Junction City

It's one of the Christian works of mercy to bury the dead, so we thought we should come up here for Bernadette's father-in-law. We left the dog in back, put out food and water for the cats (and our neighbor checked on us) and away we went. We weren't going to stop for any caches till we got close to Redding, as those we can do on a day trip from here. There was one newish one in Corning that I had to try, though. It's in a tiny park, a foreign coin exchange. We had no muggles, so it was easy. Our next one was another hundred miles along, in Weed. This one we tried for last year but we were on the wrong side of the freeway.

By this time I had discovered that I forgot my book(!!!) The lucky thing was, while we were in the driveway, Rich remembered he hadn't loaded in our funeral clothes. Those we would have had to come back for, the book wasn't so important. However, since the next one, just outside of Medford, was named "Bookworm" I was hoping it was outside a bookstore. Imagine my disappointment when it was a library. Libraries are great and it's possible they have sale books, but we just went on, after getting gas and lunch. Later, at a rest stop, someone had left a couple of Janet Dailey romances atop a trash can, and I discovered that I was not that desperate!

We couldn't find a cache in a little park in Grant's Pass, and then went to a neat one called "Styx and Stones." It's off Old Highway 99. We'll say! When we wound our way there, it turned out there were sections of an OLD old highway, probably before 99. And a tiny old cemetery with two people in it. Nice cache! Then we could get back on the freeway going north before we got back to another, so we decided to pick it up tomorrow, southbound.

Finally, there was a virtual at an Indian casino. Then we had a hundred miles left, and we wanted to get to Junction City, so we called it quits for the day.

I missed a voicemail from Bernadette, mostly because I didn't realize I had to leave the machine on a little longer for it. We went straight to the motel, and I'd thought it was possible that we'd just meet them at church for the rosary, but the phone rang and they were calling. I said we'd go to the house in a few minutes, and tested the computer to be sure I could log on there. Indeed I could! Then we went to the house and expressed our condolences, and went to the church to the Rosary, and back to the house. We got here to the motel about 10. Father has a replica of the Shroud of Turin, which is fascinating, especially after we saw The Passion of the Christ.

The funeral was at 11, so after we went over to breakfast, we had a chance to cache some. Last October we had tried one of eight this one guy put out, and hadn't found it, so when we didn't find the first two of his we tried today, we got really annoyed. However, the third one (about 3 blocks away from the house) we finally found. Then we located another in a tree close to the church. We drove northwest near a Mormon church for our third of the day, then to the one we'd tried last October... with 800 more caches, and it wasn't raining or dark, this one was pretty easy. The final one turned out to be in the Danish cemetery where the burial was to be, so we located the gravesite as well as the cache. Then we still had quite a bit of time left before church, so I logged the first three of these caches.

This is the same church where Bernadette was married. I think the family appreciated us for coming. The funeral went well, and the luncheon, and then there was a wait for the burial as one of the grandchildren had a French final. She graduates on Saturday. We went back to the motel for a short nap, then picked up Bernarob for the burial. (His mom stayed at the church with the body. She's holding herself together with sheer nerves, and I imagine once the kids have left she'll have a big crash.)

At the cemetery, we not only looked at Roy's grave, but also grandpa Jack's. One of the kids had a flat, and the roads are only wide enough for one way, so Rich was in his element supervising the tire change. Then we went back to the house and stayed till about 8 or so. We thought we'd see if we could find one cache just south of town. No, we couldn't, but we got to watch an osprey flying overhead. Tomorrow we're going home!

Yesterday we did five caches and They did six, so now They catch us at about 1530 end of July.

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LA Times afraid of Fox News.

Claudia Rosett:

...by the yardstick of most criticism now leveled at President Bush for freeing Iraq, by the rhetoric of John Kerry, who has deemed the venture a failure involving "one miscalculation after another," by lights of the chronic dismay over every setback or mistake in the face of 1,001 uncertainties, one might start to think America and its allies had on a whim invaded Sweden, reducing the place to the kind of condition you'd expect after about a quarter-century under Saddam.

The D-Day speech Bush SHOULD give. I would like to see this, but it won't happen.

Strategy Page:

Another big problem is the Arab media here, which has big problems with facts. Just like the Al Jazeera reporter who stood proclaiming Iraq was winning the war as Marines rolled into Baghdad, they still misrepresent the situation over here. The American media also has had its issues with facts also. They will go out of their way to find the Iraqi person who doesn't like the coalition and show him as if he speaks for all Iraqis. When we bombed that supposed "wedding Party" last week on the western Iraq border on a Wednesday, the media failed to mention that a vast majority of Iraqis believe that weddings and especially the wedding party should be held on Thursdays. Its part of their culture. This adds to the mounting evidence that this was not a wedding party but probably a meeting of terrorists and criminals who also eat and throw parties. I read another article by a New York Times reporter who compared the term "Haji", which some soldiers have used when referring to an Iraqi person, to the term "gook" used as a derogative in Viet Nam. Again this is not the case. I have asked several Iraqis, including Police Officers and interpreters who have said they feel honored to be called a "Haji" because it refers to some who has made or is trying to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Again, it seems that trying to put down the military is more important than getting the facts straight. Maybe the worst example was how they reported the end of the re-stabilization of Fallujah. The mission was not designed, nor was it our intention to attack and conquer Fallujah. Had we intended that we could have easily destroyed and killed everyone in that city. But, that is not our mission in Iraq. But when the media says we were forced to stop the siege on Fallujah, they fail to recognize that we were only going after the criminals and foreign terrorists there. When we got the majority of them, the rest went to the leaders and asked for a cease-fire. We won that decisively with minimal innocent casualties.

Media bias.

Rope-a-dope?

The only solution is to kill them and keep on killing them: a war of attrition. But a war of attrition fought on our terms, not theirs.

Of course, we shall hear no end of fatuous arguments to the effect that we can�t kill our way out of the problem. Well, until a better methodology is discovered, killing every terrorist we can find is a good interim solution. The truth is that even if you can�t kill yourself out of the problem, you can make the problem a great deal smaller by effective targeting.