Rastaman took me out for date night on Friday (yay!), and we had time to kill between dinner and the movie, so he was kind enough to offer going to Micheal's with me so that I could pick up pretty papers for logbook covers. I had promised ahead of time that I would only purchase papers, so when he saw that I was really wanting a hole punch, a paper piercer and an eyelet tool, he threw them in the basket so that he could purchase them for me and I could keep my promise... Now if only we'd thought to actually get some eyelets to go with the eyelet tool, I'd be able to play with it. Oh, well - it's a good excuse to go back and use my 40% off coupon next week.
Agent X wasn't home this weekend, so Rastaman agreed to go boxing with me on Saturday. The skies were clear and blue, and it looked like the perfect day for boxing. We headed back to the Botanic Gardens in Fort Worth. The plan was to get the new Nordic Mythology series by Breath of Life, and then to get a couple others that we didn't get last time. One of which requires a compass, so it was going to be my hands-on tutorial on how to use that thing (Rastaman was in the military and knows all about compasses and degrees - I just know how to use it to figure out the general direction I'm headed).
We found the first box - Yggdrasil - right off the bat. Last month's adventures in the Gardens really helped us out with this - I knew ahead of time the general area we were headed, so we were able to park and get to the boxing right away. The stamp was gorgeous - I'm always impressed with Breath of Life's stamps - they are always so pretty.
After getting sort of confused and mixed up, we finally got on the right path to get the second box - Loki. We found it, and after some muggles passed by, we were able to retrieve it. I was SO excited when I opened the box and found a hitchhiker! It was a great little stamp of the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter. Rastaman was all kinds of confused - he seems to only box because it makes me happy, and he really has no interest in these things, so he didn't know why I was getting all excited. Now that I've seen a hitchhiker in real life, I'm seriously considering making some of my itty-bitty stamps that I've done recently into hitchhikers. We diligently stamped everything where it needed to be, and proceeded on to find Odin.
And wouldn't you know it? It started sprinkling rain. We hurried to the log where Odin was hiding, and that darned Thorny Vine Mafia has apparently grown to include vines in Fort Worth too - that's what I get for looking at the wrong end of the log. Rastaman was obviously thinking more clearly than I, for he did not venture into the thorny vines to find the box, and he found it as soon as he started looking. It was also a very lovely stamp, in a very lovely area of the Gardens we hadn't seen before. However, Rastaman insisted that we consider heading home before the weather got worse.
We dropped the hitchhiker off at another box that was on our way back to the car, and started home. Good thing too - it started pouring before we even got out of the Gardens, and I didn't have any rain gear with me, or anything to protect logbooks from getting wet. I'll have to make sure to pack something for that next time.
After we got home, I spent the rest of the day making all of my logbooks for the new series of boxes, and felt pouches for all the stamps to be planted. And I even got a chance to mount the stamps on some foam! However, I've now realized that I should not have ordered black foam for stamp mounting - I must now procure a paint pen in order to mark "UP -->" on the back of the stamps.
(Now, a confession of my geekiness - my entire family, son, husband and sister included - are members of Starfleet, the Star Trek fan association. We're part of a starship, the USS Joan of Arc, and everything.) I also got a chance to briefly talk to my sister this weekend. I told her all about the series that we'll be planting soon, and she informed me that since it's all about Star Trek, I can get promotion points for it. (The fact that this is exciting to me just helps prove exactly how much of a geek I am.) So, I'll be sending pictures of the completed boxes, the clues and stamp images into our ship's Communications Officer for inclusion into our newsletter (with huge spoiler disclaimers - none of them are letterboxers, but I certainly don't want the stamp images to get out to boxers and ruin the fun).
So, with that being said, I've asked for suggestions on creative clue making from the CCCP on Atlas Quest - and they had such wonderful ideas! I've decided that it'll be a story with puzzles to solve along the way to actually find the boxes. I just hope that when the series finally gets launched, everyone else will have as much fun with the puzzles as I am having making them.
So, this week's Lessons Learned Letterboxing...
- I really need rain gear so that we can find boxes in the rain without worrying about logbooks getting wet. At this rate, I'll be lugging around a huge suitcase of gear everytime I go boxing.
- Black foam isn't such a great thing, even though it looks cool. My brain apparently disengaged when I ordered it.
- Rastaman is quite content boxing with me because he wants me to continue to be interested in it and not lose my enthusiasm for it. He apparently thinks that if I don't have someone to box with, I won't box. I'm not sure that's true, but he usually has me figured out pretty well, so maybe it is. At least he likes the spending time with his wife part of it.
- The Thorny Vine Mafia is everywhere, and they are all out to get me.
- Hitchhikers are even more adorable in person than I would have thought.
- Creating creative clues is a lot more time-consuming than straight-forward clues, but also much more rewarding and satisfying.
Rogue Artist
