Geo Rumpusing

Mean Mr. Mustard suggested that Eryn might really like Wild Rumpus, the kids' book store near Lake Harriet. I generally trust him - I'm even reading a book he suggested by Hugh Laurie (I've never read anything by Laurie, although I have read a book by Fry). So today the whole family crawled into the car I waited in line an hour to wash yesterday and drove north to check out the store, its many animals, do a bit of geocaching around the lake, and find some dinner at the local Chipotle.

Here we are at the Lake Harriet Bandshell, after finding the geocache we were after. I'm glad the back of the bandshell is sealed, because it was damn cold walking up to the bandshell from the parking lot with the wind blowing off the lake. There were some people out sailboarding on the ice, and other people with wind kites pulling their skis along the ice and jumping ten or twelve feet into the air when they got going fast enough. Even in Minnesota, you look at what some people consider to be a winter sport and think, "Fuck...you're crazy."

Eryn, enjoying the brisk breezes of Minnesota at the bandshell.


We found two of the three caches we were looking for today. My GPS took me to the wrong bench, but we eventually found it nearby, focusing on the fact that it was supposed to be the best seat in the house, if you liked drums.


This is where we did not find a cache. Upper near Lake Harriet. There were some railroad ties nearby, and the cache had to be somewhere near there, but I couldn't find anything. I also couldn't fit my big arms into the holes in the ties. A closer read of the site later noted that the cache was a big block of ice and perhaps a real mess. Win some, lose some.


Eryn in the picnic area sliding around on her boots. I don't have a picture of her on her ass, which is surprising.


Mime in a box, without the mime. Some good acting on her part. I wonder if it's as good as Kevin's in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Who can say...not me. I bet you're surprised that you can find a phone booth anywhere nowadays. Well, you can. And it's a geocache site. Although I almost missed it because Eryn pushed past me into the booth before I could get a good look inside. Eryn was excited about this strange relic from the time of her ancestors. Pooteewheet scored the find.


Here's the cache. We had to take our stinky cheese back out as the cache wouldn't close. I offered Eryn a piece of gum. If you think that's horrible as I couldn't possibly know where it came from, you would be wrong. It's horrible because it's a mouse trap designed to bait little girls. She looked shocked and betrayed when it snapped on her finger. Thirty minutes later at Sebastian Joe's she was still telling us that it hurt. Oh yeah...we hit Sebastian Joe's for ice cream. It doesn't matter that it was cold - you can't walk past Sebastian Joe's and not go in, particularly if you're from outside the neighborhood.


Here's the cache in the phone booth - tucked up on top, 394 feet from Wild Rumpus. So now Mean Mr. Mustard can go geocaching without a GPS if he wants to. And then trick Emma or his wife into taking a piece of gum.


A nearby store that sells games, including Tigris and Euphrates at 50% off (although marked up 20% first, but still cheaper than I paid for it a few weeks ago...grrrr), and lots of kids playthings like wooden food for toy kitchens and blocks and swords, et al. They also have a tree so kids can pretend to be squirrley---er.


Finally...Wild Rumpus. We saw Spike the lizard. The tarantula. The rats, or hamsters, it was hard to tell because they were beneath the floor and the Plexiglas was fuzzy. The cats. The chinchillas. The various birds. And the chicken - which was evident in the previous video. Here's Eryn and the chicken. The chicken would, now and then, come by wherever you were sitting and stare at you until you moved, and would then claim the chair. I suspect it was cold and envious of human body heat.


Here's one of the two cats. A manx, a stubby. I think his name may be George. He's surrounded by Patrick McDonnell books featuring a cat that says "Yesh" a lot, which is entirely appropriate. Not because the cat was saying "Yesh" to me, but because he's a cat. A few minutes later, he was sacked out next to me, enjoying the blistering sunlight in the window. I'm still trying to figure out if my face hurts from windburn or sunburn.


One of the things we bought Eryn at Wild Rumpus was a set of dinosaur cards. Here she is at Chipotle on Lake Calhoun. She is, indeed, demonstrating how the asteroid card wipes out the dinosaur cards, underscored by the nuclear winter effect you get in a Minnesota Chipotle with windows on 80% of the walls. It might not seem that apocalyptic, but imagine that paper card traveling toward you at up to 162,000 miles per hour.