Under The Wire

It is not unknown for me to procrastinate.  In fact, I am currently the sitting High Priest of Procrastination (I used to be King, but a friend of mine toppled me from my throne [it took him ten days to get around to it, though]).  Consequently, I had put off GC8NEAT for a very long time.  For those of you living under a rock who don’t know what that last sentence means, one of the rarest types of cache available is the Locationless Cache (defunct until recently).  It was special because it had no set location and could behave in ways most caches don’t.  Austin once had a local Locationless called The Rock That Rolls, which is now a trackable.  It is a container embedded inside a rock, and whenever someone would find and claim it, they would move it to another location and post the coordinates of its new resting place in their log.  I’ve heard of another one where you had to find a specific person who frequently attended Megas carrying a staff, speak a code phrase, and that person would open a compartment on the staff containing the cache. Groundspeak retired the type, probably because having a specific location seems integral to the geocaching experience.  A couple of years ago, Groundspeak reactivated the type, making it available for those of us who were not around “back in the day.”

There have since been three new Locationless caches. The first, GC8FROG, requires getting a photo with Signal the Frog, longtime mascot of geocaching.  I claimed that one back at Texas Challenge in Round Rock.  The newest, GC9FAVE, requires a photo at a favorite local location discovered while geocaching.  I haven’t claimed that one yet, but I already have an idea of where I want to use it.  Finally, there’s GC8NEAT, which requires a photo of an outdoor improvement effort.  The important thing is that both GC8FROG and GC8NEAT both archive on January 1, 2023.  I needed to claim GC8NEAT with a quickness!

Since I’ve been working from home during the holiday season, yesterday I went out during lunch to take care of that glaring, missing Locationless.  A block over, there’s a corner that has been overrun by fallen leaves, blocking up the gutters and retaining water in the streets, causing it to pool all over the sidewalks.  I’d been watching it build up for at least a month, and I figured a rake and a lawn bag would do the trick.   My thinking quickly changed when I got there, though.  I instead found the detritus of a holiday celebration strewn down the street: streamers, paper plates, plastic forks, and similar trash.  Maybe it fell off a garbage truck, or perhaps someone dropped it while hauling something off.  I can only hope that nobody discarded it on purpose.  No matter the source, the wind had begun to carry items farther afield.  My target changed.  I went back home, grabbed a trash bag, and walked up the street, picking up the trash left about.  Luckily for me, there was a lot less than it looked like.  I thought I’d need three small bags but managed to make do with only one.  At least it was a nice day to pick up garbage, I guess?

While I may go back with the rake and lawn bag this afternoon for the original leaves, that was how I finally claimed GC8NEAT with four days to spare.  With all that extra time left, that’s hardly even exciting!

And, because the end of the year is coming up, I, as staff writer, editor-in-chief, and owner of this periodical, will be pushing the Friday entry to Saturday so that I can have a traditional year-end entry. So don’t freak out Friday morning when you don’t hear from me!