Last night Rich couldn't find the checks from the Play It Again Sports branches we visited, and so today I dragged the recycling bin inside (it was still pretty windy outside) and dumped it out on the floor to go through Every Single Piece of Paper to be sure we weren't throwing it out. I might have known there was no point in actually vacuuming yesterday!

In the end, I spied them up against the side of the tissue box on the table we'd checked a thousand times. I didn't QUITE wake Rich up with the news, but it was pretty close.

Today's plan was to get as many caches in Folsom as we could. On the way, we stopped at Sunrise Mall to look for one in the ivy. We looked and looked, and I picked up a bag of trash, and finally Rich found it.

From there to Negro Bar, which is sure different since they built the new bridge. There's a famously hard cache there called Mole's Hideout. It was famously hard: we certainly had no clue. Now I suspect it's in the culvert. I had looked in there, but not too hard.

So, when one of the cachers couldn't find this, he put up one called Consolation. That was no picnic either, but we found it in a tube in a hole in a concrete post.

We crossed the Rainbow Bridge and parked at the Old Folsom Powerhouse, where we found one nice little cache. Then we crossed the street and walked along a canal. It used to bring water to the powerhouse, and was built by the prisoners at what used to just be a little jail, not the big old penitentiary it is today. Rich found the AOL can cache near the bridge. We found a couple of other nice caches along the way. Back at the Powerhouse, we toured the old place. It turns out that they plan to close it in mid-month for earthquake retrofitting, and it's supposed to reopen in 2006. How annoyed we'd have been to miss it!

We went to a dumping area with all this rusty stuff in it, and somehow Rich managed to find the film canister cache! Then we went to one under a bridge, in one of the holes. There was one near Kaiser hospital. We went looking near a trail (that used to be railroad tracks) for the shower cache, but had no luck. That Valentine party spawned a number of nice caches, but we can't seem to find any of them.

Then came the highlight of the day. We went back to the highest hill in Sacramento County, where we've been before, and this time we looked for a cache at the bottom. This stirred up a burrowing owl who came out and stared at us and bobbed up and down and shrieked at us.

This gave us hope and incentive to go after the one along the beaver pond which we missed back last summer. We started this time where we were told to, the lovely play area in Folsom. Last time we were completely opposite, and on the wrong side of the creek. We walked along a rough trail and finally spied the ammo box pretty much in plain sight.

From there we went to a little park near power lines for one, found one on a pole at a mall, and finished the day with a nice walk along a trail, just us and the mosquitos. That's 14 today, getting us to 962.

The wind chimes sound so lovely. These onyx ones from Tijuana, for some reason, just have a wonderful tone.

I like General Kinnett's response to "won't the terrorists think we're weak if we don't come in right away?" "Ask them after we've come back in."

A comment at Dailypundit:

"the enemy may have come the unpleasant realization that this was not the former administration"

Americans are paying for Clinton�s military cowardice again and again and again and again and again.

More on the flypaper/alligator theory.

Meanwhile, Glenn speculates on Kerry's health. Is it Marfan's? Well, he's tall enough and craggy enough.... Orson Scott Card on a decent running mate.

DenBeste on chutzpah.

ObGoe: Babylon5 did it better.