cimawr
-
Posts
397 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by cimawr
-
-
Neither of those are in Baltimore, let alone anywhere near *downtown*.
The Cancer Survior cache is about 12 miles from downtown, in Towson, which is the county seat of Baltimore COUNTY. It's also not what I'd call wheelchair accessible, since the "park" is on a corner completely surrounded by streets, and there's no nearby parking.
(For that matter, it's not particularly accessible, full stop - I live .85 miles from it, and have never bothered to look for it because it's too much of a hassle to get to. You have to either park in a nearby mega-mall's parking garage, and walk along a lane with no sidewalk to reach the "park", or park several blocks away in a residential neighborhood, then cross a four-lane divided street. Only way I'm ever going to look for that one is if I happen to take the dogs for a three-miler and decide it's worth my while to cross all those streets.)
"Little Stinker" is a longer distance away; about 20 miles from downtown, up in Cockeysville (which is a northern suburb of *Towson*).
The third cache listed is at or near the Shot Tower, which is a historic site quite near to downtown; the OP might want to try e-mailing that cache's placers, since I believe they live in the city.
-
Well the best way is just to be born without an allergy to the stuff and then you don't have to pay money to get some potions to keep you from breaking out.
Only problems with your comment:
1. People aren't "born with" or "born without" allergies. You can develop an allergy at ANY time in your life; all it takes is what's known as a "sensitizing dose". So don't get complacent about your supposed immunity to a particular allergen - especially if you move from one geographic location to another, where you may encounter pollens or other allergens your body isn't accustomed to. (Generic "you/your", not specific.)
2. Getting a nasty rash from PI (or any other plant containing urishol) does NOT require being allergic to it.
See below.
The following is an excerpt from a post to another discussion list a couple of days ago, tangential to a discussion on homeopathy:
1) The initial rash <from poison ivy> is not due to an allergy, but to the fact that the plants contain an oil called urishol, which is a skin irritant. When you come into contact with the plants, or they are burned near you, the oil gets on your skin and irritates it.
You can also get it if your pets or livestock brush against the plant and then against you, transferring the oil from their fur/hair to your skin, or from oil which has gotten on clothes or the like.
Some people are more sensitive than others to the effects - IOW, some people have tougher skin than others - but the severity of the initial rash usually depends more on how much of the oil was present in the plant, how much got on your skin, and whether or not you washed or bathed to remove the oil from your skin after exposure.
IOW, severity of the initial rash has nothing to do with "luck", and everything to do with a) the severity of exposure and b ) how quickly and how well you removed the oil from your skin after exposure. A lot of people who think they're "immune" to PI simply happen to have showered or washed their hands relatively soon after coming into contact with it.
2) Having said that, some people do develop a *secondary* allergic reaction to the exposure - just as some people break out in hives or rashes when exposed to certain perfumes etc. (For example, I'm allergic to some detergents, and will break out in hives if I wear clothes washed in them.)
That's what makes the initial rash seem to "spread" - actually, it's a secondary allergic rash. The rash can also seem to "spread" if you scratch and irritate it, and/or it gets infected.
Again, this isn't a matter of "luck", but a matter of whether you actually are allergic to the oil on top of the initial skin irritation.
3)There is some evidence to support the idea that taking a small amount of the plant internally will increase your resistance to the effects of the oil. I'd have to do some Googling to find the references, however.
4) If you're sensitive to poison ivy, poison oak, etc., there IS a commercial product which is extremely effective - it's called Tecnu.
<snipped rest of this, since it's been covered in this forum>
There's my 2c, which is worth what you paid for it.
<edited to remove annoying smiley which usurps my outline structure>
-
Okay, that's fine if you want to check on your caches every time someone logs a DNF, but just because someone doesn't do that, it doesn't mean they aren't maintaining their cache. The cache owner knows more about their cache than someone who hasn't found it. Sometimes you know that your cache is hidden in a manner that has a high chance of never being muggled and poses quite a challenge for cachers to find. I'm sure they stay on top of their caches, but I can't imagine they'd spend their time going out there after each DNF.
That's my take on it, as well.
DNFs simply mean "did not find", and not every cache is so easy it can be found by each and every seeker. With some caches, if you look at the logs, you'll see multiple DNFs interspersed with "found it" logs; that indicates it's a tricky cache, not that it's missing, and the hider would be foolish to run out and check it each and every time someone can't find it. (This is most common with tricky micros/nanos in my area.)
OTOH, when a cache is found by *most* seekers, and/or is intended to be fairly easy to find, and you get a DNF, then it often is an indication of trouble. Even so, I wouldn't necessarily take a DNF by a fairly new seeker as an indication that the cache is missing - unless they added detail which corroborated it. (For example: "I searched the area for 30 minutes, including what's described in the hint, and found no sign of the cache. However, I did find signs of flooding in the area.")
It all depends on the individual cache.
WRT the original question... personally, I don't log a DNF every time I start out to look for a cache and don't find it. As so many others have said, it depends on the circumstances - whether I really had time to look for it, whether I think it's actually missing, and what I know about the difficulty of the cache....
What it boils down to, for me, is whether or not I think my reasons for DNF need to be communicated to the hider and/or other cachers.
-
Don't be so fast with that judgement. Private roads in Washington state are named and numbered, including condo driveways. Complexes get so big they have to have something to go by for the USPS.
In some areas of MD and DE, private roads - which are as often farm lanes and the like - are now required by law to be named if they are over a certain length. However, it's not for the convenience of the Post Office, but in order to speed time of response for 911 calls.
Which allows for some quite creative names, since property owners are allowed to make up their own (although there are some parameters, such as no obscenity or hate messages). Among other things, there is a Pooh and Tigger Way (named by the family's kids), and three neighbors (two of them sisters) have named their lanes "This Way", "That Way", and "My Way".
None of which applies in this case, since it's been established that the street in question is not only NOT a private road, but was in existence long before the apartment complex.
-
+1 to Tecnu.
Swear by it. I tell my workers to use it after they've been in the woods if they think there's even the slightest chance they came across poison ivy. I believe they recommend to use it up to two hours after exposure.
I'll add to the chorus on Tecnu! I'm very allergic to poison ivy and oak - not only do I get a very bad topical reaction to the oil, but a day or so later, I often break out in secondary hives in areas not exposed.
A few months ago, while traveling home from a competition, I went looking for an urban cache after dark, and it turned out to be in a tiny patch of woods behind a restaurant. The woods were illuminated enough by the parking lot lights to enable me to find the cache, but somewhere along the way my face encountered one of the evil vines.
A few minutes after I drove away (and still 40 minutes from home), my skin began to itch, burn, and break out. I got home as fast as I could, and immediately washed with Tecnu.... 10 minutes later, no itch, and by the next morning, no rash or reaction was visible.
-
Many, if not most, cachers don't read the logs before attempting to find a cache. Personally, I only read them if I can't find the cache
Same here, other than sometimes glancing at the logs on the "front page" if looking at a new cache page - there IS that bit about "logs may contain spoilers", after all!
For that matter, I do, fairly often, go looking for caches without reading the cache pages at all, especially if I happen to find myself with a bit of extra time on my hands after a meeting.
However, ALSO I have enough common sense to:
a) abort if it's obvious that I'm not prepared for the terrain or distance
b ) ditto, or DNF, if it becomes obvious that I need more information, or if there's something that sets off my "alarm bells" (such as huge "No Trespassing" signs**)
c) filter out puzzles, multis, and caches with very high terrain ratings when doing large "pocket queries" (not to say I won't do them, but I don't dump them into my GPS without a bit of research - got "bit" that way a couple of times at the beginning).
d) do more research and filtering - including reading cache pages - if I intend to cache on a trip, especially if it's in an area new to me.
**That happened a couple of weeks ago.
I started out at 9 am to drive the 48 miles from my S.O.'s house to mine, having a 1 pm appointment, and the appointment was canceled via cellphone just after I left. It was a glorious sunny day, so on the spur of the moment, I spent it meandering home on back roads and caching along the way, looking for caches that popped up on my GPS.
I got to one, and lo and behold the only obvious area (a tiny strip of wood behind some suburban homes) was PLASTERED with "No Trespassing" signs. So I just gave it a pass, and went on to the next. Sure enough, when I checked the cache page that night, the cache had been disabled because "the neighbors are getting upset".
-
I'm never going to do any more caches that are in plain view of people's houses. I'll still do it if a virtual stage happens to be there (e.g. such as when I need to look for a name on the monument by the street in order to get the coords). I much prefer woods.
I'm with you on preferring woods caches, but I think avoiding ANY caches that are in sight of houses is a bit of overkill. For me, the deciding factors in such cases are:
1) Is the cache in a place where the public has a real right to be?
2) Is the place where I need to be a spot where homeowners should *expect* to see members of the public, even if I may not be acting exactly like most people seen there?
3) Do I feel that my being there is an invasion of the homeowner's reasonable expectation of privacy?
A cache in a public park, where any homeowner whose house abuts the park should have an expectation of seeing strangers near their property line, would be unlikely not to meet those three criteria.
-
Yep...and after taking my "nap", I still have the same feeling!!
Read a map...great advice...mine doesn't show up on the cache page...does EVERYBODY else's??
Every cache page I see has links to 10 different online maps of the location on the left-hand side above the written description. The online maps include Topozone.
-
One last thing.... What's with all the hyphenated words? Is that a MN thing?
More likely, it's a software effect on words that originally spanned line breaks.
-
It makes perfect sense.
The things I most enjoy finding in caches are:Meant to add that I agree WRT finding dirty golf balls, which I usually toss out of the cache since I figure anybody who really wants a dirty golf ball** can pick up plenty from the ground on their way to/from the cache. Which is what the eejits who leave them do.
**Every time I find this, it's a case of the cache being placed in an area where people practice golf drives - which in my area, is pretty much any park that doesn't specifically prohibit the activity.
-
I really don't care about the swag. I just love being outside, walking and the thrill of the hunt. What I do like though is trading personalized items especially caribiners & wooden coins. I really don't consider those "swag" but more of a collectible if that makes any sense to anyone but me. ;-)
It makes perfect sense.
The things I most enjoy finding in caches are:1) Signature items, which I've started collecting - I enjoy seeing other cachers' creative efforts and personal style. I most enjoy the unusual ones; for example. one local cacher leaves small local rubber duckies in pirate costume, another small pins in the shape of bees, a third a bead which looks like an eyeball.
I sort of have a sig item myself, although it isn't yet personalized... in some caches, I leave tiny silver/pewter Jack Russell charms in memory of a dog I lost to cancer recently. Which also reflects my "screen name" (means "big dog" in Welsh <G>) in a backwards, pun-ny sort of way.
2) Traveling geocoins. It's fun to look at them - again a matter of appreciating creative effort - and to see what custom icon pops up. And they're easy to carry.
3) Small useful items like carabiners, compasses, keychains, etc., although more often than not I end up trading them back into another cache.
-
]Is this the 'bank parking lot' one from the other thread?
1) No, it's not near a bank. (I believe I specified in the post that it's a deserted museum parking lot.)
2) Which other thread? There are so many of 'em....
-
Thanks for the laugh!!
Have you ever seen/read the letter about the beaver dam... the one where the owner of the property got a notice from the Powers That Be about "unauthorized construction" on his property?
edit: adding URL to the story, which is true.
-
As a female cacher with 600 finds, I have never had an encounter with a law enforcement officer while caching. I wonder if female cachers in general have fewer problems....
I've not been at it as long - about 4 months, 115 finds - but I've wondered that myself; I'm sure that to most people, a sub 5' 40-something female just doesn't appear to be any sort of threat.
And I KNOW that there are situations where, if I hadn't had the dogs with me, I'd've gathered notice; as it is, if I pull up somewhere, hop out with a dog, and proceed to walk back and forth, the immediate assumption is the dog has to pee, and I basically become invisible.
I did have one sort-of-LEO-encounter when I'd just started out. It was with a cache where the coordinates are a bit wonky (noted in repeated logs), and the hide area puts searchers in an area where NOBODY would otherwise go - behind a privacy screen of evergreen trees, right on the fence lines of three private homes, within 30-40 feet of two of the homes, and overlooking one home's swimming pool.
The third home has dogs which, according to previous logs, have been agitated by the presence of strangers (they weren't out in the yard the time I was there).
The area is at the back corner of a private museum's parking lot, where there are normally no cars, so it's not even like anyone would walk past there going through the neighborhood, etc.
In any case, I went looking, felt uncomfortable being that invasively close to private homes**, and left to look for another cache a couple of blocks away, which I found quickly.
After checking the logs and finding a different set of coordinates, I went back, about 10 minutes later, to look on the parking lot side of the privacy screen, but almost immediately, a car pulled over from the other side of the parking lot and stopped about 20 feet away, and the driver started watching me.
AFAICT, it was an unmarked police car; I suspect that one of the homeowners had called them. (There had been several finds within the previous few days, which I believe most likely fed into it; e.g. I wasn't the first stranger spotted where nobody would normally be.)
In any case, I got in my van and left, and haven't been back... one of these days, I may take another quick look WITHOUT going into the area which is practically at people's back doors. And in retrospect, perhaps I should have approached the cops and explained what I was doing, but I was already uncomfortable with that particiular scenario, and the occupant of the car wasn't in uniform***.
**The thing that makes this one odd is that, unlike other caches I've done that were in sight of, or near to, private residences, the area isn't one where there's any reason whatsoever for anyone to be under normal circumstances. To my way of thinking, if the coords put me on a public trail, a sidewalk, in a park, etc., then the homeowners *expect* to sometimes see people there.
***Now there, if I were male, I might have been more likely to approach the car. As a small female, not being 100% sure the individual WAS a cop, well....
-
this weekend i had my twelfth interaction with police.
the best one was this one:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LU...48-9834a77ccb63
this spring i'm going to go back and find that sucker.
Thanks for sharing! Well written, and it gave me a laugh; the illustrations perfect it.
-
I think 3-4 stages is optimum. 5 could be fine depending on the stages. Above that it goes from fun to tedious for me and my interest in doing the cache would lessen with every additional stage.
What he said.
And I also agree with the poster who said that the *stages* should have intrinsic interest; I'd lose interest in, and probably abort, a multi which consisted of "lame micros".
-
An empty box of matches. They even logged putting it there in the logbook... something about it being really old and possibly useful for collector or some such.
There's a cache in my area where you're SUPPOSED to trade interesting books of matches. It was one of the first caches I looked for, and I took two cool empty matchboxes - small ones from European hotels that my grandmother stayed in in the 50's - along to trade.
However, I ended up not leaving them because the cache container is cheapo disposable Gladware, and of course everything inside was sodden and/or moldy. :-P It was my first experience of the cheapo non-maintained cache container.... needless to say, it wasn't my last.
-
Watch the Jim Carrey version of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" and you get something very similar to this.
Drat. I was attempting NOT to add any more movies to my Netflix queue.... sounds fairly gruesome, but now I'm curious!
-
Lemme guess... you found an altoids-tin cache? I've seen those posted as both micros and small. Personally, I say it should be a micro, but a lot of people mark it as a small.
Are you asking me, or the OP? If the OP, he said he never found it.
If you're asking me, no, it wasn't an Altoids; it was round (ball-shaped, IOW), so it had a surprising amount of room in it.
I agree WRT Altoids tins, btw, although I understand why the fact that you CAN put small flat trade items in makes people think of them as non-micro. On a side note, I think they're not a very good choice of cache container in most cases, since waterproof they ain't, and rust they do.
-
how big is a small size, if it's not micro and not full, how big or small and a small one be...is it anything in between those two sizes?
I don't think there's really a standard set of measurements for container size; it's somewhat subjective, in my experience.
Sizes (in order from small to large) are, IIRC: nano, micro, small, regular, large.
Generally, a nano is very tiny (I've seen one about the size of a pencil eraser) with room for only a very small, tightly rolled log.
A micro is usually film can or keyholder size, with room for only a log or, sometimes, very small items.
A small can usually hold a log, a writing implement, and small or flat items; generally the container is something like an 8 or 16 oz tupperware or a flat lock'n'lock.
A regular holds a log, writing implement, and larger items; usually a regular-size ammo can, quart or larger size container, etc.
A large is just that - huge ammo cans, 5-gallon buckets, and the like.
However, I've found there's quite a bit of overlap between adjacent sizes - what one person considers "micro", another may consider "small", or what I might call "small", someone else might think is "regular" because it can hold something besides the log.
For example, I recently found a cache which is listed as "micro", but in fact is about 3 inches across and can easily accomodate some small trade items, geocoins, and the like. Me, I think I'd have called it a "small".
For another, I adopted a cache which was listed as regular, but was in fact a 16-oz powdered-drink container; I changed the listing to "small", because it couldn't hold much, and there was an ongoing issue with people bringing trade items too large to fit, and leaving them outside the container.
(I also subsquently exchanged the throwaway drink container for a slightly larger flat lock'n'lock.)
-
I once had an experience where I saw two people actually declare their intentions to kill each other and then go into nearby rooms where they actually had guns, whereby they actually loaded those guns with the thought of actually using them....
puts it in perspective.And did you vacate the vicinity???
While I agree that there's a difference between first-hand threatening experiences - I've had a few myself, although none, thank the gods, involving guns other than a threat to return with one** - there HAVE been cases of internet issues leading to real-life injury or death.
For example, there was a case a year or so ago that involved two women who participated in a discussion list about Rat Terriers. One was unbalanced, and problems arose between them on-line. The final result was that the unbalanced one created a fake online identity, posed, through e-mail, as someone interested in buying a puppy, gained entry to the other woman's house, and killed her.
**I used to work in retail customer service, and any time you work with the public, you encounter crazy people. I also once got involved - simply by being present & knowing one of them- in an issue involving people physically assaulting each other in public.
-
Ok now I'm really confused. I just checked and the OP has a total of 4 finds, all of which are Regular size and one they actually went and logged a find on 2 seperate occasions.
If you read the logs, he took his son to find it one day, and his daughter another; since the account is for all the family members, it amounts to two different members of a team logging finds on two different day.
WRT micros, I'm guessing that what's going on is that he's looking at cache pages to find ones suitable to hunt with the kids, and finding it frustrating because when he reads the descriptions, they turn out to be micros. IOW the problem is finding non-micros to hunt for, not going to a cache and finding it's a micro when he gets there.
-
Has Groundspeak ever considered assigning confirmation numbers to caches? Sort of like TB tracking numbers, the cache confirmation number would be located on the cache log and a "found it" log would not be able to be posted without it...
It wouldn't work.
How would a finder know what the number is in the innumerable cases where the log is destroyed by water, eaten by mice, etc? Not to mention that there are quite a few caches out there where the hiders neglect to put in a log in the first place, throw a scrap or two of paper in and call it a log, and/or recycle logs from other caches.
And yes, I have seen all three of those circumstances in newly-listed caches.
-
Oops, I meant 'sang'.
Oh THANKS.
Now I've got a mental image of some weirdo standing in the woods with a scrap of paper and singing a list of names like an operatic tenor....
How did you choose your Geocaching name?
in General geocaching topics
Posted · Edited by cimawr
Heh. I *thought* I'd seen it somewhere before... although I can only vaguely remember the details of that series.
Point of note - warning, I'm about to wax pedantic
:
There isn't any such thing as " the correct Celtic way" to pronounce a word or name, because there isn't any such thing as a language called "Celtic".
There are a number of related languages still spoken in the countries/cultures thought of as "Celtic", including Irish Gaelic aka Erse, Scots Gaelic, Cymraeg (Welsh), and Breton (spoken in Brittany), but each one has its own rules of spelling and pronunciation - same as Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc, are lumped under the general heading of "Romance languages", but the words, spelling and pronunciation of each are distinct and different.
<pedantic mode mostly off>
Anyhoo - FWIW, "Sion" is the Welsh equivalent of the English name "John" and the Irish "Sean", so to my eye "Sioneva" reads roughly "Shahn-eva"... although there is no "V" in Welsh.
(I can't reproduce the Welsh vowel "io" correctly in written English, but "Sion" has a slightly different sound than "Sean", and both are a bit different than the bastardized American version,"Shawn").
Getting back to the subject of personal name origin... I use Cimawr, which means "Big Dog" in Welsh, on a number of different forums. Ci=dog, Mawr=big/great; in Welsh, the adjectives go after the main word instead of before as they do in English.
Ci is prounouced roughly "key", and "mawr" roughly "mah-oor", with the "r' rolled. ("mawr" is actually only one syllable, but if I don't put the hyphen in there, the English-reading eye sees it as ma-hoor
)
Best bet for English speakers is to say it Key-mar, same as they say Brin Mar for "Bryn Mawr" (which means "Big Hill".)
As to WHY "Cimawr" - the Big Dog thing is a old, old in-joke with some of my family and friends, having to do with the fact that I train and compete in NADAC agility with my own dogs, and used to work as a professional dog exerciser, handling off-leash packs of 6-9 dogs , which makes me the "big dog" in terms of pack authority… but I'm a small person (just under 5' and around 105 lb).
It was also orginally a reference to the U.S. marshal character played by Tommy Lee Jones in "The Fugitive", as in "Don't make the Big Dog cranky."
And "Cimawr" is both distinctive and uncommon, so it's a good ID.
(Oh, and no, I don't actually speak Cymraeg, unfortunately; I've never gotten much past "Hello", "Good afternoon", "Thank you" "It's miserable out today" and "I like coffee". However, one of my sisters lives in Wales and is fluent.)