COVID killed Christmas...

Ok not totally killed Christmas but certainly put a huge damper on it.  I mean basically any Holiday Parties, Holiday Events, big gift exchanges, etc - CANCELLED.  We're at an all time high with cases actually.  Our damn country is on red alert.  California got pulled back to the Purple Tier then back to Stay At Home earlier this month.  Sigh.  

But as per usual for this year - we made the best of it.  

We did decorate.  I was actually really excited to decorate our new place.  We have so much space!  We also got a real tree!  It smells so pretty!  I don't think I've had a real tree since 2007.  We also were able to still put up all our fakie trees because we have the room!  So our place looked super cute and festive!

I love our lights!

Figured I'd decorate the tree outside our place

I've always wanted a banister to put garland and lights on!!!

We did good!

So pretty!

Seymore cuddles

Decorating our REAL tree!

I'm in love!

One night we watched my friend Kali on her Union Station Xmas Tree Virtual Lighting thing!

 

My friends rock

 

 

We also got out and looked at some Christmas Lights when we could!

 

Such a cool surprise we found!  It played the lights along with music when you tuned into a certain station

Randomly saw this driving around

Rad

There was all kinds of fun food and baking throughout the season.

I baked randomly here and there and made cookies for us and dropped off surprise deliveries to friends.  My mom had her baking day, but I didn't go this year - cuz - you know - COVID...but I did stop by and get some cookies and took some pictures of them!

Taylor sent us a Harry & David Box of goodies!!!

We made Hot Chocolate Cocoa Bombs!!!  So fun!!!

Work Virtual Ho Ho Happy Hour

I'm a baking fiend!

I won some cookies from our neighbor!!  So yummy!  (I'm actually totally sober even though I don't look it)

The baking ladies

I snuck in for a quick bite!

Quick pic!

I always treasure my patio visits with Taylor, and I made us Jingle Juice.  One of my co-workers also sent him a rad Christmas Presie in the mail that we continued playing with all through our visit.

Jingle Juice!

Also right before Lock Down - in between Thanksgiving and Christmas - we did get one outing in  - miniature golf!  It's all outside and was set up super safe so we figured why not!  Good thing we did too, because just a few days later everything shut down again.

So when the actual holiday came, we tried to see our families while being safe at the the same time.  I got a COVID test a few days before to make sure I was good to go.  Negative.  Fab.  So I alone went to my Dad's house to have Christmas Eve Dinner.  Christmas Day we masked up and went to Pat's mom to exchange gifts, then over to my moms where we exchanged gifts outside.  Didn't take too many pictures really...because FUCK COVID.  But here's a couple...

Pat and I did a Christmas Eve Day hike!

The sky show was beautiful on my way to my Dads

Even though the little pretty much knows the deal with Santa - cookies were left and she left a note in Japanese

Christmas morning

Seymore was enjoying the morning

Mom had a hook the antler game that was fun!

So - there ya have it.  Although it was a rough one, we did it and I feel like we did it well.  Hoping we'll all be in a much safer better place next year!  Hope you all had as good of a holiday as can be.

Hiding our first geocache...

Is not nearly as easy as you'd think it would be.

In fact - it's kind of a pain in the ass.

 

So - Xmas 2018 Pat actually bought me a cache container.  That was our 1st year dating and he didn't really know what to get me so since I was so into it (and still am!) what a perfect gift!

 

Problem was I kept forgetting about it.  I did remember at one point, looked into the process to hide a cache and it looked way complicated so it kind of fell by the wayside.

 

Well - here we are in Pandemic Hell so Pat was like "Let's hide the thing!"  

 

The 1st step was we had to get permission from the Land Owner.  Seems odd, and I'm sure most of these cache peeps have not got permission but I wanted to do everything right at least the 1st time.  After months of forgetting, research and finally getting a response from someone legit, we got the OK!

 

Our plan was to hide it across the street from where we live.  We're right there and it would be perfect and easy to maintain it!  

 

Pat thought what a fun family adventure to go hide it!  The place we had in mind was a big pile of large rocks, so we painted it gray and I named it "Rock-A-Billy".  SO - we read all about the process again again and off we went!

 

We found it, hid it and excitedly came back to the house to properly log it into the system. (FYI you apparently can't really maintain a cache page in the app, you need to do it on a PC)

 

How cute is my note I left!

Pat painting the cache to look more like a rock

Resting atop (what we thought would be) our new cache spot

So perfect!

Fancy

Success!  (But not really)

 

As I was logging it into the system I got a "YOU CAN'T HIDE A CACHE HERE" notice.  WTF?!?!  Apparently you can't hide a cache too close to another cache.  Ugh.  I was so annoyed.  There are a shit ton of caches in this area and most of them haven't been found in years so their obvi inactive but still.  So that was quite a wall.  That week I hiked out by myself on a lunch break and retrieved it.

 A couple weeks later Pat had some other spots in mind so we hiked out on a very windy Sat morning.  This was more of an exploratory hike as we were trying to find places there weren't caches close by.  It ended up being about a 6 mile hike round trip but we found a spot that was perfect!  Pat put in the coordinates and we didn't get the angry error!  Yay!  We hid it again and headed back to log it when we got home.

I miss when it's green

Cute little flowers popping through!

Our new spot!

Perfect!!!  (Or so we thought...)

So windy!

Like so perfect!!!

That's our neighborhood over there

The next day we got a notice from the Reviewer Cache Person- "The coordinates seem off, are you sure?"  We looked on the map...WTF?!  Somehow Pat had entered the coordinates of our house.  UUUGGGGGHHHH!  We then found the right place on the map but realized it was literally on top of another cache - an inactive cache mind you - so now we can't hide it there either!!!  FUUUUCCCCCCKKKKK.  This wasn't an easy hike back out either, so I basically cried.

A week or so later off we went again on Saturday morning to retrieve and try to re-hide the damn thing.  I was losing hope that we were going to be able to find a place since the cache is not super small and there's not a lot of good hiding spots that aren't next to other caches, but we had an area in mind.  After another 6 mile-ish round trip hike (That involved a hell of a climb but was fun!) we found another spot.  I'm not super thrilled with it because I'm afraid it's going to slip out, but dammit we're going to try.  It's literally the only place left in this area we could possibly put it.

Climbing

A pretty new path!

Kicking my ass

There's some green!

This little guy scared the shit out of Pat

Ok....we need to get not in one of those red circles....

Please let this work!

Rock a Billy

Hopefully finally successful!!!

And guess what - SUCCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We got one more email from the Reviewer Cacher Person to double check the coordinates and enter them another way, so we did a quick Tuesday night Dusk Hike and raced the sun to double check the coordinates and make sure all was good.  Came back - re-submitted and it was approved and published that evening!

The crazy thing - I already got an email from someone asking where to park and some dude FOUND IT!  WTF?!  Ha ha!  He must have hiked at night like right after it was published.  So weird but really cool to officially be up and running!!  I look forward to more logs and maintaining our first cache!!

So go find it!!!

Happy Caching!!! 

Final night of hiding!  It's ready to be found!