Making A Mess Of Things

I know I present myself to you as this put-together, high-speed, low-drag cacher. That is a carefully crafted illusion (both that I am high speed, low drag and that I successfully present myself as such). In reality, I mess it all up with what I believe is great beauty and aplomb. Caching is sometimes a messy enterprise, but if I do something dumb in the forest and nobody is there to see it, am I still a doofus? Some would say yes. I prefer to say if nobody saw it, then no harm no foul. But, in some cases, I have it documented for you all to see. Do any of you remember that Virtual in Natchez? Reading is fundamental, folks! Or how about when I misspelled a county seat for over a year? D’oh! And, of course, there was Nuevo Leon, the dumbest of many dumb moves. Great story in hindsight, but I was still dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers.

Why am I even thinking about this? Because I’ve made a few fumbles in the last few days. The first one was related to my new source of caching-related words. How did I manage to talk about a new (to me) caching blog and not provide a link to it? I don’t know, but I did it! Or didn’t do it, depending on how you look at it! Another one is brand new from yesterday. Remember I mentioned a few months ago that I was making my first EarthCache? Well, I finally submitted it last week, and it got bounced back. The reviewer noted (and probably rightly so) that it was more focused on a water feature than an earth feature and would require significant editing (dare I say geologic fluffification) to make it viable. That’s fair. I know little to nothing about earth science. I can handle physics, math, and astronomy well enough, but earth anything has been in my realm of academic avoidance all my life. I have often said that not every cache is for every person. Being able to answer an EarthCache may not mean I am capable of making one. Poopy. The final fumble? Well, you’re looking at it. For those of you who don’t know, I have an editor, who I assure you is quite real, despite her irrational love of The Chicago Manual of Style and em dashes. Well, I have a deadline to submit these entries to her, and I have blown that deadline out of the water on this one. So, unless she has taken pity on a poor mendicant writer such as I, you’re getting this in its most error-riddled, ungrammatical form!

My point here (and I do have one) is that we all make mistakes. Sometimes we DNF something easy or put a typo into a cache description. Sometimes we oversleep and miss an Event. Sometimes we get all the way out to a cache and realize we left an important TOTT at the car a couple of miles back. That’s okay. We’re all human. We all make mistakes. And that’s all right. It’s called trial and error for a reason. If you’re not messing up, you’re probably not trying.