Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is awesome. aside from being generally entertaining to watch (quote: "somebody put a living room where the crack den used to be."), it provides some valuable advice to average clueless straight men (of which i'm definitely a member some days). plus, the "Fab 5" are genuinely concerned with making their "project" better without taking away from who he is. they're like proud fathers (and maybe a couple mothers) when they watch their prodigy work his new stuffs. and, unlike the hacks on Trading Spaces and the like, these guys have incredible talent. good show. now, come to my house!
speaking of my house, the home buying process is moving along nicely. the mortgage should be approved, approved today (it was already basically approved) and then, maybe, by next Monday or Tuesday, i will signing papers and holding my hand out to accept the keys. we could be living in the house by next week's end. holy shit!
last weekend, we walked around the new neighborhood a bit more and went to the brand new farmer's market a couple blocks away. it's going to be a regular Saturday activity, taking a walk to the market and getting some super fresh fruits and veggies. and along with all the good food, we found that a lot of the neighborhood turns out for the market. it's a pretty diverse crowd and i'm quite pleased to have weekly interaction with them. my neighbors, my people.
so that was Saturday during the day. Friday night some friends of mine and some of Corinne's friends met up at the Latin American Club (not a club, not full of Latin Americans) for drinks and drinks. i tried really hard to get sloppy drunk but failed. i did achieve happy drunk which was close enough. also spent some time talking with Bob and Justin from Corinne's side of the family and got some quality guy time in. we talked about everything from the crazy shit we did in high school (sorry, mom, about using your car like a dune buggy) to poker to bicepmania.net. good times, good times.
Saturday night, we met up with Suzy and a bunch of other doctor-related people at Yoshi's for sushi and jazz. Pete Escovedo was playing. i'd never heard of him because i'm completely ignorant of latin jazz but he was quite great and, as it turns out, is the father of Sheila E. who knew. along meeting with some interesting new interns (that's first year medical resident to you), including one very tall, very cool surgical intern with long dreads, it was quite a fun night.
Sunday, we indulged in our new love ... GEOCACHING!
you may have heard of this and thought, "that sounds dumb." well, you're wrong. you're so wrong, you ... um ... well, you're just really wrong. it's a blast! basically, there are thousands of "caches" hidden all over the world (there's even one at the North Pole). when someone hides a cache, they post it on the geocaching website with its latitude and longitude coordinates. then you, the cache seeker, plug those coordinates into your GPS receiver and go hunting for it. it's deceptively simple. the truth is that once you get to the coordinates (the easier part), you still have to dig around to find the cache. some are hidden in stumps or behind ledges or up in trees. some people get really creative and hide them in fake tree branches several feet off the ground. some hide them on the side of a cliff accessible only by rappelling or at the bottom of the ocean. of course, all you know is that the cache is within three meters of the coordinates (GPS is generally only accurate to that distance). and some are very easy and in relatively plain view. but since you don't want just any person walking by to see it, they're usually hidden pretty well.
now, what's a "cache"? well, most of the time it's a tupperware container filled with a) a log book where you can record your visit, b) a writing utensil to fill out the log book, c) a description of what this is and what geocaching is all about, and d) whatever the person who left the cache wanted to put into it minus what visitors to the cache have taken plus what visitors to cache have added. the general guideline is take something, leave something. after you've signed the log book and played with the goodies, you put the cache right back where you found it for the next person to come along.
some things we've found in caches include money, foreign coins, mix CDs, toys, batteries, keychains, whistles, playing cards ... pretty much anything you can fit into a box. the only exclusions are drugs, alcohol and weapons because of the risk of someone finding it who shouldn't, and food because of the animal factor.
those are normal caches. there are also virtual caches where the cache isn't a thing but a place and the objective is to find the place and take a picture of it. there are multi-caches where one cache gives information on how to find the next. (an example of this is one in the Bay Area that is a more or less to-scale representation of the solar system with nine caches, each one representing a planet. after finding all of the caches, you can solve a puzzle that will give you coordinates to a tenth cache, known as "Haley's Comet".) there are also travel bugs which are barcoded items that travel from cache to cache and can be tracked on the website. and there are micro-caches which are, well, micro (think: smaller than a film canister) and pretty hard to find.
finding a cache is like being a kid again. it's a treasure hunt for adults, complete with high-tech gadgetry. we were four-for-four on Sunday. we found one in the middle of San Francisco, one just off of 280 at a vista site we'd been to before without realizing a cache was a few feet away, one way off in the middle of the woods after an hour-plus hike, and one in the middle of a park in Belmont. we hiked, we laughed, we got sunburnt, we spent the entire day outdoors, and we had so much fun.
the only problem is it's very addicting. i briefly thought of driving to Vallejo yesterday after work to track down a new cache that had just been posted so that i could be the first to find or, as it's entered in the log books, "FTF". some people on their profiles on the website enter under Hobbies, "i used to have others." i'm not sure we'll ever get that bad but it certainly is a lot of fun.