GeoMaine

I’ve listened to everyone that spoke his or her mind via e-mail and responded to many of you. I’ve been reading the forum posts without comment. I am here now to defend my actions. I would like to start by saying that I have read many positive replies in the forum. People are beginning to understand that the BSA is not the organization that it needs to be… That more and more of us want it to be. I think like you, only I am thinking MORE like you. I am a very passionate person and feel that something simply has to be done. NOW. Stickmonkey: You can delete my logs for the TB as much as you like, you can mark it as missing as often as you want to - it doesn't change the fact that I still have the travel bug and will be placing it soon, as always intended, as I’ve said from the very beginning... As soon as tomorrow. For the record: I never once said, "stickmonkey, I am keeping your TB." I never once said, "I am going to throw away your travel bug unless you..." or anything LIKE that. Not only did he put words into my mouth, he took words OUT of my mouth by cutting and pasting bits and pieces of my e-mails as he saw fit… and deliberately making sure they were taken out of context both here and in the forum topic he created just for this debate. Interested? I have an unbroken chain of e-mails from stickmonkey available for review… along with everyone else who emailed me. Please note: I have no intention of sharing those in a public forum! I'm quite sure that stickmonkey is able to say the same thing for mine: he's got them. If he's not anymore because he's now deleted them – unlikely since he’s been using them to his liking for the forum posts from the beginning - I will forward any and all requested copies for copies DIRECTLY from my gmail sent folder. In all fairness be sure that you ask for them (from any of us for that matter) to be directly forwarded to you instead of 'cut and paste'. Those of you that are tech-heads will be able to verify that they are in fact, the originals. All of you are always free to discuss with me your views of gay rights (pro or con) gay rights within the BSA and everything else as long as you are willing to listen to my views as well. I have always kept my e-mail address up and available on my profile page throughout this. Believe me, I’ve gotten more than enough e-mails that would make the hair stand up on the back of your many of your heads. I intend to do NOTHING with these, I assure you. I fully understand that there are people that will feel just as strongly against the things that I have strong feelings for. I’ve clearly expressed my opinion to several of you and respect those that do the same. It’s just immediately obvious that we simply cannot agree to disagree. No matter, it’s often that way with hotly debated social issues. The word ‘bigot’ has been hurled in my direction several times to my utter surprise; I’ve been quite careful not to use it, as you would notice throughout this entire exchange. E-mails included! Definition: “A bigot is a prejudiced person who is intolerant of opinions differing from his own.” “Bigot is often used as a pejorative term against a person who is obstinately devoted to his or her prejudices even when these prejudices are challenged or proven to be false, often advocating and defending these prejudices in a rude and intolerant manner. (the above appears from ‘wikipedia.com’) So next to an infinitely unusual definition of ‘homophobic’ I received via e-mail, how can this be true? I’ve been very polite (or in one instance, polite just enough) to everyone. I’ve been inviting to your e-mails, I’ve been inviting to your comments; I’ve even been inviting a ton of abuse no one deserves, no matter what. Bigot? My feelings for the BSA are a fair cry from unique. There are hundreds of thousands of people that feel the same way about the BSA as I do. Some more tolerate, some even less tolerant than myself. It’s impossible to be prejudicial against a prejudicial organization! That’s like saying that it’s not okay to dislike the Klan. Yes, you all know that I love to make that comparison; to me it holds a perfect fit. After all, they had a very firm set of ‘standards’ against African Americans fifty years ago (and it was okay for them to do that?!) - much as the BSA now has against gays. Thank God the KKK is now a 99.9% dead organization. I’d love to see the BSA survive, only as a much more tolerant organization, much like the 4H is now. Many have informed me that a TB log (or this forum) is not the correct place to discuss such things. Perhaps, but 90% of you have been more than happy to post an agreeing/conflicting opinion anyway, so that makes that point completely moot. In addition, I have seen so many issues that are off-topic here in geocaching that this is just par-for-the-course. As I said to stickmonkey in an e-mail I sent to him: “There has got to be something 'controversal' that you would be willing to stand up to almost anything. Stand up to your friends, your co-workers, even strangers. Stand up to being called a terrorist, stand up to the rudest e-mails that you can imagine from people that don't even know you... or even care why. Gay rights? That's mine. Welcome to my world.” BTW: It never made it into the forum, though he cut and paste nearly everything else after it. I later wrote to him: “All of your gay friends, all of your gay co-workers, all of your gay relatives. You're clearly not thinking about them... But I am. You are not thinking about your ten year old boys when they become adults. I am. If you don't think that one or two of those twenty or so boys you have in the troup will grow up to be gay or have a gay sister, you are wrong.” By this, here is what I meant… and he knew this. He has a gay friend. He has a gay co-worker. He has a gay family member. By odds alone, it’s virtually guaranteed. By enrolling and promoting the BSA, he is slapping each one of those people in the face, intentional or not. To give himself something to do with his boys on the weekends and enjoy the company of adults? Seems like a high price to pay to me. Perhaps I have been a bit too adamant about suggesting that the BSA is actively teaching prejudice. They are not. But not allowing openly gay leaders or openly gay teenagers to remain in the boy scouts and actively removing them from the BSA? Intolerance IS prejudice. Some of you are already getting ready to e-mail me… but hold on. As quietly as the organization tries to remove ‘them’ or stop them from joining in the first place, there is always the truth behind the action. The kids always eventually hear it. From their friends, fellow scouts; it’s in the press, it’s on the net and it’s in the blogs. So. Why does the BSA do it? It has absolutely NOTHING to do with protecting anyone. After all, every major study ever done has always pointed to straight men and pedophiles as being the major culprit of sexual abuse to children, both male and female children. The BSA does it because they have their ‘family values’ policy in place, and they can get away with it. Funny, but only one quarter of the families in the US now meet this ‘family values’ criteria. Outdated is not even the word for it. Care to learn more? Visit http://www.bsa-discrimination.org or one of many others. All you have to do is google the BSA and gay discrimination. You will hear about hundreds of children that cannot have their father (or their mother) as leaders or volunteers in the BSA just because their parents are gay. These four boys that will eventually learn the truth and I promise you, it won’t be from me. That’s a conversation for their parents to have with them only when the time is right. Now about this TB – I’ve said it from the very beginning; After all, it’s right in my first TB log; the one that got deleted. I never knew what I had until it was too late. After all, here I was in Vermont and being from Maine. Every TB owner likes to see a 150 mile jump, not three miles here, five miles there. Here I was, capable of putting some miles on these TB’s. I took two other TBs as well. Didn’t look at them either! All I see is the dog tag. If there isn’t a mission sheet with the TB, I take it. Little did I know that this TB had a small mission statement laminated on the BACK of the item… At least, until I got it home. It is very clearly promoting boyscouting and geocaching at the same time. It is not just a compass with a tag. The TB owner very specifically tied this TB to the Boy scouts. Finally: Here it is. The aftermath. Granted, I may have 'hinted' that I was annoyed enough that he deleted my log without notice to hold onto it for a while, but I would never break the chain of a TB no matter how I felt about it. I have had TB’s that I have owned that have disappeared for as long as a year. Not once did I accuse anyone of stealing them, no matter how long they were holding onto them. Normally, most people would have a TB for a week or two in between caching weekends. I’ve had this one for less than a week. I’ve re-cached every TB I’ve ever gotten my hands on, save one (a geo-coin) that invited it’s finder to keep it. Even that caused me great worry before finally retaining it for the sake of maintaining a piece of geocaching history. Obviously, my anger was NEVER directed at the ten-year-old boys. After all, they don’t know any better. My anger was solely directed at stickmonkey; mostly for the deletion of my log and partly for what I considered the continuation of a horrible organization. Is it his prerogative to enroll his kids? Of course. Is it within my right to speak my mind to an adult who is obviously active in the BSA? As long as this remains America, ALL of us have that right, and most of you have exercised that same right to speak to me about your own personal beliefs as well. I sincerely cannot apologize for my first log; I wish I could, after all of this. Again, gay rights is my something 'controversal.’ I invite all of you to read through all of my cache logs and all of my TB logs. You will see that I’ve never been anything other than polite, respectful and cheerful in everything that I have ever touched as a geocacher, 300 caches later. Again. For the record, I've had this TB for exactly five days. You can follow my Vermont logs and see for yourself. Five days. Hardly seems like a theft. : ( Thank you for your time everyone. I will reply to e-mails but will not be posting in this forum again. I wanted to make sure the TB issue was equally represented on both sides. Sincerely; -GeoMaine-

My first question is this: Did you just happen upon it, or goes geocaching know about it? Did you throughly check geocaching.com for all benchmarks in this area and clear them all from being possible suspects? Your best bet would be to discover what kind of posts they were using for the time periods and what type of markers they were using in them. (I don't know if 'standards' were applied where you are and/or if they just used readily available local materials back then, plus what they were doing THERE versus what they were doing HERE and in other parts of the country might be different and/or have their own timeline as well.) Yours clearly had a square plate in it at one time, so the 'square' vs the 'disk' could help you as well. All these things will help date it for you. Even if you knew when they switched from granite to concrete in your area would be helpful. (I really think that you're looking at granite - not concrete? I can't tell from the picture...) In any case, it's very likely that it was placed AFTER the railroad went in so it's not going to be that much older than the ones you have found already, but I can understand your need to solve the puzzle. I'd simply web search for web pages about old markers, find those with pictures posted and then use those to date yours. The good thing about the web is that you can find everything and anything if you look hard enough. Somewhere out there, there is a guy that has devoted literally YEARS on the web to documenting these very things. Sad for him, good for you. : ) If you want to know the specifics about this being a possible marker, you could also cross reference this to known markers in the immediate area and see if you can find a log for this one marked 'missing or distroyed'. To do this, find an old town map with this railroad track FIRST appearing on it and then find an intersection with a road or a dwelling nearby as an immediate reference point to this track and the marker. (Both the road and the dwellings could be gone or even been moved by now...) They always cross referenced these to several objects (houses, intersections, distances to other landmarks, town centers, town lines, etc etc.) just in case one or a few of them disappeared. I know that in my hometown, they actually GAVE AWAY my town center to another town when they moved the town lines around back in the 1800's. We STILL don't have a town center or even a 'REAL' Post Office. (Ours is in a supermarket called 'Shaw's and it's not even a full service one...) Falmouth, ME. Look it up and see for yourself. Big town too, 10,000+ people. He he!) Someone obviously put that marker in there for offical purposes (IE: it HAD to be documented...) So your challenge seems to be a fun one. FIND the documentation and THEN you'll find the marker. My guess is that it's a little older (but not much because of the date of the railroad) but even a ten year difference could easily see a change in the marker style. Good luck and have fun!

As they say, possession is 9/10ths of the law! I can already read the NEXT AD soon to appear on E-Bay... I bought this Geodetic Survey Mark on E-Bay back on April 4th of 2004. Since then, I've paid $26.01 for the marker itself and paid $4.50 for to have it shipped to me. I brought it into work and showed it to a friend who claimed that I couldn't possibly have one of these things. (Turned out his DAD worked for the something called the 'NGS department' or whatever...) I THEN paid a lawyer $6,700 to help keep me out of jail, but only if I pleaded guilty to the tampering and destruction of government property and further agreed to pay a $250.00 fine. I now need to sell this object to help me pay off my lawyer, pay my fine and since I lost my job because I'm now considered a felon.... get me caught back up on my house payments, car payments, electric bill, cable bill and cell phone bill, not to mention my AOL account which I'm going to need in order to close this sale. Because of this, the bidding will have to start off at $10,000.00 just in order for me break even. I'd like to make a few more bucks over that, just so I can give my wife some flowers because she's been talking about taking the kids and leaving me... Because of my slightly unfortunate experience, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that the winning bidder NOT be a US resident since all this could happen to you too. Will ship to Canada for an additional $10.00 and all other foreign countries for an addtional $15.00. I just hope that I can sell this and mail it to you without getting caught again. Insurance is NOT available due to the nature of the product. Good luck, and have fun bidding!

Hmm... PLESE NOTE: This is NOT directed at Centris OR ANYONE IN PARTICULAR! I can now see how there is a lot of grey area in the world of TB's - I would imagine that if it was all to be done all over again, the 'creator' would have the TB be the same as a regular cache. Find it once and you're done. After that, you're just moving the thing and don't get the credit for 're-finding' it and 're-placing' the TB. I also think the TB's should 'forensically' be attached to a cache - by this, I mean the TB has to be removed and traced from a cache that the geocacher has actually been to (and had the TB in it in the first place!) and then placed in a cache the person has actually been to. If it's been off on a 'TB meet' or whatever and never saw the inside of a cache, it wouldn't be counted as a find. Also; if you visit a 'TB hostel' (or any other cache that might happen to have more than one TB in it) then it's a 'take one, leave one' policy, no matter what, both in the 'real' world and on the machine. By this I mean, you CAN'T log more than one TB per cache since you didn't TAKE more than one. Get it? So in other words: No cache visit, no TB credit. No more logging a TB that doesn't have a direct link to a cache you just went to or came from. No more logging multiple TB per cache finds. Find the loopholes and close them. Personally, I think geocaching is whatever you want it to be. I don't care about 'finding' or 'moving' Travel Bugs; Myself, I LIKE finding the regular caches and the trading that goes on. Even more than that, I like whatever it takes to get me there. The driving, the hiking, the searching. It's not what's IN the cache that gets me there. For others? There are other reasons - NOW using Centris as my example, it's pretty clear that some people are very into TB's and the culture that goes with being a bug trader. Is that bad? No. Does that hurt you or me? Of course not. You might be into geocaching for oh… just to see what kind of container they use. Others might be of the ‘took nothing, left nothing’ type of geocachers and just note their find (log and/or website) and I imagine that at the very end of the scale (Probably where all the ‘lifers’ will eventually wind up at some point…) is just to simply take the cords off of the site, go there and find it without anyone ever knowing they were ever there; no log of any kind, no trade… Nothing. Just a smile as they see the glint of plastic under a rock and then walk away without ever touching it. Now: Here’s the RESPECT that Centris certainly deserves and seems to be vastly ignored by almost everyone. Traditional Caches found – 292 Multi-caches found – 9 Virtual caches found – 24 Webcam caches – 1 Locationless (Reverse) caches – 2 Cache in Trash out events – 1 One top of that, she has FIFTEEN still active regular caches that she owns. That’s FIFTEEN caches she has to baby-sit on a near weekly basis. All those caches she put out there JUST for you and I to find. How many do you have out there? How have you contributed to the sport? I’m not quizzing you. It’s more of a quiz you can give yourself. It’s never fair to bash a player that is only playing whatever game they want to play with whatever rules they are given, no matter how big the gray area is. If everyone can agree they don’t like the way the game is played, then they can always change the rules. Until then, we either play… or we watch. No one likes a Monday Quarterback. Even if all of us occasionally like to play one on T.V.

Oops! A little advice regarding police officers and after midnight stuff: Being the 'odd' sort of person that I am (like frequently rollerblading at 2:30 in the morning) taking hikes in the woods at midnight (and I wasn't even geocaching until recently) I've realized that there are 'normal' things a person does at night, such as sleeping, watching television... and sleeping. Anything other than that and it's NOT normal (IE: which makes it SUSPICIOUS.) Not that I blame them or want them to STOP thinking that way! After all, If I had a guy poking around the woods near my house at 1:30 in the morning with a flashlight and wandering around in seemingly aimless circles ... Yeah, I would want the police VERY interested! The key is to be as unsuspicious as you can be (without actually being in your bed!) Things like diving into the woods when you see a car, shutting off your flashlight when you have an officer drive past you or shutting down your flashlight when you see the telltale dashboard searchlight moving about. (hint: It's TOO late; keep both your hands at your sides and walk toward the light.) Even overly hiding your automobile off of a trailhead is the wrong thing to do! Personally, I'll even make it a point to be OVERLY OBVIOUS, such as leaving the caution lights flashing or leaving a note with my 'itinerary' and the time I left and the time I'm expecting to be back. Leave it right by the vehicle identification number in the dashboard (since that's the second thing they'll look at when they call it in... And if you're worried about your car being stolen or broken into... What the hell are you doing? ) If I'm confronted (and I have been numerous times) I'm very 'submissive', let them see both my hands at all times and also very careful where I point the flashlight. (Never in their eyes!) I've learned to offer them first an explanation and then an immediate voluntary pat-down to put them more at ease. (So they know I'm not carrying a weapon of any kind or possessing any 'breaking and entering' tools like a crowbar or a screwdriver or things like that...) And make sure you have your ID with you! They want it, and wanted it yesterday! (DON'T reach for it until they ask for it; you can just IMAGINE how that looks!) Get them past the 'I've got a suspicious character' phase as fast as humanly possible and right into the 'okay, he's just a harmless freak' phase. I'm not normally a submissive person (by any means) but when I'm 'technically' doing something I probably shouldn't be doing at 2:30 am (the whole 'dusk' thing that's on the sign confuses me!) and the only person I'm talking to can either 1) shoot me or 2) keep me in a cold dark place with round metal poles and give me a new roommate named 'Bubba' - dadgum right, I'm submissive. ESPECIALLY if it might be first 1 and THEN 2. Key! I won't act like I'm doing anything wrong (since I'm not) but will readily drop whatever I'm doing and go home if they ask. I've realized that it's perfectly okay to 'be a little off' in the mind of a police officer, but it's not a good thing to be suspicious. Being a little off is harmless... Being a possible suspect is not.

For what it's worth, here's my two cents... Buying disposable batteries is so... so eighties! Can you really walk along a nice stream or swim in a beautiful lake or sit at the ocean shore and THEN throw away something like a battery? No one would toss a car battery out in the middle of lake, would they? So why do it on a smaller scale? : ) We can bury it from sight, but it all winds up leaching into our lakes, streams and groundwater. If this sounds yummy to you, drop a AA battery into a glass of water, wait a week and then see how you feel about drinking it. We have to think about each other and our children, not about how long a battery might last or if you have to take three seconds out of your day to put a set of batteries in a charger. There are currently available (in your local store) NiMH batteries that will last three times longer in a GPS than a set of Alkalines. GPS units, PDA's and digital cameras are all high drain devices, perfectly suited for MiMH rechargeables. Such batteries are readily made and available from Energizer, Rayovac and have mAh ratings as high as 2200. (The higher the rating, the longer they 'last' - meaning, produce a device-usable amount of current.) Alkalines are at 1.5 volts out of the package but very quickly drop down to 1.2 volts (Just like the NiMH) but drop even further down at a much quicker rate than a good set of NiMH batteries. Hence, why they're actually recommended over alkalines for high drain devices. Rayovac just came out with a new system - A set of four AA batteries and a home/car charger that recharges them in fifteen minutes for only thirty bucks! Buy two sets of batteries and you'll always be ready, even if you don't have fifteen minutes. After that, as in most chargers, you can leave them in and get a 'trickle charge' which keeps them at 100% until you need them... at almost zero cost. I currently use a mated four AA and AAA charger with 2100 mAh Energizer rechargeables and have used rechargeables for years and years. Everything from flashlights, CD players, my GPS unit, etc etc. My up time is just as good (when it's not flat out BETTER) than a set of throw away alkalines. I can reasonably expect to save several hundred dollars in final costs (over regular batteries) and also save YOU and ME from drinking and eating my batteries. : ) I have never, not ONCE, damaged anything by using rechargeables. Think about your $300.00 cell phone, and then think about what it uses for a kind of battery, along with your $1500.00 laptop. Finally, when the rechargeable batteries have finally gotten to their end-days, (three or four years for most people) you can turn around and recycle them, unlike a disposable. Radio Shack will even take them to be recycled. Ask yourself again. Do you still think rechargeable batteries are expensive? Ask yourself how many trips to the battery store you saved... How much money you saved in gas... How much you saved in batteries... And finally ask yourself... 'What's NOT in my drinking water because of me?' : )