Thawn Is An Archaic Word

Well, now I believe it. The promised springlike conditions did, in fact, materialize, as did power after three and a half days. While crews from neighboring cities and towns are still working on outages, Austin has mostly recovered, and I am short-sleeved again (at least for a few days, anyway).

I found myself working on a challenge, my oldest one uncompleted. It requires finding a hundred caches in each month (which was easy) and a hundred caches on each date (which still vexes me). I’ve got more than the minimum 3,100 caches (Adventure Labs don’t count), but not on the right dates. Therefore, breaking the standard protocol of getting a cache a day, on Saturday, I went out and found two to complete the required finds on the fourth of a month. That was more than welcome because there was no point in being at home. One of them was an easy park-and-grab, the other in a subdivision park. The sign on the park fence designated that the park was only for residents. I looked askance on that both because I have problems with taking public resources (in this case, land) to make them private and because if the park truly is private property, that’s not a great place to place a cache. Either way, I disregarded the sign and went on in. The painted Altoids can sitting in the open was easy enough to find. In fact, I moved it to behind the utility box because there should be at least some mystery to it, no? And I turned around to see an interesting view.

I could see the lake beyond beneath a slight haze in the distance. It might have been lovely, had it not been for the little boxes made of ticky-tacky in between. Suffice it to say that I have complicated feelings about suburbs, but none of you are here for my opinions on housing theory. All I could do was appreciate the view that might have been and then leave.

I have things I need to do for the upcoming Texas Challenge. As captain of Team CenTex, I need to hone my team to compete against the foul and most foreign interlopers from those other parts of Texas: North, East, South, Southeast, and West! And, if that isn’t bad enough, we must also prepare against all the invaders from beyond the holy borders, too! What trials and tribulations await us, we most chaste and sanguine scions of Central Texas? Now that things are no longer most frigid, I should have the mental space to tackle some of those needs. It’s been a long, draining weekend for me, folks, and though I will deny I ever said it, for once, I’m not unhappy to see the Spear of Apollo. But just this once. He still knows what he did…