A Catching-Up (and Cache-ing-Up) Post

Happy New Year, everyone!  

It looks like I am beginning my 2013 with a huge backlog of woodworking projects so it’s probably a good idea to write this little “catch-up” article showing a couple of the more recent ones before I forget about them.

First is the desk paper caddy I made for my wife for Christmas.  I posted on this before so I won’t go into construction details but here is the final product.

I decided to go with a combination painting and staining to finish up the piece.  This was so I could match the surface color of the desk while matching (well... coming close to matching, anyway) the faux-aged paint look of the desk fronts and sides.  I threw some felt feet to the bottom and called it done.

It is very solid and, as you can see, it is definitely going to get some use.  I am glad she likes it.

Events somewhat out of my control like baby-sitting for a friend after he and his kids were in a car accident (they’re fine), a water heater gas leak (it’s fine), and other deal-with-them-as-they-come stuff prevented me from moving beyond the prototype phase for my next planned set of Geocache swag, so I was forced to go with “Plan B”.

Ok, ok... “forced” is a strong word.  I mean, it’s my option to put stuff I actually made/built into Geocaches I find rather than stuff I bought - it’s not a rule or anything.  It’s just something I like to do... for now... Lots of squirrels to chase, you understand.

In any case, Plan B involved a hasty re-purposing of leftover barnwood pieces from a project Jimmydunes and I did many years ago.  I kept the scrap and shaped these 75-year-old pieces with a Dremmel which were then put into a little clear potpourri-like jar for one of the rooms of the old house.  The jar didn’t quite go with the new place so the contents lived in the garage until I could figure out what to do with them.

So I drilled a hole in the ones that could structurally handle it, ran a string through them, and voila: necklaces.  I used a woodburning kit to burn “S.U.” and a serial number (0050 through 0059) into each one.  Er... “Collect them all!”, I suppose.  

Actually, the serial numbers are there in response to a question from a Geocaching friend of mine.  Since people tend to take items out of the caches and place other items back in, he wondered how long it would take for you to unknowingly run into your own swag in a cache you had never visited before.

Interesting question.  

Obviously there are a huge number of unknowns, many of which involve trying to guess at the behavior of large (but unknowable) numbers of people.  How often are the caches found?  How far apart are they? How often do items from one cache wind up in another (assuming they are not “official trackables” like Travel Bugs)? When taken out of a cache will they ever wind up an another one or will they be kept forever or chucked into the woods or otherwise taken out of circulation?  Would that answer change if the items were all the same (I have noticed that some people’s “signature items” are constant - a bunch of little decorative stones, a laminated “business card”, etc.)? How often and in what areas do you, yourself, go Geocaching? Do you focus on park & grab city caching or do you hike for miles and miles between finds?  What is the distribution of caches that are large enough to contain the item?  How long do Geocaches themselves stay “in play” before they are archived?

The list goes on and on.

So, the best way to answer the question, I figure, is to throw out a bunch of stuff I could tag as my own and just wait and see - empirically test it, so to speak.  Since my attention span is short to the point that I am amazed I haven’t wandered off while in the middle of writing this very sentence, I didn’t want to commit to fabricating an endless supply of just one thing, so I make different items as the fancy strikes me.  I record the date, location, and serial number of the item I drop off in a little notebook as I go so I can keep track of what went where and when.

So, that’s the story of the serial numbers and the different kinds of geo-junk I make.  I have seen some swag-related comments posted at places I have dropped stuff off in the past, and I have gotten some emails regarding the Jefferson Ciphers I made.  However, I have not yet run into anything I have made myself so far.  For the record, my “order of magnitude” guess on the odds of this happening is about 1 in 10,000.

Speaking of emails...

This is something I did about a decade and a half ago.  My father-in-law got me a hunting knife for Christmas that year and I whittled this little rook out of a stick while we sat in his living room and talked. It sat on a desk in the various places the wife and I lived since that time until I decided to put it into a cache a few months back.  Before I took it with me, I took a picture of it then burned “SnowUrchin” into the bottom of it.  I dropped it off in a cache in Hampton, Virginia in late October, recorded it in my notebook, and promptly forgot about it.

About a month later I got an email about the rook.  Someone had found it and emailed me to ask if I was it’s creator and to let me know that they planned on attaching a Travel Bug to it.  The goal of that Travel Bug, they said, was to visit a series of castles in Europe, which I think is pretty cool.  They said that they will let me know once they register the tag so I can follow its travels online.  I will let you know if/when they do. [Editor's Note 01/11/14: You can check out the progress of this travel bug in the sidebar.]

Wow.  That was a lot longer of a post than I anticipated, and I still have more project-y stuff to go on and on about.  I guess am just going to cut this article “short”, update the sidebar, and start on a new post before I head out the garage to get some real work done.

Talk to you later.