Home Alone

By Allan Olson

Being home alone is certainly a different contrast from the usual hub bub of our home – and by home alone – I’m referring to a fate that is fast approaching- empty nesters. While my youngest might be only in the fourth grade class this fall, my oldest is entering the high school and it didn’t seem that long ago – that he too was in the fourth grade class – so I’m certain that the next eight years will fly by fast.

The house became empty on Friday – with three of the four kids headed north with their Grandma for a week of fun with grandma and grandpa and vacation bible school. That afternoon, Nikolai was picked up from his first week of Upward Bound – at which he had a great time. So over the weekend our house wasn’t totally empty.

I tried getting him to go out fishing Friday evening, but he wasn’t really interested and in reality the wind probably would’ve kept us from going out – until about 8 p.m. when things calmed down. He suggested Saturday – but I already had plans for that day. It was my birthday weekend and Father’s Day weekend and I was going to do something I wanted to do that was going to be affected by any weather – except heavy rain showers.

So Friday evening, we watched Pirates of the Caribbean at the big screen – I’m not a big fan of the series so I wasn’t as familiar with the plot and in all honesty – it wouldn’t matter to me if I watched it again. It certainly had its humorous points but the sci-fi isn’t my genre and I think I would’ve enjoyed watching Cars 3 with the kids more.

On Saturday morning, I headed out to meet a friend and his son for geocaching, we left Cass Lake at 11:30 a.m. and returned about eight hours later. Our destination was in the Deer River area, which in reality meant all the surrounding towns.  I had only a couple geocaches I wanted to target – one that would require a little more work than the normal search and sign. For these two, it wasn’t the searching that was the hard part, it was the signing. On the way we found a few caches in between and then before we got too sidetracked we navigated towards the two tricky ones I wanted to get. The first one was the most fun – and the only one we actually got to work the proper way. We found the parking spot and walked about 900 feet in a gravel pit to the right location. We found the container – several pieces of PVC with a valve. The name of this was MacGyver: Pneumatics and after reading about it I packed the necessary piece of equipment the night prior – a handheld air pump. The tricky part was figuring out what to do with it aside from attaching it to the valve stem protruding from the PVC.  We pumped air in it a couple times and it didn’t do anything. The youngest member of the group suggested closing the valve and pumping it back up again and then opening the valve –we did that and as we wondering if it worked, we heard a whoosh and something landed on the ground next to me –it worked. So we signed the log in the container and put it back and this time and did again – just so we could see it work.

The next tricky one, required a chemical reaction to get the container – we didn’t have any chemicals with us and the valves on the PVC were a little gummed up from the previous reaction so we didn’t get to see it work like it was intended – however, we did have a tool to reach inside the container and were still able to sign the log and claim a find.

During the rain storm, we also found the perfect cache – it was one that required us to drive around town and read the signs, taking notes and doing a little math we found the final location – just after the rain faded away.

In all we managed to find 20 geocaches and racked up another 180 miles on my old jalopy most importantly we had a fun time, next time, we might pick another direction and he will be the driver.

On Sunday – we returned Nikolai back to BSU for the week and we officially became empty nesters. We went to the store to get a few grocery items for the week and I went to get my Father’s day pie at Perkins – but they were out – which made my sad. So I went to the grocery store and found a whole pie substitute for probably the same price as one piece –it wasn’t quite as good but still pretty tasty.

We headed back home to a quiet home and finished the new season of the Ranch and some other shows. It sure was a different twist of things to have such a big house and no children noise to fill the home. Also feeling the effects of no kids, is our dog – he sure is lonely without them.

This week, both my wife and I have busy schedules at work and then we head North to get the kids. We need to be there by 7 p.m. Friday for the program but we will need to leave a little earlier to attend a graduation party. Plans for the weekend, will be celebrating my birthday with my kids – since that will be the first time we have been together in a week.

Please remember to watch out for the buses that are carrying our most precious cargo. Also, snap a photo or two to preserve a lifetime of memories. Thanks for reading, and have a great week! Feel free to drop me a line at cltimes1@arvig.net or stop by the office for a visit.