I have, from time to time, made mention of my dislike of the sun god Apollo. I have often felt that his spear focuses unduly on me in many inconvenient ways, usually in some sort of heat or light fashion, often in both. While he has recently aggravated my dislike of him, he is the cause of a different problem. Technically, I should blame the depression of Demeter, but I’m taking my dismay out on Apollo because he knows what he did. I’m talking about him hoarding his sunlight as we head into winter. Now, I am aware that people who live north of the southernmost state capital in the contiguous United States are raising an eyebrow, perhaps even laughing, at my worries (perhaps my very perception) of winter. The cold sucks and all that, but it’s the light that I’m focusing on. Less sunlight and shorter days make it harder for me to cache.
There was once a time when I was innocent and fresh faced, a new cacher ready to make his way in our invisible realm that sits just below the surface of the mundane world we inhabit with muggles. In those heady days, there were caches everywhere, ripe for the taking. Sure, many of them weren’t special. An LPC is just an LPC, and a micro in a tree is just a micro in a tree. Still, a cache is a cache is a cache. Eventually, I had to go farther afield for them, but that only meant getting into neighborhoods I didn’t usually visit. As time continued on, I would start traveling to communities surrounding Austin regularly: Pflugerville, Buda, Elgin, Lakeway, Cedar Park, Sunset Valley, Round Rock… Sometimes, when I had time and a belly full of fire, I would even go to the major nearby towns like Georgetown, San Marcos, and Bastrop. Some days, I would even go all the way out to San Antonio, Waco, or Fredericksburg so I could play on an entirely different board for a while. But after almost four and a half years, all the low-hanging fruit is gone, all the simple puzzles solved, all the close Multis redirected to. There are few simple caches nearby, and even fewer I want to go out and look for in the cold and the dark. Of course, that shouldn’t be an issue because I’m no longer supporting my streak, right? I can kick back and relax and go cache another day. Except, as predicted about six months ago, it’s still going. Assuming that I find one on the day this publishes, it’ll be 1,635 days in a row.
Darn you, Apollo! Why can’t you give me a standard day and night? Sunlight from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. would be peachy! Maybe not quite so cold in the winter or quite so hot in the summer! Surely you can bring some constancy to this world by taming the variable nature of time, giving some comfort to those of us who brave the elements to bring glory to our names from a caching perspective?
Or not, because orbits and perigees and seasonal tilt. But still! Apollo, I blame you!
Geocaching While Black 