Size Matters

Saturday I was coming home from running an errand when I remembered that I needed to find a cache. Since I was in a part of town that I don’t usually find myself in often, I thought there should be a plethora of options. I was incorrect; the area has been traditionally economically depressed but has been gentrifying to an extent in the last few years. There weren’t a bunch of caches (though I guess that opens up some opportunities if I’m so inclined), but there was one that stood out in a sea of nothing. It was in a greenspace I didn’t remember ever knowing about, and it was large! Don’t see a lot of those floating around. It even filled in a D/T for a Treasure (I haven’t finished that darn puzzle and 1.5/2.5 is not especially common). Sounded like a winner to me! When I arrived, I figured out why I had never been to that greenspace before. The entrance to it was on the back end of a University of Texas lab facility I didn’t even know was there. I knew about the big one on my end of town (I’d even gotten caches there before), but this one was a mystery to me. I pulled into the parking lot worried that there might be some kind of security, but who would put a cache inside a security perimeter (other than maybe a Virtual, but that’s a different discussion)? On a Saturday afternoon, the gate was open, two cars were parked, and I would be nowhere near either of them. I parked at the end of a path into the woods. I realized that I could have driven the path to get to the cache (the CO kindly left a convenient parking waypoint a few feet from the cache for those willing to do so), but opted to walk it instead. I was only about 800 feet away so why not? After a quick little jaunt down the path I got to GZ and saw behind the treeline a great black case covered in stickers. I was happy to find the case, and yet I couldn’t help thinking that it was smaller than I imagined it would be. Since a large is defined as a five-gallon bucket, it was large (substantially bigger than an ammo can), but still … lesser.

What is the border between sizes? We’ve all seen a container that was between micro and small or small and large. I have on occasion grappled with a container that I considered a regular small or a small regular. It may or may not be a distinction without a difference, but questions like this rattle around in my head. I usually consider myself a fairly easy going person about a lot of things, but there something about this specific categorization that drives me wild. Some things feel as if they should have rigid definitions and the wiggle room between sizes is one of them. I’m not OCD about it or anything, but I find myself thinking about it far more than I probably should care about. All I have to do is inveni, inscripsi, and reposui, but this dumb size distinction is the thing that I’ll remember. Thanks for leaving me something I’m going to ruminate over for weeks until I forget about it!