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Wow! 90 Jeremy oysters for SEK 5! OK, I'm American. I'm guessing that SEK is the monetary unit in your country, and I have no idea the rate of exchange, but stacked up against the rest of the list that looks wayyyy cheap.

Made me look! Very fresh. Inventive. Too bad you're on the other side of the country; I'd love to seek this one.

Shameless boasting ahead: I've lost 67 pounds in the last year, after a brand new diabetes diagnosis. About 40 more to go. In Indiana, I've yet to encounter a cache search in excess of 3 miles, so it's not necessary to pack in food. Just a water bottle, and a piece of fruit in case the combined searches run long, bacause since I've lost the weight, I don't have trouble with high blood sugar any more. In fact, it's just the opposite. More than 5 hours between meals and I run into a wall of low blood sugar. So I also carry glucose tabs, just in case. This is the first weekend since I started caching in August that I stayed in: freezing rain turned into an ice storm yesterday. Today looks almost doable, until I watched the weather and they are reporting falling temps through the day, into single digits by nightfall. So I'm in cache withdrawal, and cabin fevered in only one day; the temptation to eat when I'm bored is astounding; I've been running away from it for so long, I've forgotten how seductive all those damned tv commercials can be. Guess I'll go mall crawling. Ew. Um. Antique malls maybe. Ah, hell. Screw it; I'm going caching, quick before I order a pizza and huddle into a pathetic pile of slug in a corner of the couch. Later.

I once parked at an apartment complex next to the park where a cache was waiting for me. But I was on the wrong side of a tall chainlink fence, and I stopped a woman getting out of her car to ask her if she knew where the gate for the fence was. She showed me a hidden 'gate,' a tear in the fenceline behind a dumpster pad. It put me within 400 feet of the cache. She turned out to be another cacher, and said she knew right where the hide was, but I didn't let her tell me. (OK, asking for the gate was probably cheating a bit, but she was there...) At a different new cache, I was FTF after running into the guys who placed the cache in the parking lot. They had come back to place a TB in their new cache, and tagged me when they noticed the GPS in my hand.

For a worldwide game of folk from all walks of life, we sure are a bunch of white Anglo-Saxons, aren't we? {Not that there's anything wrong with that...} (So am I, but I'm too poor to have a scanner or digital camera, so no pic from me...) So, just wondering, where's the rest of the world?

A few years ago, while vacationing in Colorado, I picked up a pretty aspen branch and carved it into a walking stick. I seated a compass in the top of the staff, and use it often when the GPSr is bouncing around due to dense canopy, electrical power trees, sunspots or for no friggin reason at all. I do have a tendancy to get turned around sometimes, especially if I am intent on a search that is frustratingly unfruitful. After an hour of looking close at hand, sometimes I look up and find myself disoriented. The compass helps the woods behave around me when the GPSr is not. And for those D'oh! moments when you are ready to head back and realize you forgot to waypoint your car, the compass helps alot along with the GPSr's retracking feature.

I've been using a Garmin ETrex that I bought new last August. It does let you input that last digit. With 74 finds and only 4 DNF's, I'm happy with it's performance. They have newer versions out now that are more caching friendly, with the layout and page access streamlined for caching. The only consistent drawback that I've found is the tendancy to bounce the cords badly around high voltage wires, and giant electricity trees. Triangulation helps some, and I usuallu find the cache anyway, but accuracy definately suffers in that case.

I work for the American Red Cross, in the Emergency Response Training Dept. We teach CPR, first aid, lifeguarding and much more. We also help prepare volunteers to go out in the filed and help at disaster sites. I love my job! Hope most of you can say that too! I'm a weekender mostly, though I like to cache in the evenings. But the days are short this time of year. I am trepidatious about caching in public parks at night, since I seldom can find anyone to come along. Parks in this city are often populated by unsavory characters after dark. Many of them are 'designated pickle parks,' if you get my drift.

I like to lurk. You learn more when you shut up and listen. As I am still a newby by all standards, I figure I don't have much new ground to cover here in the forums; I'd rather be covering new ground in the real world. As to impressions and thoughts: I don't fear getting flamed. I just like to come here to learn more about a fun hobby, read the fun caching stories, ideas, interesting placements, etc. Yes, there are some stuffed shirts, inflated egos and an occasional sniper to be found here. To that I will say this: Seems some take all this so very seriously; so very personally. It's just a game, folks. It's like searching a cache. If I spend an hour searching at the arrival cords and find myself getting bent and hostile about not finding, I have to remind myself it's supposed to be fun. When it ceases to be fun, why am I here? So I bail. No hurt feelings. No injured self-esteem. It's simply time to go seek a different cache. I love everything about caching and will lurk here often. If I feel I have something to contribute, I will. Otherwise, I'll just shutup and listen.

GPSaxophone said: The Red Cross is committed to saving lives and easing suffering. This diverse organization serves humanity and helps you by providing relief to victims of disaster, both locally and globally. The Red Cross is responsible for half of the nation's blood supply and blood products. The Red Cross gives health and safety training to the public and provides emergency social services to U.S. military members and their families. In the wake of an earthquake, tornado, flood, fire, hurricane or other disaster, it provides relief services to communities across the country. The Red Cross is America's most trusted charity, and it needs the support of compassionate Americans to succeed. ______________ I work for the American Red Cross, and am in the process of getting permision to place a leg of a new puzzle cache on the grounds at work. I love my job!