Nota Bene, Everybody

Yesterday, I found a cache that’s been eluding me for a long time. The hider, who is notorious for not providing hints, left a hint in the logs that was more than enough to make it findable. The container, however, gave me pause. I’ve seen lots of shotgun shells used for hides (I’ve used them myself on a couple of occasions), but this one was an expended bullet casing inside a much smaller shot casing, which together made for a sealed cache. I don’t exactly like this container. A shotgun shell is large enough to see that the shot load has been expended and is safe, but a bullet casing is small enough that that’s not readily apparent, especially when the end is covered. It looked a little too much like a piece of unexploded ordnance for my tastes. I get that I’m not talking about leftover land mines or artillery shells that failed to detonate, but I’ve seen enough random bullets in random places that I think about it from time to time. I know that neither this CO nor any responsible cache owner (or, you know, functioning adult) would ever do something like this involving live ammo, but my nightmare is that someone is hunting for a cache, finds a stray round that was dropped a long time ago, and something happens when it’s picked up or pushed out of the way. Is it unlikely? Perhaps. Is it impossible? Not by a long shot. And I’d rather not read about it happening to someone. So my point here (and I do have one) is, as always, be frosty and stay safe out there, folks. Getting shot by a loose 30-year-old round lying on the ground is a dumb way to die.

On a much lighter note, I ended up attending a couple of Events this weekend, one of which was a celebration for a local cacher, Celticdaughter, on finding her five hundredth cache. It was also a “covert” celebration for friend of the site Godot on his forty thousandth find. It seems like just yesterday (actually, about a year and a quarter ago) that I was at the Event for his thirty thousandth, which I felt really bad about because it was on day 2,000 of my streak. Once I mentioned that in passing, it became about both of us, and I didn’t want to steal his thunder. Kudos to them! Forty thousand is pretty impressive by any metric! And five hundred is something to celebrate as well! It takes a while to get there, and it’s an important step on the way to the higher numbers! Raise your glasses, folks! Happy day! Callooh! Callay!