When life gets in the way, blogging about caching suffers before caching itself suffers. I'm back now with a renewed commitment to increased quantity and decreased quality, if that is possible.
C and I bought a house in the Merriam Park neighborhood of Saint Paul, after renting for a year and, luckily, selling our house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the house market is even worse than it is everywhere else.
I can see already that the greatest threat to my geocaching career is not my job, or my commitment to spend time with my children, or even potential MnGCA board service, but the infinite list of home improvements that is accumulating. What makes that list manageable is the rat-in-the-boiling-water effect -- if you just accept the fact that certain things are wrong with your house, the problems magically go away. No water out of the 2nd floor sink? There are other sinks! Dryer doesn't heat up? Tie a rope around the birdhouse for a clothesline! Seriously, it is a great education, and I find myself watching The Learning Channel, where all the experts are in great moods, unlike me. I repair things with a constant stream of words that start with s and f. HBO needs a home improvement show.
I have to admit, one of my favorite parts of moving was changing my home coordinates on geocaching.com and watching the changes in my list of closest unfound caches. Candy Apple Green's multi-cache Mountain Goat became my closest unfound cache, until I found it with LucidOndine and magicite on Sunday evening.
Hey, I have an idea. I'll publish the exact distance from Mountain Goat (M) to my new house (N), the exact distance from M to my old house (O), and the exact distance from N to O, and let you guess where I live and where I lived. It's not a completely determined system, but you could fiddle with a satellite map and probably figure it out.
I'll have to think about the security issues before I do that. And by "security" I mean, will my geocaching "friends" hide a cache in my front yard? Oh wait, they already know where I live. Hey fellas, there's a big pile of bark near the rotted-out pillar on my front porch... it'd make a great hiding spot.
In the meantime, my new closest unfound cache, GC1EFY6, has posted coordinates 1.4 miles away from my new home coordinates. (OH! That information would determine the system above!) I need to find nine caches to push my cleared-out radius above two miles.
Ah, there's a strategy that C could use to motivate me: "Your nearest undone task is 20 yards away. Get up on a ladder and scrape the peeling paint off the window trim."
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