Yesterday I was closing the heavy wooden door and Fitch tried to run through it... I smacked him across the cheekbones. He retreated under the bed and I had to lure him out to be sure I hadn't killed him. He's fine. I hate that door. In fact, I want to replace it with a French door... which is what was there when the house was built. At least the cat is OK.

I took Casey to the Zoo yesterday. I bought a new Zoo key since I couldn't find the old one, and the kid had fun sticking it in all the speakers.

Today we went to the Pocket area of Sacramento and picked up the new caches there. First we stopped at the tip of Del Paso Park to scope out a location for the cache we picked up Wednesday. It was harder to find a place to park than it was to find a dead log to hide it under. Then we went to a couple of new caches along highway 160, G.I.Joe and one at REI. Once we'd found them, we wandered through REI and I want everything. One thing I definitely want if we ever go camping again (how? in the little car) is cots. I'm too old to sleep on the ground any more.

OK, back on the road heading south. Our first stop was actually the wrong place, because I didn't load it into the machine right. Once we got that it was a mile away, we headed back to Land Park, the big city park in the south of town and finally figured out how to drive close to the big WWI memorial where the cache was.

Next we were at one which memorialized the terrible 1972 tragedy when an airplane couldn't take off at the Metro airport and careened into an ice-cream parlor, killing 17.

As early as 1964, airport manager Don Smith had warned against building the shopping center so close to the runway, only to be ignored by city officials. County Board Chairman Patrick Melarkey also blamed "irresponsible" developers for building the center. (The Sacramento Bee)

Near the library where I take Casey we found another cache. I was thrilled to discover a Big Bird travel bug. It turns out that we found a cache that was put out but not approved, too close to the one we thought we'd found, and so they were surprised their travel bug got a start before their cache. Oops. This also means that the lion finger puppet and bendy Valentine I put into the cache were not the right goods.

Big Bird got joined by Godzilla later in the day, which made him a little cautious.

Onwards to one along a bridge in the Pocket area. No luck here. Then we found one with foreign coins in a hollow tree. From there we drove a little south and found one near the water tower. This was called Men in Black, and there's good reason for it. The tower certainly looks like a flying saucer. It took us a couple of tries to get close to the cache.

There's a geo-poker game going on in the Folsom area and we've been thinking about it, but it's going really fast there and it's quite a distance to Folsom, so we probably won't join in. Nice to be asked, though.

..........

Best of the Web: "Not to take anything away from Kerry and Clark, for whose service to the country we should all be grateful, but it strikes us that President Bush's experience as a commander in chief who's led the military in two victories is a more relevant qualification than service in combat a third of a century ago."

WMD and all the other lies.

Mark Steyn:

Even nickel'n'dime terrorists need nickels and dimes, and in your average war-torn basket-case state that usually means fundraising overseas.

Roger L. Simon connects the dots.

Nuclear non-proliferation.

Do You Feel Safer Now? Yes, in fact, though I didn't know we weren't safe on September 10.

Austin Bay.

Kerry's Watergate. The NYPost says: "John Kerry characterized the break-in as a preemptive strike. " OOOH-Kay. Kerry believes in pre-emption, but only for his own political gain, not to protect the country.

Also, he believes in DYKWIA(Do You Know Who I Am?) Robert Musil comments.