Bounty Hunters March 5 - 11, 2001 how to find your own treasure, and how to build a home office.

There are certainly many ways how to destroy a marriage. One of the most effective ones is devoting yourself and your husband to some activity that neither of you understands, but one where you assume it would be lot of fun. Acquiring some complicated new electronic toy is quite successful, too, number one being: moving, furniture rearranging, and general cleaning. We managed all these within one weekend -- and we still talk to each other!

You may know we own a GPS - a box on a cable, which disgorges data about our global position -- but only when it's attached to a computer. There a CD with maps in the computer, and we use this system only in case of need. The other day Sid stumbled while browsing the internet over a page on GEOCACHING. Geocaching is kind of game -- a person with GPS hides a "treasure" -- usually a box with a logbook, some gift (like a bag of candy, tiny toy). He publishes the coordinates on the internet and if you have a GPS, you can go bounty hunting. When we saw how many "caches" are within our reach (cache comes from French caché -- to hide), we knew we could not let it pass.

A more thorough thought uncovered a slight problem -- there's no display on our GPS -- without the computer it is useless and dragging a computer along on our way through the woods, on or off road, appeared seriously complicated. So we put it aside till later, when we would have appropriate equipment.

Well on Friday, Sid called me enthusiastically -- he sacrificed his free time and stopped by Fry's (a favorite computer/electronics retail store) and bought a small GPS with a display. That constituted the purchase of complicated new electronic toy (!!!). Besides that, he announced merrily, Fry's received desks (ad moving and furniture rearranging). A heavy weekend was about to begin.

But of course a simple desk was another one in a row of our silly ideas -- we wanted it to appear like pale wood, we cared for the top surface to be square (not diamond-shaped, elegantly wavy or some other fashion-dictated desipience), we wanted it to have drawers (while not daring to specify number or arrangement, for we would not want to be unreasonable), we did not want a keyboard drawer under the desktop (Sid's legs would not fit under such thing), nor would we accept giant "canopy" -- an over the top extension with various racks and monitor stand (which would never be made in the middle, forcing you to forever lock your neck to one side while watching your screen). Also we wished for the desk to be at least twenty seven inches deep to accommodate various items like a monitor and a printer, and still leave a spot to stick a stamp on a postcard or sign a check. You certainly understand that having such "elaborate" specifications, we kept on shopping for long, long time.

To buy desks at Fry's was great fun. We tried to figure out which ones of surrounding cardboard boxes hid our desired piece of furniture. Sid rounded up a cooperating lady clerk, who, however, wrought her hands over the prospect of us buying whole two desks right the way they had them, but that was all she could do, so she ran away, excited. We expected to never see her again. Meanwhile, an elderly employee appeared claiming to posses the skill to locate any wanted box by some number. The first lady returned, now completely breathless, with another woman in tow. Furious shuffling of boxes followed, intense running around of the personnel over the whole impressive stretch of the store, plus arguing how many boxes would yield a single desk. In less than an hour we were leaving with two times two boxes, hoping to have what we thought we bought.

Moving the boxes in (one was 93, another 105 pounds) from our garage was Sid's job. Already at Fry's he dismissed my cowardly suggestion of asking Martin for help, or using our communal shopping cart and the elevator, he sat in his car and drove off. I took Cecilia and followed him (we met at the store after Sid's work, that's the reason for two cars). Before I finished parking and walking over to our house, one could already hear heavy beating -- Sid mimicked engineer Pavel Pavel and "walked" the large, flat, square boxes like Easter Island locals did with their statues.

The idea of seeking a cache with our new GPS appealed to us much better on Saturday morning than assembling desks. We selected a nearby bounty on the net and took off.

Even the trail starting point (parking lot) coordinates were mentioned. The adventure had a dramatic prelude, as Sid was driving and I was turning GPS over in my hands. I told him we were going the wrong way, and he hissed that I should be telling him WHERE to go, only by my reckoning we would have to go straight into a hill, which I did not dare to suggest. I lost my navigating privileges (only after we paid in vain four dollars, on a wrong parking lot), and we returned back to the turnoff which I had previously suggested, but a manly decision had altered our course another way. Then we only made one mistake, and we did not need to pay for it .

On the RIGHT parking lot, Sid grabbed the GPS and marched forward. It was a nice spot, slightly different from our favourite hills. The sun was warm -- we're considerably closer to the equator here than in Czech. When we dragged ourselves almost to the top, we found that we confused thousands of a second -- latitude vs. longitude and hence we were somewhere else. We had to go back -- so eager to find that cache that we ran off the trail to every beer can (only later we noticed that the cache is in an ammo box). Simply classical greenhorns.

Eventually coordinates led us to a trail between thick, impenetrable bushes (like bullfinches) on both sides. We did not feel like crawling through that, but we tried one suspicious tunnel. After few yards it required crawling so I started returning -- and there it was, after turning around, under a stump there was a green box with painted yellow letters. FOUND A BOUNTY!

The box contained a sheet about geocaching, a book where we recorded our discovery, and some toys for children (the author wrote that we placed the cache with his three year old daughter) -- we did not have anything to leave, but we will be better next time!

	The result of a weekend working shift... AN OFFICE!

This game must be pretty popular here -- for one, there are many caches near us, second, we were the third group to find this box, in a week. What's good about it that caches are usually hidden at interesting places -- we did not know Mt. Eden, a nice park nearby.

But enough playing games -- time for household work, actually desk assembly. We started on Saturday six p.m. (by rearranging our living room to provide enough space) and finished on Sunday two a.m. Please don't think us so lame -- two carton boxes contained almost 200 pounds -- 109 bolts, 39 boards, and 97 other metal parts. Our biggest surprise was that even though the number of parts indicated at least a mechanical nativity, it amounted to one desk! On Sunday we unpacked the second half of the affair. Since we already had some practice and after we borrowed Martin's electrical screwdriver, the second desk took us only two hours. We occupied ourselves till the evening by pulling computer cables, moving other furniture, and by convincing children from the whole house to clean up after they had discovered, fought with, and broken up styrofoam packing. Outside, there was a gorgeous day, but kids found boxes from our desks temporarily lined up outside our apartment. For hours, our corridor echoed with the roar of gladiators, followed by building strange dwellings from blankets and remains of our boxes. I had no idea our house had so many children... I think that several mothers could raise some reward -- we attracted their offspring for the whole day!

Copyright © 2001-2004 by Carol & Sid Paral. All rights reserved.