Happy Birthday, Geocachers!

Did you know that in May of 2000 the "selective availability" was removed from the satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS)? Then President Bill Clinton made an announcement that the United States would stop the intentional degradation of the GPS signals and made them available to the public. This was a surprise as the original commitment for removing the selective availability had been for 2006. The tech community went wild with ideas on how to use the "instant upgrade" on their GPS units. Needless to say, at this time, GPS units were not widely available and only a handful of real dedicated techies (aka geeks) had any idea what this meant.

The first geocache was placed on May 3, 2000 by Dave Ulmer near Beaver Creek, Oregon. He called the idea the "Great American GPS Stash Hunt" and posted the coordinates of the "stash" at N 45° 17.460 W 122° 24.800 on a GPS users' group on the internet. Simple idea: hide something, publish coordinates. Simple rules: take some stuff, leave some stuff. Within 3 days 2 other users had found the information and posted about their experience finding the "stash" on the internet. Others followed suit and people started hiding things in their area for others to find.

Within that first month, Mike Teague started collecting and documenting coordinates of hides around the world on his web page. A mailing list was created to discuss the activity. In September 2000 the term "geocache" started to be used more regularly than "GPS Stash Hunt" when Mike Teague handed off the maintenance of the list of hides to Jeremy Irish. Jeremy founded the Geocaching web site and created a web site and tools to help improve the ability of people to find caches near them. At the time the site was published, there were 75 known caches in world.*

As with anything new, someone told someone, who told someone else. Even the media got wind of the new phenomenon. People wondered if anyone would bother to find a cache if they hid it. The dedicated people who were involved in the early days encouraged people to hide new stuff. And you know what? Once it was hidden, other people went and found it. New caches are hidden every day all around the globe. Wherever you go, you can take a GPS with you and find a treasure trove of stuff left behind in some cool, and some really hot, places around the world.

There's GPS units in our cars now. There might be one in your phone. There are handheld devices galore that can give you an instant global fix on your position. Get the coordinates to something nearby and go find it. It is hide-and-seek for everyone! Kids love it. And you know what? When you look for caches to find on the website you can select an option to make the cache kid friendly, or family friendly, or pet friendly, or findable at night, or 24 hours a day, or under water, or . . . you get the idea. I gotta find me one of those under water ones . . . hmm.

The nifty thing about it, you can still go and find the spot where the original cache was. There's a plaque and everything. Or you can go and find stuff near you. Whatever you do, remember the rules: take stuff, leave stuff according to the cache type and preferences. And one more thing, be environment friendly. If you take it in, take it out with you. If you take along a plastic bag, you can pick up the other trash left behind there too. That is another cool thing about geocaching. They call it CITO: Cache In, Trash Out. Not only is it fun, it's good for the environment. Yea, I like that.

*Source for history of Geocaching adapted from http://www.geocaching.com/about/history.aspx. They said it much better than I could.

Oops

Some of the most memorable moments in life I gain from my son. There is joy in understanding, awe in accomplishment and magic in learning. One of my son's books is a whimsical exploration of learning how to dress oneself by Sandra Boynton called Blue Hat, Green Hat. For those of you without children, in the story the animals are learning what the items of clothing are called and where they go. The poor turkey however, can never seem to get the item in the right place. With the examples of the other animals putting the clothes on correctly, it makes my son giggle to see the turkey make mistakes. In fact, while pointing at the pictures he'll "read" the story to me. It is joyous fun for all involved. We had put the book on the bookshelf for a bit of time to read other favorites and hadn't seen the book in a while when we were getting him dressed the other morning. The shirt and pants went on correctly, but when we came to the socks, we started playing. Did the sock go on his head? No. Did it go on his lovey? No. Did it go on his knee? Nope. Did it go on his hand? He giggled. He grabbed the other sock and pulled it on the other hand. He looked up at me with the mischievous grin on his face and said quite clearly, "Oops!"

It is a wonder when kids do things on their own. I could see the complete knowledge of what he was doing and the absolute joy of understanding something in his upturned face. Moments like these are completely precious and fleeting. As a parent, I know they slip by sometimes so fast that you can hardly breathe. They are the moments you cherish. Some parents put them in memory books. Some parents tell family and friends. Some parents keep the memory in their heart and just treasure it for their own. This moment struck me. I had to take a few moments and write it down. Maybe someone else has moments like these with their children. This is what life is all about. And frankly, it should be.