Wed., Feb. 17

After another day of humiliation and embarrassment followed by shock and awe I decided to look on the bright side and have a salad for lunch. I’m going to limit myself to one eating-out meal a day, and I’ll try to make it a good one. I really don’t want to cook. Maybe boil water but that’s it. Anyway, I went to the hospital cafeteria to have that meal. I loaded up a plate of just salad. I knew that HB would be really happy with my choice. It did have a little of everything except meat products as Loma Linda is a SDA institution. The closest thing to meat was the Free-Range Baco Bits. Anyway the bill came to $11.03 for a plate of salad. I probably won’t be eating too much salad there anymore.

Well it was a successful day. I took off on a hike after lunch with no definite destination in mind and I arrived safely. Actually, I did go to look for some geocaches on the hillside south of here. You can actually see barren hilltops over the tops of the houses, so that was my goal; to actually hope that there were some caches up there. I found three that looked to be in that general direction and loaded them into the GPS. It was getting kind of sunny and the roads were steeper than what they looked from the bottom. The first rule of geocaching is that “The shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line.” That’s especially true around houses with dogs. I couldn’t find the first one even though I walked around all sides of a house. I swear it must be on the roof or in the back yard. 0/1.

I did discover that there are oranges, lemons, and grapefruits just laying on the ground, in the street, and on the sidewalks. They’re everywhere! And I just went to the store and bought about $10 worth. Let’s just say I’ll be eating a lot of fruit but not buying any at the store.

The second gecoache was a little difficult to find even though it appeared that it was just off the road. I had just about given up when I noticed this white official looking pickup with a light bar pull up and park about 100’ down the road under a tree. I was thinking that since I had passed all those signs that said “This is Neighborhood Watch Neighborhood” some good Samaritan neighbor was watching and called the law on me. “Officer, he’s a dangerous looking sort. Ball cap on his head, something about ‘Bigfoot Lives’ on it. He looking for something, but he looks like he’s lost, appears to be walking around in circles mumbling 'yum, yum' noises to himself,“ I can hear her say.
I poked around a little bit more and actually found the cache. Yes, just where the hint said it would be. I sat down on the curb and logged it half expecting to have the white pickup drive up slowly and the guy get out of the pickup and say, “Whatca’ doin’ son?” He didn’t. I put it back in its place and walked back down the road past the pickup still expecting him to be watching me and ask me what I was doing there. I noticed as I got closer it was a Code Enforcement Officer for the City of Loma Linda. I thought that there was some kind of code against looking for geocaches in Loma Linda. I needn’t have worried, he had the seat back and was asleep.

I actually did find a way to get to the top of the hill without cutting through anyone’s yard. Of course the cache was meant to be found by coming up the hill from the other side from another street from who knows where. Anyway, I went down the other side and tromped around but couldn’t find it. I figured I covered about 8 miles today, and my ankles are telling me all about it.