For The Want Of A Bottle…

Saturday afternoon started off lousy. While the girls and I were at an event (not to be confused with an Event) at a library, someone stole my water bottle. I set it by a water fountain, nipped off into the men’s room for three minutes, and when I stepped out, it was gone. It was especially devastating because it was a bottle I picked up back in Bridgeport while the TexaSix were running around the Northeast a couple of years ago. I was chided for leaving it unattended in a public place, but who wants to take a water receptacle into a place of ritual impurity like a bathroom? Bunch of savages in this town! Once we left, convinced that the bottle wouldn’t be found, I wanted to get a cache. It needed to be done, and maybe it would lift my mood. It did the job well enough. We found an Altoids can in a hole in a tree. It was best suited to my younger daughter (the one with the smallest hands), but after seeing a gecko shoot down the trunk and into the hole, neither of my children was willing to put their hand in there. A father’s got to do what a father’s got to do, so I reached in. Invenimus, inscripsimus, reposuimus.

Sunday afternoon was a little better. On the way to an ice cream date, we had a little time to kill, so I stopped to let the girls pick up a Virtual I had long since gotten at the (now old) Austin History Center. If memory serves, it was my second cache ever, so it was fun watching them scurry around the front and acquire the appropriate information. Sometimes it’s fun to see them running around picking up caches I’ve been to before. It feels like they’re following in my footsteps in a more literal sense. I can’t say that’s what all parents want, but I think it’s a nice little buzz in small doses. And these are footsteps I don’t mind them tracing (believe it or not, I’m an imperfect and flawed person, as their mother can no doubt tell you). We still had a little more time left, so we went shopping for a new bottle. It’s a little too big and cost much more than I wanted to spend, but it is insulated and holds the same amount of water as my old one, so it was good enough.

Once we had ice cream (actually gelato, but whatever) and the girls were heading home, I busied myself with getting my own cache of the day. I was prepared to do a little traveling since I had gotten all the low-hanging fruit in the city center, but I noticed a more recent cache not far away. I headed over and parked near an art installation. My immediate reaction was that it was something newer I wasn’t aware of. (I don’t follow the art scene around here.) I wasn’t entirely wrong; it had only been there fifteen years. But what really mattered was that the cache was there (a magnetic key box on the only nearby big piece of iron). I’m sorry the girls missed it, but I can always bring them to it the next time they come down.

That’s it. I lead a relatively mundane life, all things considered.