Daddy - daughter day

Daddy - daughter day

By Allan Olson

A question many people ponder, especially adults as we grow older, is: “Why do the weekends always fly by so fast?” Perhaps the answer is because most weekends are packed with fun (or work), so it just seems that the time is flying by.

On Friday evening, I volunteered to go help my brother at his store, since he was back to his “second home.” I helped him with stocking some shelves. I have concluded that I don’t understand the world of those who sit in offices developing ideas for tool numbers and how they are arranged. What is their logic? I was looking for a home for a certain tool, and the number sequence was going up, up and up, and then the sequence skips a whole bunch of numbers, leading a normal person to go look somewhere else for their tools. In the end, I was able to fill some shelves with tools in the nearly three hours I spent there. Thankfully, it was after store hours, so I didn’t have to help customers with questions I would not have a clue answering.

On Saturday, I couldn’t convince the kids to go with me to do some cleaning at the office and then some geocaching. At the last minute, Abigail decided she would go, and since I packed extra food, I only had to make sure she had boots and socks for geocaching. It’s not very often parents get to spend time with just “one” child and her last minute decision ultimately made my whole day. We spent a couple hours at the office doing some tidying up; she picked things up that were lost underneath the desk, so I didn’t have to get down on the floor, and did whatever other cleaning I asked of her. I gave her time to play on the computer and just do what she wanted, and it all worked fine for both of us. We also met another family of geocachers who were out on their bikes going through town looking for caches on a beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon.

We finished up at the office around noon and decided it was time to go geocaching – just the two of us.

We started by finding a couple of caches that we had been unable to locate on previous attempts; one of them had been replaced since we had last looked. We were able to score on both of those, and turn the frowns of a Did-Not-Find into a Smiley. In between the first and second geocache, we also took in a rummage sale, where Abigail found all kinds of little goodies to take home. The treasures she picked out included a woman’s wallet, a game, a couple of necklaces, some yarn for her grandma Ethel, and a puzzle, which she put together later that evening with the help of her aunty.

After that, we hit a small section of trail that had four geocaches that we had yet to find. The first one was fairly simple and straightforward, and we made the find pretty quickly. The next one was named, “Don’t look down,” so obviously it had to be up higher. I just expected that I could reach it from the ground – but I was wrong. I was just about to give up on this one until after we found the other two, and then I spotted it. “Abigail, can you climb up there and get it?” I asked. “I am a monkey,” she said putting down her wallet on the ground and getting set to climb the tree. She made it up to the cache and worked on situating herself to open the peanut butter jar in a tree. “I can’t do it,” she said. “Yes, you can,” I told her. “Just put the jar against your body and use your hand to open it,” I said, not wanting to tell her to lean her body against the branches of the tree and use both hands. She finally got the jar open, dropped me the logbook to sign and the lid, and scampered down the tree to get them back when I was done. She carefully got them back up, struggled to get the logbook back in the jar, dropped the lid and I had to hand that back up to her. In the end, she wasn’t able to get the lid back on correctly, so I climbed the tree to do it. You might ask if it would’ve been faster for me to just do it in the first place. Of course it would’ve, but not nearly as entertaining.

The next cache was also up in a tree, but this time it was a micro, and once again I was about to give up on it and go look for the next one when Abigail said, “Dad, it’s right up there!” I looked where she was pointing, and of course, she was correct.  This time I did the climbing, since these containers are much harder to unscrew and get the log sheet in. She took a picture of me in the tree, but when I got down she insisted on climbing it, too, so she could get a picture with it.

The next cache was much simpler to find, and then we were done, and started our walk back to the vehicle. On the way back we stopped and took pictures of some lady slippers that someone had left me a voice mail about, telling me exactly where to find them in case I wanted some photos for the paper. They were correct, and the photo tip was appreciated.

It’s not very often I get one-on-one time with any of my kids, so this was a lot of fun for me – very entertaining and informative. Abigail let me know that she wants to be a music teacher when she grows up, and she corrected my grammar (I think maybe she should be an English teacher) while talking on the trail, which amused me further. In all, it was a great daddy/daughter day.

We spent Sunday at home until about 5 p.m., when my brother and his wife returned from their store. Then we headed for the lake with all the kids to go swimming. That was a fun time, but a tiring way to wrap up the weekend.

We didn’t quite make it to 400 geocaches by the end of June, but we still had a fun weekend.

This weekend is my dad’s birthday and my wife’s family reunion. Needless to say, it’s going to be exhausting – but sure to be fun as well. And as long as we’re there, I have my eye on a geocache in that area that hasn’t been found in two years, so that might be another adventure for us – we’ll see what transpires.

Thanks for reading, and remember to be safe on the lakes while enjoying the summer. Be sure to spend some time with kids! Thanks for reading, and have a great and safe weekend. For more of my columns visit: http://allan-crazykids.blogspot.com