Alright, poppets, just a brief update tonight. First of all, I'm absolutely thrilled with the response I got to the Mad Libs Monday invitation. Eight people signed up to participate, and I cannot wait to see how this all comes together. My body is too crippled by stress to jump for joy right now, but I hope to be in a better place by Sunday, when I do the filming and editing.

Second, I'm considering selling off my Flip camcorder and a two-year-old (maybe not even) Canon point-and-shoot, both of which are in good condition. (Why? Because hi, I'm broke and don't need five or six cameras.) The thing is that I don't ever sell stuff online, and some places *cough* eBay *cough* seem to require more effort than is worth my while to create a posting. Suggestions, anyone?

(Why can't selling stuff in real life be as easy as selling stuff in the Sims?)

I had this idea a few weeks ago to do a weekly video series called Mad Libs Monday. The basic premise is that I'd pick up a book of Mad Libs, select one story to read, post a list of needed words (adjectives, adverbs, nouns, etc.) on Monday, and ask the internet to fill in the blanks via tweets, comments, audio recordings, and video clips. The following Monday, I'd pop in front of a camcorder and read the "backbone" portion of the story, editing in the responses and creating (hopefully) a one-of-a-kind, giggle-inducing tale made by the good people of the internet.

However, I need a few volunteers to do a test run with me. If you're able to record and submit audio or video clips of a handful of words (which you would obviously need to generate) by Saturday, leave a comment (make sure to fill in your email address in the appropriate field), and if seven or more people sign up, I'll make the assignments for the first week via an email tomorrow night.

P.S. Don't feel pressured to do this if you think it's a stupid idea. Just tossing a thought noodle against the wall to see if it sticks.

[Edited, 09.14.11: Oh wow! Thanks to everyone who signed up to participate! I picked a story that had enough words for eight people, and all of the spots are now full! If you're interested in joining a future Mad Libs Monday, let me know!]

A few weeks ago, I received a Google Calendar invitation from my dad, inviting me to "Geocaching and Dinner." If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen me bragging about this. While it's not the sort of thing that would end up in a Jane Austen novel (for a myriad of reasons), it's the sort of thing that makes me love being part of this family, being a second-generation geek, and having internet access. (On a related note, Kate Chopin is someone I'd love to meet in a hypothetical "have dinner with a dead person" scenario, but I wouldn't trade my internet access for that privilege. Sorry, Kate. Same goes for you, Jane.)

This was the first time either of us had delved into the world of geocaching. My dad is one of those people who does extensive research on the history of a lake and every sort of plant and animal species to have inhabited the area before he will even think about putting his toe in the water, so I wasn't surprised when he sent me two "how to get started" YouTube videos on Thursday (to my company email address and in the middle of the work day) and then printed off a slew of options and let me borrow some gloves and downloaded two apps to his BlackBerry to use in addition to the Garmin GPS unit. You get the picture.

In spite of all this preparation, we actually didn't find anything at the first location. We had what seemed like forty different devices all pointing in fifty different directions, and we left feeling a little disoriented but not too disheartened. The weather was fantastic, and the locations my dad picked all had great stories to add to the fun of the search.

We stopped at three more places and had just the right amount of trouble finding the next three caches. At our first find, we killed two birds — conserving space in the log book and coming up with a "team name" — with one clever stone: (RS)². (My father and I share the initials "RS.") The one after that was the only cache that was large enough to store goodies, but the item we would have taken just fit too perfectly with the location to be moved.

All in all, it was a really fun father-daughter outing, and we even managed to wrap it up with Portillo's for dinner, which we ate while watching Doctor Who with my mom. You may now proceed to be super jealous.