"My Crazy Kids"

Fall weekend adventures By Allan Olson Where to begin on this weekend’s activities? It was all such a blur of fun; it’s hard to remember it all! Friday night was the quietest. Even though momma was away, daddy still fed the kids and made them work on cleaning their rooms – a most dreaded task for any child. While they did that, I made a pumpkin cake and enjoyed listening to a football game. My brother arrived with his three kids on Saturday morning, and from that point on everything was all in fast forward. The kids all immediately jumped on their bikes and started riding like the wind. They decided to take one break, hiding in the house to look at the computer or television. We fixed that problem in short order by kicking them back out of the house – so they biked some more. I decided that we should go for a couple geocaches – the weather was perfect! My brother was game, so we fed the kids and headed for the woods. There were a couple of caches I had wanted to ...

 Fall cleanup time By Allan Olson   Last week’s “snowstorm” convinced us that, if nothing else, the season is definitely changing and like it or not, we could soon be knee deep in snow. Things were relatively qui­et at our place this weekend. On Saturday morning I took pride in losing two games of chess to a 10-year old neph­ew. Following his departure, we headed to town to shop for a few grocery items and new shoes for the kids. We’ve de­cided that next spring we will be investing in some boots for the kids for our geocach­ing adventures into the woods so they don’t trash their good shoes. Upon examination of their footwear, we discovered that of the three youngest, the shoes of two had holes and the third wasn’t far be­hind. Nikolai’s shoes were already replaced earlier for the same reason. I suppose I could make them go barefoot for a year to solve the prob­lem, but they might object to that, at least during the winter months. On Saturday afternoon, after attendin...

Our First Geocache Hide By Allan Olson We finally did it! We planted our first geocache for others to find after starting our caching adventures in May and logging 184 of our own finds. This weekend we hid our very own geocache in an area near where my wife grew up close to the Rainy River. We had been talking about it, and I’ve been eager to hide one for some time. We decided this weekend that it would be good to hide one in an area where there aren’t very many. Now we have the suspense of waiting for someone to find it! On Saturday night we did some research and hid the treasure. We gave a niece the coordinates to find it, and after a little bit of searching she located the hiding spot. The name of our geocache is “Rapidly Waiting,” which hints at the location of the hide. For readers unfamiliar with the activity of geocaching, I’ve included some background information: Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants n...