curve on this thing is pretty steep, but with practice we're finally starting to get it!

It seems that there are all sorts of variables, including how hard you pack the grounds in the strainer, how much coffee you use, time of the pour and the fineness of the grind. Apparently the recommended grinder is like 260 bucks!!! Of course Roger has it. It is pretty bad ass, but since he lives very close by, I'll just bring my beans to him! Here's a few successful pulls!



Probably not very interesting to you all, but its been great for us!! With this and the other great gift of the coffee maker, we've cut out Starbucks! TAKE THAT!!