The excuse to go to San Jose (not that we need one, but it was there) was the Gonzaga-Santa Clara University game. As alumni parents of both institutions, I suppose we should be impartial, but we're definitely Zag fans.

We wanted to cache on the way (shock!!) We left here before 8 am, and first went to the Jelly Belly factory. We were second-to-find at this new micro, and just missed Team Alamo (about 3100 caches by now) by about 15 minutes. They were en route to Davis to visit their son and family. Drat, I'd have loved to meet the super-cacher of California!

Then we wanted another planet, Saturn in this case. Team Alamo's super-cacher friend has also put Titan the moon up in a nearby location. We were looking for Saturn and found Titan. The clue for the moon says it's the same kind of placement, on the other end. Since we found the moon under the corner of the bridge, we looked really hard at all the other corners, even though we knew Saturn was supposed to be in the southwest. We really think it's gone for a swim. Darn it! Today we were going to pick up three of the planets so we would have eight. When you get all nine you can go for Haley's Comet.

Oh, well. Onwards to Monica's. It turns out the book I thought she would like, she liked so much she named Genevieve after the heroine. Now then, I thought she'd like it because there was a Genevieve in it! They had the DVD of G's second year for us.

The activity was to go to Oak Meadow park for a picnic. I rode with Monica and the girls, Mark rode with Rich, so we all got some nice conversation in. (It's fun to talk to the girls as peers. I like the adults they've grown into.)

One of the topics was overweight children, paranoia, and modern day life. Monica doesn't think there are more dangers today than when she, or I, was growing up. I agree, mostly, but with two footnotes. If, say, the proportion of weirdos to normal people is one in a thousand, nowadays we meet a lot more people in the course of a week, so are more apt to come across these weirdos. Secondly, there's sex everywhere, and people are more desensitized to bad behavior. Lewis Carroll liked to photograph nude little girls, but nothing worse came from it, and he probably never even considered touching them. A lot of thoughts that wouldn't ever cross your mind back when I was a kid are now common coin. I'm not going to mention the group that tries to make perversion seem normal by name, because it gets the weirdos writing me and the last time had very unfortunate fallout, but this group would be in jail or on death row when I was a child. So indeed, things are a little less safe today, but I agree with Monica that parents are TOO paranoid. She plans for the girls to go to the local Catholic girls' high school, and to walk or bike there, since it's only about a mile away. Seems OK. Of course, in ten years, who knows what will be the case?

We stopped at the Safeway for sandwiches for lunch, then went a couple of blocks to the park. There, the girls went on the swings, then over to the carousel. Rich stayed back with Charlotte.

It was just a beautiful day! We rode the train around Vashon Park, and Genevieve was back on the carousel, and all over the play structure. It was the first time she'd been down a twisty slide and she loved it, and she was brave enough to try it on her own first thing. Then, unfortunately, she ended up on a slide that needed a catcher and ended up sitting down hard, so it'll probably be some time before she does this again.

We had almost four hours with the family. What a terrific day. We like to see the grandchildren once a month, at least, just to keep them aware of who we are. Also, they grow and change so much! Charlotte has a whale-spout hairdo now, and five teeth. Genevieve is speaking more clearly (and she puts together very sophisticated sentences, too.) She's started gymnastic classes and is beginning to wean herself from her blanket squares. They will be in Sacramento in a couple of weeks while the house is being tented, and we're feeding them, so now I have incentive to clean!!

We said goodbye back at the cars and went off caching. We found Mars (which was just returned this morning) and got its comet numbers. There's a travel bug inn near there so we found it, traded one and got the numbers of the other three. Then we went for the one that is in a coffee shop. Actually, the shop is usually closed Saturday afternoon, but luckily it was open, and we had some mocha or cocoa and traded more bugs. I got one I really wanted, a Shrek toy which comes from the mid-Pennsylvania super-cacher. The funny thing about this cache is it's just around the corner from Mark's folks.

From there we went to one called "Apostrophe." I think he put this one out because of a comment I made in his Word Police one the last time we were in town. You have to post an example of apostrophe misuse from another cache when you log. That's pretty easy! Then I'd done some geometry to get the coordinates for another. I filled out two pages with math, with squares and square roots, then realized these were similar trangles, easy! x/17 = 27/x so the answer, x^2, is 17*27. Still, it was nice to be vindicated and find the cache.

We were in the area of another I hadn't put into the machine. This one was trashed... we cleaned it up and re-hid it, but we think the guy should probably take it out for a month or so, till the kid who thinks trashing it is so funny forgets.

It was getting dark, so I thought we probably didn't want to go downtown to search under a freeway overpass for Mercury. If we'd gotten Saturn, it would have been more important, but as is, we have another time before we can get all the planets. (Uranus is in Gustine, and then we'll be done. Haley's Comet is somewhere in the Oakland Hills.)

I put in the coordinates for one other nearby cache. (Pity I don't have a wireless laptop! Then I'd have ALL the caches listed, not just the ones I thought would be nearby.) This one was about 5 miles away... and turned out to be .2 mile from the first travel bug inn we went to! (There's another one really close, along the Los Gatos Creek Trail, too.) We found this one in the dark, though the quarter moon gave a lot of light. I got a Where's George dollar there. It was funny, because the sodium street lights make the red stamp on the dollar invisible, and back in the car I thought maybe I was mistaken that it was a George.

We drove up to Santa Clara. We were trying to remember how it is that you get to the arena, when we spied a Gonzaga Alumni license plate frame, so we just followed him. Then we discovered the game was sold out. OK, no problem. If this had been the real reason we came to town, we'd have been disappointed, but while I'd have enjoyed it, it wasn't important. We got to see the kids, now that was important, and this way we actually got home at a decent hour.

What a great day!