Hello dear reader. I’m sorry I have been away. I’ve been doing a lot of different things that have kept me away from this creative space. Some of these things are dull. Some are interesting. Some are knuckle headed, literally. Some are just laziness…

Depending on your interests the main thing keeping me from writing has been a project for geocaching. My wife and I received permission to do a 25th anniversary of geocaching event. This event is called a community celebration event. We are going to hold this event on the 31st of May. We’ve been working on a hiding project this past week. We are nearing its conclusion. It will publish soon…

That hiding project is a geo-art. We have 25 puzzles all centering around dogs. Mastiffs specifically. Each puzzle is based around a specific breed of mastiff or one of our dogs. We’ve included a couple of our dogs that have crossed the rainbow bridge as well. The art is shaped like a dog bone treat.

Each of the puzzles are of the jigsaw variety. Varying number of pieces all created from pictures using an online puzzle maker. The list includes:

1. Gus Gus – our late Cane Corso/St. Bernard, he was the inspiration for our geocaching handle
2. Jules – the Sharpei that thinks she’s a mastiff
3. Mia – the late great English Mastiff who entered our lives after Gus Gus passed. She was a gentle soul
4. Ziva – the reverse brindle English Mastiff. She’s a princess in more ways than one.
5. Bubbles – our Neapolitan Mastiff, and my baby girl
6. Berkeley – our son’s mastiff/shepherd/malinois mix. She is far and away the most active dog in the world.
7. Mack – the Bullmastiff with a hint of English. He is my old man. We are approaching his 7th birthday. He is in my blog’s profile picture.
8. 17 other mastiff breeds, and a bonus picture of Ziva and Berkeley together in an amazing pose. The are both reverse brindle, and quite bonded.

That has been the main diversion. We have created everything, marked our coordinates, but now we just need to place physical caches and then edit the final pages, before submitting the caches for publication. The difficulty of the puzzles varies by how many pieces we made them. A 60 piece puzzle will be a difficulty one. A 600 piece will be a difficulty 4 or 4.5 pending the colors. Sorry we do not think a jigsaw puzzle can be a difficulty 5.

Then there is the various spring house and yard projects. We’ve been fixing various things. Nothing is more annoying than replacing a drywall ceiling. Yard work never ends. There is always mowing, pruning, and if you lose a tree (chainsawing the log.) It is tedious repetitive work; especially the part where one has to clean up after the mastiffs.

The stupid thing keeping me from writing was the concussion I gave myself. There is a stairwell at work I avoid because there is one spot where the ceiling is about 5’8″. I’m nearly 6’2″. I did not avoid this stairwell one day last week and I managed to hit the ceiling hard enough on the top of my head to nearly knock myself out. Thankfully, I was just concussed. The spot where I hit my head is still bruised and tender. I forgot to duck… Silly me… It was an accident that many jokes at my expense will be forthcoming… I imagine these jokes will be duck duck dad jokes. I will enjoy the razzing from my colleagues, as I am blessed to work with the greatest people ever!

I’m looking forward to finishing the geocaching project. My favorite part of hiding caches are the people who find them and the stories they share through their geocaching logs. This is by far the most enjoyable aspect of geocaching (the logs.) Communication and camaraderie within the game is just as fun as finding or hiding caches.

No dissenting today, but I will remind everyone to keep calling and sending emails to congressional leaders about one’s dissatisfaction with the attacks on our Constitution if you happen to live in the USA. (Impeach, Convict, Remove, or resign.) If you are out there in the world continue opposing the tariffs by boycotting goods from the USA. If you help hurt the millionaire and billionaires we can overturn this neoliberal capitalist oligarchy and try to return the our government to a democratic republic that works for the common good rather than the common greed.

May the weeks ahead be good for all of you… On it goes…