Park Challenge 4, or how I spent my weekend

This past Sunday was Park Challenge. It's a little event that Greg and Dave started a few years ago and I worked my way into to the mix because it is a way for me to legitimately purchase office supplies.
The event itself is like a treasure/scavenger hunt where teams of 2 - 4 solve some puzzles and then use the answers to map their way around Golden Gate Park to find different checkpoints. Greg and Dave write the puzzles and make a neato map for the race and I deal with the business end of stuff. I have kick ass jobs like helping make the puzzles look sassy, buying and using office supplies (including Sharpies!) and making forms in Excel.

This past Sunday was Park Challenge 4, we ended up having over 40 teams pre-register so we figured that we should probably have 50 packets of puzzles on hand. This did not occur to us until Thursday, when we counted only 30 of the things we already prepared. So even though we tried to avoid it with planning for months, we still ended up working ourselves down to a nub on Saturday. All ended well, but in the future it's probably best that I do not work on last minute projects with markers sporting warnings about "proper ventilation" on the package. Because no matter how many windows you open, by puzzle number 15 out of 50 everything starts to get hilarious. Like milk-out-the-nose hilarious.

and now for my PC4 scrapbook:

This was the garbage truck that came through just as all the teams sat down to dig into the first two puzzles. Alex HAD to take a picture of it, because he said it looked like a horror movie. Jokes along the line of "uh oh, here comes the nerd collector" were plentiful.

Here's a team working simultaneously on the Chess Puzzle and Reverse Taboo. This guy is actually a Chess Master and was having some trouble because the way the puzzle was set up did not actually follow some of the rules of chess.

Here are all the boxes of Chess boards, it was marking all these up with gold markers that had me feeling like I was all hopped up on goofballs Saturday night.
Dave and Greg looking relaxed (as relaxed as people can be in matching shirts), waiting for the first team to finish.

and here I am with Greg trying to look smart at the finish line. Perhaps I would look smarter if I took the cap off the pen before holding it to the paper.
(moments after this photo was taken the nerd collector came to take me away.)