Steve&GeoCarolyn

Wouldn't it be more sensible to hike alone than shop alone in your area? Here in Memphis we have enough violent crime that we're in the top 5. (Every city has to be good at something, right?) There are places I don't go and places I won't cache. Most of those places are urban. I feel quite a bit safer in the woods. Carolyn Updated to add: It's not a girly thing. Those places are dangerous for both genders and my beloved won't go there either. He's even more cautious than I am.

Beautifully written, flask. Thank you for sharing it. For what it's worth, I'm a big scaredy-cat. I'm afraid of heights, caves, snakes (shudder), car doors, snow, the possibility that trees may fly through the air and hit our house, elevators, stairs, and pretty much any topic my over-active imagination gets ahold of. As far as people go, I suppose that I'm afraid of a few men, groups of children, a surprisingly large number of women, and dentists. What I don't do is let my fears overwhelm my life and deny me life's pleasures or keep me from life's necessities. I visit my dentist. I deal with the people I encounter as best I can (male and female). I hike alone. I venture into areas with snakes, heights, and snow. I've done tech rock climbing and rappelling. I deal with situations when my danger sense sings out. (This is a different voice than the feeling that all elevators are dangerous.) I make the best choice for the moment I'm in. I don't think it makes sense to act on a generalized fear of all men or all snakes or all dentists. It makes sense to me to assess the situation I'm in at the moment I'm in it and act accordingly. Carolyn

You should get yourself one of these keychains, then! Totally cool! I definitely need one of those. Wouldn't it make an absolutely darling travel bug? Carolyn

That's great advice and I agree with your book recommendation. It's a wonderful book. It completely changed how I react to my fear. I don't try to rationalize my way out of fear anymore. Instead I use my rationality to figure out what I'm afraid of and if I can't identify the cause, I assume my unconscious knows something I don't and I leave the area. I trust myself more these days and as Mule Ears said, I experience less fear and anxiety on a daily basis. Carolyn

Hmmm. My fancy sewing machine does embroidery. I may have to play with that idea. On the other hand, if someone else did it, I would have more time for caching. Thanks for the idea! Carolyn

We have tried. Three times we have tried. The longest we ever managed to keep at it was 2 hours. Got bored, found an internet connection and picked a cache more suited to our enjoyment. While those that choose to concentrate on the numbers are welcome to do so it makes no sense to me. We're of the same mind. Our worst day geocaching saw our highest number of caches (8). We both ended up with sick headaches from the gas fumes (most of the caches were in gas stations) and being in the car too much. Then my head exploded when I tried to remember the details well enough to log all of them. That experience taught us that we would never be high number cachers. We have a personal limit of no more than 5 in a day and prefer to hover around 2-3, preferably in nice hiking areas or beautiful nature preserves with boardwalks over the swamp. I think that is why the experience doesn't appeal to us as much as it does to other people. We are mostly loners who enjoy the experience of being quietly alone together outdoors. I don't want to sound like some sort of people-hating curmudgeon (I'm not), but getting away from people for a while is one of the things I like about geocaching. That said, I'm glad that other people find camaraderie, laughter, and joy doing numbers runs. It's just not for us. Carolyn

That sounds really neat! Where do you get them done? Carolyn

Hmmm. Perhaps we should change our name to Steve&GeoMorticia? Morticia

Ticks? Cute? Is this Unkle Fester pretending to be Carolyn? Does he think ticks are cute also? They really are cute with their tiny little red bodies and itty-bitty spider-like legs. When we are sitting on a log by a new found cache, the ticks sometimes approach drawn by our body heat, I think. It is as if they are sly little alley cats looking for canned food and petting. Of course they are vile blood-suckers so my beloved doesn't let me play with them and he immediately leaps up when he sees them and drags us away. He hates ticks passionately and they find him irresistable. So it would probably be better overall if you didn't mention to him that I find them kind of cute. Carolyn

Ah, one of the few fears I do not have. I like spiders. I even think ticks are kind of cute. Carolyn

Hmmm. One of the areas we found that we didn't know existed until we found the cache, we've adopted as our morning running trail. We're there every weekday. I think a daily note might be overkill. Another cache we are effectively stalking, visiting it to get another excuse to walk along the path every weekend night. How many notes do you think you would want if you were the cache owner of those caches? Carolyn

I think we all agree that there are sometimes reasons to be afraid or cautious and that hiking alone can be more vulnerable than hiking with others. Don't forget that traciebeth humorously dismissed her fears of serial killer footsteps and murderous cache hiders with the reference to watching too much CSI. This shows that she is a basically rational person who knew that this particular fear wasn't a likely event. What is fascinating to me is that this particular fear comes up a lot in a variety of contexts. "You're meeting someone from the internet for lunch? Aren't you worried that they might be a serial killer?" "You're planning to travel alone to Los Angeles? Aren't you concerned about serial killers in Venice Beach? There are a lot of people with tattoos there, you know." (I decided not to ask about the tattoo/serial killer connection in that conversation.) "Carolyn, We're flying to Australia next month. Can you ask Steve if we're likely to be attacked by terrorists?" (Terrorists in this context seem to be another version of the serial killer trope.) "You don't carry a gun to the grocery store? Aren't you concerned about serial killers?" The question, "But what about the possibility of serial killers?" seems to come up far more often than the actual danger of serial killers in the population would indicate. My theory is that this is our way of personalizing fears that are often inchoate and unformed. In other words, we feel fear and we do not know why. Our mind obligingly brings up serial killers as a good metaphor for incomprehensible evil and danger. In another time or place perhaps we would be asked, "Aren't you afraid of the demons that haunt the forest?" or "Aren't you afraid of witches?" For me, the task I set myself when I'm afraid is to check the rationality of that fear. I do a quick mental and visual check of the area to see if I can identify the true cause of my dread. If I can't identify it and I'm still afraid, I leave the area. More often, I find that I can quickly identify what it was that set off my fear claxon. Then I can take reasonable action. Carolyn

I like the links and I do click on them. I've learned things I never knew. (For example the woman I met whose ambition it is to have a cache at every CrackerBarrel restaurant is doomed. Doomed!) Carolyn

Someone does way more interesting caches than we do. We started with two separate user names and now have one. We pretty much always cache together. The advantages for us are: 1) Only one of us needs to do the logging. My beloved hates logging. It reminds him of work. I love logging and photographing our visits so I do that. It is a natural division of labor for us. 2) On the other hand, I dislike touching damp log books to sign them. He doesn't mind signing our name even in a damp smelly log book. So he does that. Once again, natural division of labor. 3) He can do things I can't. He's taller than me and can reach things that are too tall for me without a ladder. Sometimes I'll get myself caught by the hair in a patch of brambles and will look around for help and I'll see that he has shinnied up a tree and is surveying the landscape. 4) I will happily do things he won't, like walk through mud and brambles. 5) He dislikes all the organizing so I organize our stuff and carry the gear. I'm the one who says, "This situation calls for the long poking stick. It's in the second pocket left side." 6) He protects me from snakes and has a fairly good sense of direction. He's also more rational than I am about what we can manage. So he protects me from myself. When we had separate accounts I felt guilty about the things I couldn't do on my own (climb trees, reach tall things, etc.) and frustrated that he didn't log or didn't log very well. I worried that we should be each searching separately. With one account we each do what we do well and feel that we are contributing to the team effort. It reduces competition between the two of us. Our natural way of interacting is as a tightly focused team and the joint account supports that. Those are the advantages for us. The only disadvantage I've encountered in a team account is that it discourages us from caching alone. I hadn't thought of doing what Mrs. B does. Perhaps we will consider that. Carolyn

I think that's fine. From what I can tell the issue deals with the action taken by the hider. If the hider must dig a hole to prepare the place, that's wrong. But if the hider wants to pile things on top of the cache, that's fine. Secondarily, the hide should not encourage the cache seeker to use a shovel to unearth it. However, if the hider didn't mean to force the seeker to dig, but nature covered the cache in sand or humus or rocks, that is acceptable. Carolyn

Hi, So, how are the paws now? As it happened we started running and I developed plantar fascitis (though not as dreadfully bad as other people have described) and was grateful I'd read this thread before the pain began. Mule Ears' advice has been wonderful and I was reminded by Kit Fox to go back to yoga. As it turns out, headstand helps wonderfully, as do most of the leg stretching poses. Poses that require me to balance on the injured heel don't work and barefoot running has been put on hold until things feel better. A friend who is a runner advised kneading my calves and thighs with a rolling pin, which has also been a relief. Anyway, thanks for predicting that I would need this thread and getting it set up for me just in time. I hope your paws are on the mend. Carolyn

OK, you're testing me, right? And doing a very good job of it, indeed! Sorry, but to answer that question in this thread would be totally off-topic. Since buried caches has already been listed in this thread as a "Dead Horse" topic, you can probably guess that it has been discussed before, and that a forum search would probably be a good idea. At the very least, though, starting a new thread on that new topic would be appropriate. Whew!! How'd I do? Nicely done. However you could have also given her a link to my very similar question which was answered by Renegade Knight. Carolyn

Nature is indifferent and will compost or not as it see's fit in, on, under, near, or given time, inside a cache. The cache owner bears no responsilbity for what nature does. They do have an obligatin when nature's actions require some maintance to get out there ina maintain it as time and life allow. I don't think that includes lifting the cache a few mm each year to compensate for the natural deposition of matieral. Besides, some of these caches are destined to be interesting archaeolgoical finds. Thank you. Though in the case I described it actually wasn't a few millimeters. It was a good several inches. But it is good to know that this is not included in maintenance. Carolyn

I wouldn't ask if I knew the answer. I actually never ask questions I know the answer to. Do you do that? I really work at niceness so I am not certain why I get attacked here. Carolyn

I get that we are not supposed to intentionally make holes. However, I do have a question. In areas with heavy deciduous trees it is possible for a cache that remains unfound for a year or two to be buried in composting leaves that turn to soil and bury the cache. One of our first finds was like this. It hadn't been found for a while. The ammo box had been placed in a natural depression between two logs. Time and nature covered it in deep leaves and about halfway down the leaves had turned to soil, meaning that the ammo box was half buried in soil. (We finally found it by tripping over it and noting that it made an odd sound.) Once we found the cache my beloved turned to me with a look of great disappointment and said, "I thought you said these things can't be buried." He grumbled about the "buried" cache for days and can still be set off harumphing with a reference to that cache. I understand that we cannot stop nature from doing what it wants to do with our caches. But does the cache owner bear a responsibility to ensure that his cache doesn't turn into a buried cache if it is not found for a while? Is this part of the maintenance we will need to plan for here since we live in an area of dense vegetation and trees? Carolyn

When we first began we made a pact to always check the hint so that we would not go back and forth discussing the matter. Once we hit about 50 finds we decided to select specific caches to do hint-free while doing the rest with hints. Now we do most of them hint-free unless we absolutely need the hint. We give ourselves extra points for hint-free finds. Carolyn

I said it was obvious. Just another day where someone had to point it out to me. Now, what are some other ideas? They were teasing you? I thought they were teasing me. I immediately looked for my tadpole protective screen, but alas, apparently I have posted too much and found too many caches to be protected by the tadpole screen. Of course since they were teasing you, well, that's ok then. Carolyn

While you're bumping, you might want to take a look at the first message. The linky goodness got messed up. Perhaps due to the exclamation mark? Bump bump bump (just to be as bumpy as everyone else)

Go to your main profile page http://www.geocaching.com/my/ Along the right hand side is a section called Premium Features. Select "Set up Notifications" Click Create a New Notification Make your choices of what sort of caches you want to be notified about and all the other details. Then click Create Notification. Carolyn

That's what I thought you meant and it sounds like a good idea to me. One thing to think about is that if you always give the link or always have it in your signature you may not be preventing Cacher A's redundant question, but you are certainly helping the silent Cachers B, C, D, E, F, and G find their way to the FAQ. One other thing to consider is that people may think that the FAQ applies primarily to the forum rather than to geocaching in general. It is named "Read First! Geocaching Frequently Asked Questions" but that doesn't mean people understand it as primarily about geocaching the activity. The forum has a different look and feel than geocaching.com does. At first I wondered whether they were run by two different entities. However, if your signature line read something like: "Got a question about your log? Changing Names? Hiding a cache? Or anything about geocaching? Check the FAQ for fast answers." This would drive people to the FAQ in ways that a static link at the top of the page doesn't. Things seem friendlier when real people promote them. Carolyn