Every time I buy printer ink, I get postage paid envelopes to send back the empty cartridges to “HP Planet Partners.” But after getting reamed for $20 – $25 per cartridge, I don’t really want to give anything to HP that will allow them to save money. My hatred of printer ink prices far outweighs any good I’d be doing for the Earth. I fill up the postage paid envelopes with trash, Halloween candy and mean notes instead.

And I am a fan of recycling. I recycle all my paper, cardboard and plastic. Today I stood in line at Fred Meyer for almost 20 minutes, just to recycle $2.00 worth of cans and bottles. But paying $20 for .24 ounces of ink makes me not care. And now they’re rigging their printers so you can’t even use competitor’s ink cartridges.

I need to find one of those kiosks that refills ink cartridges for half the price, if they still exist. I’m pretty sure there’s nowhere in Albany that does it, though.

I sure haven’t been up to much lately. Friday, the kids and I saw Bridge to Terabithia which was nothing like we expected but still a really great movie. Saturday it was in the mid 60’s out and we Geocached for 4 hours. The kids had mud completely covering their shoes and pants on the first one. I even got muddied up a little. Some girl, who was fishing nearby with her parents, came by to see what we were doing in the woods. We’d been searching for an ammo case for about 20 minutes at that point, and after we explained it to her she found it within 5 minutes.

After that, we checked on another one that we’d found a few months ago but just wanted to see if there might be anything good in it. But that one was missing from its usual spot. So we decided to try the elusive Simpson Park cache, which we first started looking for in 2004, I think. Jammie and I finally found it last year but the kids never got to see it, even though we’d tried twice. It’s about a mile hike into the woods and I was able to lead them right to it this time. There was even a PLA button in it still, from the time Jammie and I visited it before.

It was dark by the time we got back to the car. Since there was another cache right across the street from there, we decided to check on that one too. It was still there. I don’t think any of us got anything particularly good from geocaching this time, but it was fun, and we left a lot of random junk in them.

Sunday we did laundry, mostly just to get their shoes cleaned up. And then last night I made a PLA TV episode, which was 100% inspired by Jammie. I showed her the original Kids in the Hall skit last week and she said it wasn’t funny. And maybe it would be funny if the guy said “cactus” instead. So I created that, just to amuse Jammie!

Last Friday, Mr. Spessa sent me on some missions in Eugene, Oregon after work, which were really fun and profitable. And Eugene isn’t as bad of a place as I expected. It’s actually a nice little town.