"It cannot change our way of life, unless we are beaten." And there you have it, really. --- Lileks with a WWII Civil Defense Manual.

The day looked really good for a trip to Acorn's Nut Cache, the cache for which we found the coordinate travel bug. We'd loaded it in and found it was in Loomis, so I found some others in the area.

In fact, the first cache we found was about a tenth of a mile closer to the parking spot in Loomis Park. This one took awhile, but was actually there. Someone logged in that he'd be back when he found Chitter and Chatter. How did he know? Then we went to the Nut Stash. I was really disappointed to find that the travel bug that was supposed to be there had been taken by someone who logged in at the site, but not at the cache. This bug is called a Day Late and a Dollar Short and is supposed to be for the second person to find a cache. I think it's a funny idea and was really wanting to do that. Oh, well. I left a TB there, anyway. We took a tiny cache, this one with a $1 in it (and Rich traded a goodie in another cache because he wanted the medallion... I had a nice hatpin to trade) to turn into a George. I know exactly where this cache is going, and now there's no excuse not to put one there. Rich has been slow to print up cache sheets and stuff, even though he has a series in mind.

Across the road is the north half of the park with a little hill with granite outcrops. There's a cache here, difficulty 3. Well, we searched and searched, and Rich finally saw a branch that didn't belong, and sure enough, it was the cache. Such a clever camouflage!

Then we drove the four miles to Newcastle. Our first cache there was in the cemetery, in a tree knot. Then we went to one called "Secrets of Newcastle" which is behind a school on a nature trail in Secret Ravine. I left the one travel bug I had left here. Thence to lunch in "downtown." (It turns out to be the antique block with downtown slightly elsewhere.) Our first try turned out to be a bar, but we'd spied a taqueria so we chose it instead, and the food was fabulous. I could see a train outside, disappearing into the mountain.

The next cache was along a canal, at the top of that mountain (and we didn't drive right up, too mushy and rutty a road) and you can overlook the tunnel. Someone posted about the history of Newcastle and how the rail line was moved in the 30s. We weren't lucky enough to see a train while we were there.

Our last cache of the day was called "water running uphill" and it certainly has that optical illusion. You're driving up and can see the canal to the side, looks like it's tilted up a few degrees. It looks like an Escher print.

The cache is in a tiny cave with a difficulty of 2.5. Rich found this one, too. Nice day!
....

This is Kerry on VietNam and Clinton. Hypocrite! Why was it OK if Clinton was a draft-dodger and yet not OK to serve in the National Guard? Instapundit rounds them up... including Neal Boortz: T]he same people were trying to convince us in 1992 that Bill Clinton's draft-dodging was no big deal. Surely the Democrats don't think we're that stupid. . . . What a bunch of lying, hypocritical phonies.

Hypocritical Donks? But I repeat myself.

Bush has an MBA from Harvard Business School, which is not a "gentleman's C", but of course this doesn't fit with the "Bush is dumb" meme. There are a lot of these memes which, like defective genes, are bad for the people who carry them. He's really not so dumb.

A supermajority! May we not lose this in California! They're trying to take it away. The good thing about proposition 56, that the lege would lose pay if they didn't get the budget passed on time, is sure outweighed by the bad, changing the supermajority so they could sneeze and raise taxes.

And, in the California Aggie, an article about geocaching. We've been to all the caches they talk about, and met at least one of the people featured in the article.