So...Traci's outta town with the kids tonight, and I'm home all alone, a little inebriated, watching two of the best movies of the '90s: So I Married an Axe Murderer and Grosse Pointe Blank. Good times! :)

I bought a new printer yesterday, even though there was really nothing wrong with my old one. However, it really bothered me that the old printer wouldn't print in black and white when the color cartridge was out of ink. That makes no sense whatsoever. I've owned two HP printers, and they each completely crapped out after about two years, and my Epson has lasted longer, but the requirement of having color ink in order to print in black and white was a big enough bother to get rid of it.

It's strange to me how printers are basically disposable nowadays. I could have spent about $45 on new ink cartridges for my old printer, but instead I bought a new printer for $100. The new printer also has a flatbed scanner and can be used as a copier, so it was well worth an extra $55 for those features.

There are a lot of color ink jet printers out there in the $30 to $40 range that already come with ink, but new black and color ink cartridges can cost $30 to $40 for most of them, so I don't see the point. Obviously, printer manufacturers are making all their money on ink, and probably not much on the printers themselves, at least as far as the average home consumer goes.

Geology of the San Rafael Swell contains some pretty basic information about the Swell, but I found this most interesting: "Price River ignores current contours by cutting through the north end of San Rafael Reef (left edge) instead of taking an easier route a few miles further to the northeast." You heard right, the Price River defies gravity. Pretty amazing.

Here is a collection of diamond signs, several of which are in Utah. I stumbled across this when doing a Google search for some generic GPS coordinates. Each sign is accompanied by the coordinates where the photo was taken. This is my favorite, with this one a close second.

Probably only a few people will get this one, but check out this awesome salt factory!

It has been a long weekend. Mike and Allison showed up Friday evening later than expected after hitting a rock in their Subaru and bending two wheels. I went with Mike to get a used wheel at Grako's to replace the one on which the bead wouldn't seal, then we had a late dinner and spent the rest of the evening getting ready for our hike the next day.

We (Mark, Mike, and I) spent Saturday hiking all over the San Rafael Reef just north of I-70. It was about 5.3 miles total, but it felt like much more. In the first cache we found, there was a tiny amount of weed inside of a small flavored-cigar tube. I'd heard of people finding such things in geocaches, but never thought I'd find it myself. We ended up crushing it up and scattering it on the ground. We found 12 caches in all, but only three that I'd not previously found. I (again) missed out on several of the "Wonders of the Reef" series of caches, but I plan on returning soon to find the remaining three. Each time I hike there, I end up getting exhausted too soon, and it's usually accompanied by a headache. I don't know if it's the steep slope and the exertion from climbing it that does it, but I don't like it. Honestly, I'm bored with that section of the San Rafael Reef, but there's still some 50 miles of the Reef left for me to explore.

Lately there have been a few geocachers in the Carbon County area who are really getting into the hobby. It used to be that when I placed a new geocache, it would sit for weeks before somebody got around to finding it, and more often than not it was somebody from out of the area who got "First to Find." Today, two groups of people ran into each other trying to get FTF on the cache that Mark and I placed last weekend. That's pretty amazing, considering that the cache I placed within the city limits in November sat for weeks before somebody found it. And yesterday, while I was out hiking in the Swell, Traci answered a phone call for me at home--a new geocacher had called asking for a hint on another cache that I hid in town. Maybe now there'll be a little welcome competition on getting FTF, and possibly a few more caches closer to home for me to find.

Yesterday's caching trip was a success. Mark and I visited two existing caches (one of which I'd found before), and placed a new one. The natural bridge that we hiked to was indeed worth the effort. When we started our hike, the ground was nothing but shale, and I couldn't see how a decent natural bridge could exist in that type of rock. As we climbed higher up, however, the canyons started cutting deeper to reveal a massive layer of Navajo sandstone under the shale. When we reached the bridge, I was amazed by how cool it was.

We spent almost as much time hiking around the bridge, taking pictures and finding a place for the cache, as we did hiking to and from the bridge. After getting back to the truck, we drove further south and stopped at an old abandoned ranch. There, we found another cache, then relaxed for a bit and ate lunch. After that, we headed even farther south and briefly explored some old uranium mines in the area. I think I was intrigued by this area the most out of all the places we'd visited during the day, and I want to go back another day to explore some more. There were dozens of old mines, most of which appeared to be strip mines, which is a method I've never seen to mine uranium. There was that same dry, pungent odor hanging in the air that you normally smell around uranium mines, but it was everywhere. Even driving along the road, far from any of the mine openings, we would occasionally catch a whiff. I'm not sure what that smell is, but I hope it's not bad for me...

I'm home alone for most of this week while Traci and the kids stay in Salt Lake with her mom. I normally do most of the cooking around here, but with only myself to feed, things have changed. I had cold cereal for dinner this evening. :)

I suppose it's all well and good that my family is gone, because I'm working overtime all week, and probably even next week too. I may try to do some work on my car if I get the chance, and if the weather holds. I'm continually amazed at how poorly designed newer vehicles are. The washer fluid hose in my Taurus is made of rigid, molded plastic, and not surprisingly, it's cracked. What ever happened to using rubber tubing? What's worse is that I've got to remove the right-front wheel in order to get to the washer pump to disconnect the old line and reconnect the new one. I'll try to use rubber tubing, but only if Ford did at least one thing right and used standard fittings on the ends. Fat chance.

I may end up going for yet another hike this weekend to place a geocache. There's a natural bridge about 13 miles southwest of Woodside that I noticed while poring over maps, but there's no telling whether or not it's worth hiking to without actually hiking to it, so I'll probably give it a shot. The USGS usually doesn't list arches and natural bridges on their maps unless they're significant, so I'm hoping this one is large. It's fairly remote, and not too steep (480 feet of elevation gain over 1.6 miles), so it should be just perfect for a cache.