Labor Day Letterboxing

CJ and I went on our first letterboxing excursion with my Mom on Monday when my parents came out to visit.

Letterboxing is kind of like Geocaching, but with rubber stamps...

"Letterboxing is an intriguing pastime combining artistic ability with "treasure-hunts" in parks, forests, and cities around the world. Participants seek out hidden letterboxes by cracking codes and following clues. The prize: an image from a miniature piece of art known as a rubber stamp—usually a unique, hand-carved creation." - from AtlasQuest

My Mom has really gotten into letterboxing lately. It combines some of her favorite things...rubber stamps, roadtrips, and adventure! She recently found a site, AtlasQuest, that lists letterbox locations online, and you can search for letterbox locations in your area. She did a bunch of them over her vacation that she and Dad took with some friends of theirs. And she did a search on AtlasQuest for letterboxes in the area near my house, and found quite a few of them. We decided, on a whim, to go find one of them when Mom and Dad were visiting us for Labor Day.

Mom searching for the letterbox...

A big part of letterboxing etiquette is secrecy, I guess, just in case other letterboxers are around, so you don't spoil it and make finding the letterbox too easy for someone else. Something my parents and their friends have found is that having a dog is a great "cover" for gallivanting around outside, since it just looks like you're taking your dog for a walk.

Luna enjoyed being out-and-about with us.

Another part of preserving the secrecy is that most people take the letterboxes back to their cars to do the stamping...

*WARNING! STAMP SPOILER BELOW!*

(for some letterboxers, the surprise of seeing what the stamp design looks like is half the fun, so if that's you, go no further!)

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This is what is in the box...a stamp (hand-carved) and the logbook, where you can see the signature stamps of others who have found the letterbox! Some letterboxes will have an ink pad included as well, but a lot of them don't, so it's wise to carry your own ink pad with your signature stamp.

This is Mom's "signature stamp", an Adirondack chair stamp that was hand-carved by Jackbear Stamps, and was given to her for her birthday by me and CJ. A signature stamp is "The stamp letterboxers use to identify themselves, both in the logbooks of letterboxes they've found and for exchanges. Also called personal stamps.".

"Letterboxers stamp their discoveries in a personal journal, then use their own rubber stamp, called a signature stamp, to stamp into the letterbox's logbook." (well, or vice versa, like Mom did!)

I'm not sure CJ and I would like to be hard-core letterboxers, (some people get really involved in this hobby!) but it seems like a fun activity! It's one of those things we could do on one of those "It's awfully nice out today, lets take the dog and go somewhere!" kind of days! According to Mom, there are at least 30 in the Medina area. And I think fall is a great time to do this type of thing! It may even be a cool activity for the Homeschool Art Class!

If you want to learn more about letterboxing, I'd encourage you to poke around AtlasQuest and/or Google "Letterboxing".

Out-of-the-House Adventures

Every once in awhile my lovely hubby will "exile" me from the house for the day and tell me to go have fun. Yesterday was one of those days. So I went out shopping and exploring.
There's this little place called 48A to Z, that is like a cross between and antique shop and a big garage sale...(I LOVE places like this!)

I wish I had a spot in my house for one of these old school desks! (they're priced between $30 and $55).

There's an old theater in Medina that is closed down/abandoned. It seems such a shame, because it seems like it's such a cool old building! (I think I've started to become quite fascinated with old things)

Around one side there is a whole section that is fallen down. I'm surprised they haven't roped it off to prevent people from going in. The crazy, adventurous explorer side of me wanted to climb down there so bad!...but I repressed it with the side of me that is afraid of getting into trouble (plus the fact that I was in a skirt, which is not an item of clothing that is condusive to climbing and exploring).

I wanted to take this chair home too... (but I didn't.)

"Move That Bus!!!" (The Big Reveal)

Okay...so, I bet some of you have been waiting for a post to follow up on my Mother-Daughter bonding adventure with Mom to Geneva to see a glimpse of Extreme Makeover:Home Edition. I did end up going on Monday for the reveal. I was by myself, but with SO many people there, that was probably a good thing, because I didn't have to worry about losing anyone while pressing through the crowd.
It was a LONG day. The big reveal was supposed to be at 2:00, and I wanted to get there early enough to get a good spot. So I dropped my husband off at work around 9:30 and after gassing up my car and grabbing some sunscreen and a bag of chips at Walmart, I got on the road by 10:00...which meant that I got to Geneva around 11:00...3 hours before the scheduled reveal. I was very glad I didn't get lost, since unlike Mom, I don't have a GPS system in my car (my husband has one on his phone that we use when we go on trips). But my Mapquest directions got me there okay...but once I started hitting the roadblocks around the street the house was on, I had to get creative to find a decent parking spot in the neighborhood that was within walking distance. I got a spot fairly close, but they had the sidewalk blocked off to non-residents and I had to walk around the block to get to the spectator area. The security guards were very nice though.

So, here was the house when I finally got there.

It was gorgeous! I found it hard to imagine that last time I'd been there that the area where the house was had been a pile of rubble and contruction equipment. My favorite part was the boxing ring weathervane...the father had been running a boxing gym out of his barn/garage, and of course they built him a whole new one in addition to the house! I can't wait to see the show air in November so I can see the inside of it!

I found out that it's funny when you're on location when they're shooting a show like this. They did a lot of shots beforehand...before the family was even there. They did a bunch of crowd shots (I can't tell you how many times they had us chant "Move that bus!" and cheer), they did shots of the limo coming down the road (without the family inside), they did shots of the bus moving...all of this WAY before the actual reveal to the family. I told some older ladies when they looked confused that the crew probably want to get all these shots beforehand, because when the family was actually there, they'll want to be able to focus all the cameras on the family's reaction. Plus I think it gave the crowd something to do while they were waiting. The crew even provided us with free bottles of Vitamin Water. How nice of them! They gave us so much, I ended up with 3 bottles because no one else behind me would take any more!

There were a LOT more people there than I had expected to be there 3 hours early. Actually, I wasn't sure what to expect...but I had this crazy idea I'd be able to find a good spot to hunker down and sit, reading on my blanket. Yeah right! Maybe further down the street! I couldn't even get to the spot in front of the tree Mom and I had been on Wednesday...although I got pretty close. And no sitting down. I was on my feet for about 5-6 hours!

I did finally get to see Ty Pennington (the only "celebrity" from the show I recognize since I haven't followed it for a few seasons). I got some pictures of him, but they're all from far away and most of them are pretty blurry (Do you know how hard it is to keep a camera steady when you're at full 12x zoom and holding the camera as high as you can above your head?). I think Ty is the most popular person from the show, but he was the one who came out the least. Whenever he came out, it was never for a long time. He's like a butterfly! And you could always tell when he came out because of all the screaming. Maybe it was all the screaming girls that always scared him off!

When they finally brought the family in around 4:00 to really "Move that bus!" it was crazy. The crowd was really pressing and you could barely see anything from where I was (and at the height I'm at). Most of the shots of the family I got were just lucky (again, the camera over the head tecnique)

I'll have to figure out how to upload my video to YouTube.

*UPDATE: I've uploaded the video to my Facebook.

Wednesday's Adventure

I guess it's time to tell you all about the adventre Mom and I had on Wednesday.
She'd emailed me earlier in the day telling me about the house in Geneva that was being redone/rebuilt by the TV show "Extreme Makeover:Home Edition". CJ and I used to watch that show every Sunday night at a friend's house back when we were dating...(and cried almost every episode).

Anyway, Geneva is only about an hour away from us, so after some previous commitments both of us had, Mom came and picked me up and off we went! The first security guard we came across while we were trying to find somewhere to park told us that the set had been "closed to spectators" since noon, since so many people had shown up. But it was about 4:00, and Mom and I had come too far to just turn around and go home without seeing anything. We figured that most of the people that had been there at noon had left since then. So she found a place on a neighborhood street to park and we walked one or two blocks over to where the action was. There were people there, but there wasn't a whole ton of them.

"Hey, can we take a picture of the back of your shirt?" The guy acted like he didn't hear us, but cooly obliged and nonchalantly turned his back to us so I could get this shot.

The house was completely demolished by the time we got there. It had been a 150 year old house, and I guess at 1:00, it had still been standing. "A team of hundreds of workers and volunteers will completely remodel (if not tear down) the house in just seven days." Yeah, they completely tore it down. The big "move that bus!" reveal is Monday at 2:00pm. I'm going because my mom can't...she's in the Adirondacks for the week.

As a daughter of a man whose main career has been in security (security police in the Air Force and currently works for ADT), I thought it was interesting when I noticed that EM:HE had their own security guys that travel with them.

We didn't see Ty Pennington, but we did see this guy...who I guess is a designer. Mom was making fun of me because I didn't know who he was. Come on!...it's been a while since I've seen the show!

After a couple hours of watching (and hoping to see Ty), we headed into the town and browsed an antique shop, then drove for a bit and found a little resturaunt. There was a very pretty colored sunset sky on the way home.