I was prepared to make a pilgrimage to the hinterlands of Central Texas over the weekend. With it being International Earthcache Day, I was ready to go get an Earthcache and earn my new souvenir. As you can imagine, I’ve been all over Austin and gotten pretty much every Earthcache in the area. Full disclosure: I’m being a little dramatic; there are Earthcaches I haven’t gotten in town but you can excuse a bit of literary flair, no? Anyway, I was busy considering where I was going to go to get an Earthcache when I saw that a new one published about a five minute drive away! I didn’t feel any urge to rush to it; in the six hours between when it published and I learned about it, the FTF had already been claimed by someone else. But it definitely meant I wasn’t going to have to travel significantly, either by foot or by car, which was just fine with me. Eventually, I got around to going to get it.
Its location has never been a favorite place of mine. While it is one of the oldest parks in town, it’s fairly small and has mostly been out of the way despite being centrally located because of the neighborhood it’s in, a well-to-do neighborhood that was Austin‘s first suburb and is now in the heart of town. It’s also named after the developer of the neighborhood, a man who innovated the use of a new idea in real estate development in 1891: racial covenants. I can’t say for sure if he invented them but, while they were common all over the US in the early 20th Century, Austin‘s Hyde Park had them in 1891. So as far as I’m concerned, BLANK that guy. But the Earthcache had zero to do with him and everything to do with the original gate and wall at the entrance of the park, composed primarily of petrified wood. It wasn’t my first petrified wood Earthcache, but I never remember seem to be able to absorb anything from Earthcaches unless they’re about weirs or karst. The writing of the cache was actually quite engaging and entertaining. I look forward to the CO’s future book, Harry Potter and the Permineralization of Trunks. After having a few laughs over Potter’s conversations with Rocket Racoon and Groot, I got to the work of supplying answers. Most of them were easy enough to find (also credit to the CO for also including a less complicated Junior question set for littler cachers), but during the process, I ran into what I now feel is the worst instance of AI trying to help me and annoying the crap out of me.
Usually, when I compose my answers to Earthcaches, I use my phone’s notepad equivalent to take my notes and then straighten them out for my message to the CO. In this case, I had to make a calculation and show my work. I made some measurements in inches and took them down. My notepad was nice enough to answer the equation in inches for me. Which would have been helpful except, being a good scientist, I wanted to show how they equaled something else when converted to feet. But it kept changing my foot conversion to the inches answer! When I finally got it to stop doing that, it gave me the answer to the foot conversion (in feet, of course), but when I attempted to multiply by another scalar, it would erase that as well in favor of the foot answer! I cannot begin to explain how much this got under my skin! I actually contemplated throwing my phone against a rock in a flash of anger. I can understand if AI changes what I type once (I appreciate spellcheck as much as the next person), but when I go back and correct it, I’m pretty sure I’ve made the point that what I have typed is what I want, regardless of any other factor.
But that is neither here nor there. What matters is that I made my calculations, expressed them in digital form, and sent them off to the CO as part of my answer set. And with a final picture to prove I had been there, I logged it and received my souvenir. Success! And I went to my car thinking how nature and man are somewhat alike. Nature has taken wood and turned to to stone. Man has coaxed lightning into rocks and made them act like they can think. But the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe I should give this one a dang ol’ favorite.
