Ever heard of Geocaching?

Well, I hadn't until last fall. Brian got us into it with his old GPS unit. There's an online place where people record the coordinates of caches they hide and clues, etc. Then you go find them and record back that you did or didn't find it. Today we were looking for 4 and found 2 of them. One required me to decrypt a poem that was in gibberish to get the coordinates. A puzzle for my head! And then it took us up on this dirt road to the top of a plateau where we could see the bottom of the canyon with a stream, a bit of the Columbia River, and the Cascade mountains off in the distance. Gorgeous! And the first one I actually found the container!

So, a good end to a rather long week. I did not get the middle school science job I interviewed for. I didn't feel good about the interview and they hired someone with a lot of experience. However the principal did say they had another opening coming up for 6th grade science in a week or two. We'll see...

The high school kids I'm teaching are interesting. Funny, seems like I was doing the same thing this time last year... in St. Paul, Oregon! Only 4 weeks left of school!