sword fern

This all started with one cacher here in So. Utah. (BillionJ) When he took his young kids caching, his youngest daughter couldn't pronounce the word 'geocache', so she shortened it to "jeek". Actually, there are very few of us around here that use the word. "Cache" and "cacher" are much more common. We are pretty open around here and you would be welcome to come find some of our great hides, whether they be called "caches" or "jeeks". It's all good because it's just a game and a lot of fun without all the drama. Thanks for the info. So, in a nut shell, this guy is running around talking like a little girl? No wonder we can't take him seriously. That lil girl started a mini revolution.

I'm in agreement with Knowschad here. I do the DEET/permethrin combo and haven't had a tick on me all season. Much of my caching takes place in wooded areas or in vegetation. I treat my shoes and socks as well. I usually do a less than thorough tick check after the last cache I do while at the car. I typically wear dark colored clothing but I know light colors work better. I also wear a cap if I'm going to be in vegetation over my head. Harder for them to go right to the scalp. And I keep my hair pulled back tightly so I can get to ticks on my neck faster and they have to work hard to get down to skin as well. I do spray my hat and if I'm going to shower soon my hair as well. I'll wear a hoodie in the summer sometimes too if I'm going to be amongst a lot of branches. Again treated with permethrin and underneath I'm treated with DEET. When I get home the clothes come off, shoes are left outside. Clothes typically go right into the washer and then dryer. I go right into the shower after which a thorough tick check occurs. That's a lot to remember... do you have a checklist for this We have a few nasty tick borne diseases here to worry about so it's old hand. There others that I worry about much more than Lymes at this point. And I have my one normal set of "caching clothes" so really it's pull hair back, put hat on, spray down and off we go. Get home take it all off and get in shower then look for little buggers. If anything feels awry look carefully out in the field. lol *shudders*.. not good. I can see why you take such precautions. I should count myself lucky that I'm not in too much of a tick infested place and those that are about aren't that bad. Still, I am always cautious when it comes to searching in tall grass and putting my hand into those oh so welcoming tree bases. Anyone else feel their skin crawling from these threads? I hesitated reading the original Ticks! Ticks! Ticks! thread, but once I realized that there are some species in the PNW I read it for tips. That thread has died down so I created this one.

which park? lord hill? yep. I'm curious, where did you hear that ticks lived there? If you see- some caches in lord hill have the Tick attribute checked. And besides, its common sense, Ticks live anywhere there is dense vegetation.

Thanks, but.im not sure if I want to even touch the tick.

Good to know.

which park? lord hill? yep.

Hah, good call on the U2 song. And yes, I did go on a long road trip. The animation would look a lot cooler if I went on a bunch of long road trips while caching the entire way! Anyway, as you probably know the GE time slider appears when you add valid <TimeSpan> tags to your placemarks. To get the falling/fading dot animation, you need to create a series of placemarks with slightly different icon sizes and opacity values. Their <TimeSpan> should be contiguous but not overlapping. Let me show you some .kml code. First, define the icon sizes and colors. 4fffff11 is the color's hex value plus a number for opacity. <Style id="sh_10"><IconStyle><color>4fffff11</color><scale>5</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_9"><IconStyle><color>5fffff22</color><scale>4.5</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_8"><IconStyle><color>6fffff33</color><scale>4</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_7"><IconStyle><color>7fffff44</color><scale>3.5</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_6"><IconStyle><color>8fffff55</color><scale>3</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_5"><IconStyle><color>9fffff66</color><scale>2.5</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_4"><IconStyle><color>afffff77</color><scale>2</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_3"><IconStyle><color>bfffff88</color><scale>1.5</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_2"><IconStyle><color>cfffff99</color><scale>1</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> <Style id="sh_1"><IconStyle><color>ffffffaa</color><scale>0.4</scale><Icon><href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href></Icon></IconStyle></Style> Then you need to have duplicate placemarks for every Geocache, one for each style defined above. Notice how the <TimeSpan> tags are contiguous from one style/placemark to the next. This makes the cool animation. I haven't figured out a way to make GE's animation any slower than it already is. I used a time difference of 2 weeks between each animation frame (placemark). <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-04-12T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-04-26T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_10</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-04-26T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-05-10T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_9</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-05-10T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-05-24T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_8</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-05-24T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-06-07T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_7</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-06-07T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-06-21T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_6</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-06-21T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-07-05T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_5</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-07-05T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-07-19T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_4</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-07-19T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-08-02T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_3</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-08-02T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-08-16T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_2</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-08-16T00:00:00z</begin><end>2010-08-30T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_1</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> <Placemark><TimeSpan><begin>2010-08-30T00:00:00z</begin><end>2011-12-11T00:00:00z</end></TimeSpan><styleUrl>#sh_1</styleUrl><Point><coordinates>-84.159283,39.645117,0</coordinates></Point></Placemark> The above code is for just one geocache find. So you need to duplicate it for every find, with the beginning time of the first placemark being the date you found the cache. Doing this all by hand would be incredibly tedious, so I modified a Visual Basic script to make it for me. If some people want to send me an excel file with coordinates and dates I'll make one for you. Especially if you've gone on a lot of road trips My brain hurts even more- Edit: typed bran instead of brain

Im glad I live 2000 miles away from PA. Im terrified of Ticks. Never encountered one, Hope I never will. Some people might consider this as a bump. A bump it is. Lets continue the discussion parallel to my recurring one

Ummm...I wonder if a cacher from souther UT clicked on that link.

This made me feel a little better. http://www.city-data.com/forum/seattle-area/331604-ticks-seattle-area.html DId a lil more research and found out that deer ticks (the gruseome ones on wikipedia) are most populous in my area. That drowned my unfear fear of ticks.

Cache in the winter. No, I got one on me during a warm spell in the winter. I hate the little buggers. They climb up your pant legs and end up burrowing into places that you really dont want bugs burrowing into. I pretty much gave up caching for much of last summer. Permethion {sic} spray is the only thing I've found that works. Thanks, I feel better that you live on the other side of the US than me Even though they live everywhere. Its smack dab in the middle of the summer, but the summer here has been rainy and cold the past few weeks. That may be a good sign.

Not that I would find it nice to find a tick frantically trying to dig into my hat, but maybe.

Try explaining it to the police. "Me? Jeeking."

I might be going caching tomorrow, in a dense vegetation local park w/ 35 caches in it, but problem is, that Ticks live there. Sure, Ticks live everywhere, but as long as I'm unaware of it, Im okay. Im terrified of Ticks. Everything about 'em. The legs, the arachnid like mouth, the round flat thorax, etc. I looked at wikipedia to see if it had any information to avoid them. But whoever wrote that article didn't help at all. I almost felt like editing the whole page saying "ticks are just little rainbows in disguise" But i didn't. All wikipedia had was a huge deer tick on a leaf saying "ticks sit on leaves and attatch to their host when something brushes the leaf. And we cachers even stick our hands into unknown places which might have a horde of tick eating the remains of a deer eyeball. One more peice of information that I found "useful" (Im being sarcastic) was a picture of a tick sitting on a toddlers scalp and engorging on his scalp flesh. I wasn't a pretty picture. Who knows who took that picture. Anyway, I need some help on how to help avoid ticks other than that spray on repellent. Any?

Yeap. Now what do I do with all these fish and animals I've shot or caught? Why would any man want more then one woman is beyond me? Feed it to the ticks.

Speaking of dating...

Is that why someone took a super bowl ring and left a quarter?

I get it now...not that i didn't earlier...

The sum of all its parts. I knew that.

I mean if the stuff inside is called swag, and the thing you sign is called a logbook and the thing holding that stuff is a container whats a geocache?

This brings up the question.... whats a geocache?? Try looking in the Seattle area. We have lotsa differednt genres of puzzles here.

I took a quick peek at opencaching.com and found this explaining geocaching. LMAO As for contacting that opencacher that was goingto quit, Garmin must have their email address obtained by account setup. YOU can try asking garmin...not that they would give it to some stranger...

No, that would be "Münze". Quite the difference. Myoonz?

The word munzee reminds me of a USB flash drive plugged into these hidden sockets.

Exactly!! Did Harry Potter go around putting up posters about his magic in an effort to convert the "mugglers" [sic]? I don't think so. That was probably the best example you can get. Wait I take that back.