It is official as of about two weeks ago. The University of Oklahoma is shutting down the Parkview Apartments complex and, thusly, giving us the cordial boot. This means we will have lived in our first shared home for a mere eight months before they rip her to shreds. The university claims the military-base, pill-box buildings are much too old and have outgrown their use. Considering the number of new apartment complexes the university has thrown together and is throwing together as of late, I believe the issue is rather that they have discovered how much money they could be raking in from upscale apartments.

Unfortunately, this trend (hinted at by the destruction of Yorkshire and confirmed by the upcoming destruction of Parkview) is leaving students with fewer low-cost living accommodations. There is a substantial amount of foreign families living amongst us here at Parkview. Yorkshire was synonymous with foreign student housing. These people are running out of friendly (financially and socially) abodes. It appears that as universities grow to function more and more as big businesses, they tend to function more and more as big businesses.

And, of course, the cockroaches... Who will lend a compassionate ear to the plight of the soon-to-be homeless cockroaches?

Nonetheless, we figured we should pay homage to our first home and give the new blog some fodder at the same time. It saw us laugh and cry. It witnessed me graduating from college. It has seen Nicole undertake and make bold strides in the hobbies of cooking and sewing. Its smoke alarm would trigger when we would use the oven, but it reminded us of the safety it provided. It allowed us to smell the rankest of odors from the fish sauce used in our Asian neighbors' food, and it allowed us to hear our other neighbors' bedroom activities. It granted us [an all-bills-paid] grace to crank up the air conditioning and leave it running in manners that would drive most fathers out of their minds. Above all, it gave us T-1 internet access.

I'll be honest. There will never come an instance in my life when someone will refer to me as an outdoorsy type. When I grow a beard, it never reaches the point of 'woodsman' or 'lumberjack' but rather lingers around 'coffeehouse yuppie' or 'binge videogamer'. The point in every man's life in which his son first sees his father's frailty and imperfection will come swift to me upon any of my paternal advances into the wilderness. Furthermore, in my life, there have been many, many things that would have killed me had I been born a mere century earlier--some threats, a mere quarter century earlier--void of many technological advances for which I have the interior of buildings to thank. Even if I were as 'skeptical' and secular as individuals came, I would find it hard to support evolutionary theory without the overwhelming notion that I am advocating that which should rightly destroy me for the 'better good', on account of my persistent failure in dealing with what the world throws at me.

Simply put, I should be dead by now had it not been for forces outside of myself.

Nonetheless, my wife and I made it a point to spend sometime with the great outdoors over the break and put ourselves in opportunities to rely on such outside forces in more apparent manners. Our destination (although half-day trips don't have destinations so much as turn-around points) was the Quartz and Wichita Mountains in southwest Oklahoma. Our goal was to do some hiking intersperersed with some general looking about. Is this not the point of hiking--to find a good spot from which to look at stuff?

Fortunately, brother Jake Spencer not but a few days before the trip mentioned to me a hobby with which he had recently aquainted himself. The name of the game is geocaching. Basically, a person [let's say a 50-some-year-old man from Woodward who works in a portable office building for an drilling company] prepares a 'cache' which is typically a container [recommendedly waterproof] that contains a finders' log and, if size allows, some various trinkets [plastic toys, Desert Storm buttons, hot wheels, etc.]. On a weekend while the wife is working the long nursing shift at the assisted living center, this man will take said cache and a global position system [GPS] unit out somewhere [anywhere], and he will then hide the cache and make note of the coordinates of his hidden cache on his GPS unit. He will then submit the coordinates and perhaps a riddle/hint as to the whereabouts of his hide to the official geocaching website.

Then, dozens upon dozens of other 50-some-year-old men descend upon the posted coordinates and make it a priority to find this cache in the near future. When found, the finder will log their find on the finders' log and is welcome to take a trinket from the cache as long as he replaces it with another trinket. There are, of course, many other nuances of the 'sport', but this captures the essence of geocaching.

The idea sounded brilliant (despite my lack of an oil field job and my relatively green age). Geocaching could provide a more solid objective to hiking beyond finding a place from which to look at stuff. So, I borrowed a GPS unit from brother Luke Loeffler and had brother Jake take me on an inaugural geocache hunt right here in our very own Norman. We couldn't reach the first cache on account of being freaked out by a homeless guy in the woods. The second cache we sought after just could not be found despite brother Jake's finding it weeks before.

I did not let this get me down.

Nicole and I spent the night in Elk City to visit my parents. It was nice. We played Settlers of Catan with my parents.

We set out for the southwest Oklahoma the next morning. It was threatening rain and fairly cold. We found some caches in Granite [pop. 1,844] nonetheless. One cache we found was behind an enormous granite mosaic monument to 'Giants of the Plains' [see photo]. It appears it was originally intended to be a series of such monuments, but I assume they stopped after one. Will Rogers alone will have to suffice until the bustling town can produce enough interest for, say, a Wiley Post or Taylor Hanson monument.

We continued on to Baldy Point, a 'mountain' in the Quartz Mountain 'range'. There were three cashes to be found. By this point, a respectable rain had started. The purpose of finding places to look at stuff from would have been crushed by such rain. But, one must realize, we had an objective--waterproof containers of piddly trinkets--to be had by way of a cool gadget [GPS unit]. Not going about our duty was not an option.

Fortunately, it stopped raining after we found the first cache--a third of the way up the 'mountain.' We made it to the top thanks to the convenient trail and found the second cache. It was large enough for me to fit a Where Are My Pants? CD in it. Nicole and I chuckled.

Now... what happened after that point is a debated issue. Some would say that the course I chose would make affirm at least some percentage of me as an outdoorsman. Others would say it proves the opposite.

The top of Baldy Point is neither peak nor plateau but something betwixt the two. This betwixtness stretches for about an eighth of a mile. However, I did not know this. For all I knew, it could stretch for a quarter of a mile. Lo and behold, the GPS unit revealed that the next cache was less than a quarter mile away.

The faces of Baldy span from sheer (actually used for rapelling and rock climbing) to gradual enough for Nicole and I ascend with minor effort. After hopping over rocks and cacti, we made it to the other side of Baldy. This side was deceptive. It was somewhere between sheer and gradual. The GPS was pointing down that side of that mountain while Nicole and common reasoning were pointing back down the side from which we came. But, we had come too far (.16 miles) to go back to the other side of the mountain. I insisted we would be fine.

So, down we went. Sliding on and crab-crawling over the rough but slick granite boulders. About a quarter of the way down, the heavens opened up. In no time, a stream appeared flowing down our 'path(s)' over whatever extremeties we were using to grasp the 'mountain'-side. Nicole's shoe came off at one point, stuck between two bolders. After an hour of soaking descent, we reached the bottom.

To both our pleasure (in that we weren't to be lost) and displeasure (in that we could have made it to this point by substantially easier, drier, and probably quicker means), there was a trail near where we ended up. After getting our bearings, the GPS unit was pointing me about twenty feet back up the 'mountain'. I looked up at where I imagined the plastic container to be hidden. I looked back to a soggy, unhappy Nicole. She shook her head. I shook my fist at the 'mountain'. We departed.