Some Loss, Some Drudgery, Some Expectation

Yesterday, a new cache dropped five minutes away from where I work. When I got off, I shot right over and began a search in earnest. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it. Not only is it difficult to find something magnetic when you’re surrounded by lots of iron, but my search was stymied by bouncing coords and a bunch of muggles. After giving it the most thorough search I could without looking insane, I called it. Another cacher found it, one who doesn’t get a ton of FTFs so kudos for her. I can’t win them all, but I’m wondering what it was that I missed. My nightmare (for lack of a better, less emotionally charged term) is that it’s in a niche that I passed my fingers over but didn’t feel the thing. There’s nothing more annoying that missing the cache by just a hair. That’s not entirely true now that I think of it; the most annoying thing was when a cache was described magnetic and it turned out to be a flat magnet slipped into a crack in a wooden post.

Preparations are beginning for another phase of Texas Challenge planing. In the next few months, some of us are going to start hiding caches for the geoarts and challenge runs. This has prompted an activity I never originally considered. Challenges (the mystery cache things, I mean) require a lot of prep work: you don’t just hide them, you have to come up with the challenge itself and then have someone who qualifies for it to be the CO. While large offerings like geoarts and power trails are valid reasons for using sock puppet accounts, that’s not going to work for challenges. Further, you can’t have a challenge too close to copy of it. Add in also that, despite having good ideas, there are other good (sometimes better) ideas to be found in other places. Therefore, a group of us have been working on a preliminary project: we’re going through challenges state by state in the US looking for interesting ideas that don’t exist around here. It’s a little bit mind numbing at times, so I’m only managing to look at about 200-ish a night before getting bored, but I’ve found some possibilities. I also admit that it makes me a little sad to see an interesting challenge and know that we can’t replicate it because the current rules for challenges prohibit it. That said, if all goes well, when the time comes we should have an entire Fizzy of challenges available for attendees. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean. #blatantpromotion

Finally, the Girls are coming down from L-Town this weekend. If all goes as planned, we’ll spend Saturday on some back roads, picking up some new counties for the TCC and the Two Step. Don’t worry, odds are good you’ll hear all about it next week.