Reasons to be Thankful

For some reason, I've been much more reflective about Thanksgiving this year.

I was especially thankful this morning to enjoy a freeway, just for me.

And a cell phone waiting lot at the airport that didn't have any flights on the screen.

Terminal 2 is a flashback to the past, but remains our favorite local terminal. Yesterday evening all the local news programs were highlighting the hordes of people at the airport. This morning, it's all peaceful.

The carousels sit idle, but not for long, because the Alaska contingent is arriving on the all-nighter. First time in a number of years that we've had all the family together for Thanksgiving.

People that know me well know that I'm an introvert at heart, loving quiet and solitude. That said, I find that this year, I'm especially thankful for all the people in my life. Some, I rarely if ever see, others I see regularly, but to all the people in my life, I'm thankful for your influence.

Building Smiles

Last spring, a couple fellow geocachers asked me about my background, wondering where I came up with ideas for my caches. It took months of thinking about it, but I recently created a series of 13 caches that I called my autobiographical series to try and answer their innocent question.

Each of them are puzzle caches - a least one, and in some cases, two puzzles must be solved to determine the final coordinates of the cache.

Each of the puzzles starts with an online jigsaw puzzle that was built from a collage of personal pictures. Each cache listing told a part of my story, and the online jigsaw puzzle (when solved) provided the final coordinates or pointed to the next puzzle to be solved.

I tried to make cache containers that were congruent with the jigsaw puzzle.

I especially liked this one since it took the most searching to come up with the old pitchfork. I could easily get a new pitchfork, but I wanted an old, gnarly one. I finally found this one in an antique shop in Payson and got a super good deal on it because it wasn't useful anymore. Little did he know...

I did one about trucking, since working with Dad was where I first was introduced to planning and was the biggest influence on my leadership style.

Amazingly, this simple cache is the one that people seem to like the most.

I did one that was intended to recognize the influence of teachers in my life. I think of my high school wood shop teacher nearly every time I go out to play in the shop.

I thought this one would be the most popular cache of the series, but that's not how it turned out. Sometimes I come up with something simple that turns out to be very popular, other times, not so much.

I thought I was out of ideas with this series, and then a friend made a passing comment about a picture I posted to Facebook that has my mind buzzing with possibilities. One never knows where the next idea will come from.

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying building smiles one cache at a time.

One Step at a Time

Since there aren't any direct Boise - Phoenix flights with the right color paint, I was all lined up in time to check in for the first flight to Portland. SEA-PHX flights looked clobbered for several days, but Portland looked reasonable. I was early enough that I beat the crew to work so the bag and I cooled our heels for a bit.

Apparently there's sometime special about the carpet in the Portland airport so I took a picture to prove I got that far. I'd been watching the one PDX>PHX flight go downhill all morning for reasons I didn't understand.

By the time the doors closed, I was still 6 down on the standby list. Turns out, someone in Seattle reservations was running in a race in Phoenix and a bunch of their co-workers were headed to Phoenix to cheer them on. Doesn't happen too often, but now I had some time to kill.

Found a nearby hotel with space, dropped my carry-on bag and headed for the train, wishing I'd put another layer into my carry on bag.

Wandered around some portion of downtown, including a visit to the world's smallest park. The sign was bigger than the park! They're doing a good job of keeping Portland weird!

During my wandering, I ran across a place with shepard's pie on their menu. MUCH better than my version.

I'm a light rail fan. I don't get to use them very often, but it sure makes it easy to get around, especially for a visitor to town. Seniors could ride all day for about the price of one regular round-trip ticket.

All in all, not a bad trip home - just 24 hours later than I expected.