[Jeremy]

@Team Bear Bear wrote:

In the “It’s not about the numbers stats” it has an “Approximate cache-to-cache distance:”
Ours is shown as: 14,357.4 miles (23106 kilometres) this Excludes locationless and known traveling caches.

It looks like other people are at least getting reasonable numbers for this stats calculation. Here is what the It’s Not About the Numbers Stats came up with for my cache finds:

Approximate cache-to-cache distance: 528,634.69 miles (850755.06 kilometres) (Excludes locationless and known traveling caches)

I know I tend to visit some remote caches, but this is amazing considering that I have only flown to one caching destination (exciting and exotic Cleveland, Ohio).

Oops, nevermind, I forgot about grabbing that cache on the Moon. 🙂 This added 478,000 miles to my total.

[Jeremy]

Day 6. We are halfway done with this stupid song. 🙂

We now enter the “regular” part of the song where each verse consists of a number (for today, six) and object/noun (for today, geese) and a verb ending in “ing” (for today, a-laying).

You can try replacing the object with a geocaching one:

Six caches a-laying (a foot deep in the snow, so there is no chance in hell that I’ll find them)

Or keep the object and replace the verb:

Six geese pooping (creating a minefield around the cache)

Or replace both the object and verb:

Six puzzle caches teasing
Six (green jeep) travel bugs missing
Six stage multi a-killing (me)
Six miles a-hiking

The easiest but most boring and unimaginative of approach would be to replace the object and verb with a two word noun. It may be difficult to come up with object and verb pairs for the remaining days so we may have to go this route. This is what the geocoin folks did:

Six ammo boxes

[Jeremy]

Day 5. Five golden rings becomes five golden geocoins, like the 2005 Wisconsin geocoins, right?

How about 5 pocket queries… since 5 is the maximum number of PQs that can be run in a day?

[Jeremy]

Way to go Marc! Glad I was able to accompany you on a couple of your finds this year.

What was the deal with taking the canoe out in the middle of winter? Couldn’t you wait until spring or summer to attempt this one… at least then you wouldn’t instantly die if the canoe capsized. 🙂

[Jeremy]

Day 4. “Four first to finds” sounds good, but what are the odds someone will score that many FTFs in a single day nowadays?

Maybe someone can come up with a line with a verb that rhymes with “calling”… “falling”, “stalling”, “sprawling” or at least ends in “ing”.

Four crawling ticks? But it is winter in Wisconsin…

[Jeremy]

OK, it is now the third day of Christmas. Tree sounds a lot like three… can someone think of a creative line that starts with that?

[Jeremy]

@I M W/U wrote:

PS Jeremy, Santa left a present under our tree for U, it hopes to make it to a cache in the Milwaukee area over the weekend… 😉

Sweet! It is probably the pony I asked for! 😀 I knew Santa wouldn’t let me down. I cried all day yesterday thinking this Santa thing was some cruel hoax or a lie perpetuated by millions of people, but it sounds like he just left my present at the wrong house.

If you can’t find a cache big enough for it (mostly micro and small caches here), you can just drop it off in my backyard… there is plenty of room for it to run around and some green grass for it to eat.

[Jeremy]

I picked a tentative winner for day 1… if there are any other day 1 suggestions or comments, go ahead and make them. The traditional day 2 verse is:

Two turtle doves

I originally thought “Two travel bugs” but that matches something on the geocoin…

[Jeremy]

@Cache_boppin_BunnyFuFu wrote:

Ok.. I purchased a “12 Days of Caching” 4 piece geocoin and this is how they have it noted on there:

Thanks for letting me know that these geocoin folks ripped off my idea Anne. 😉

Anyway, some of the lines from the coin seem pretty lame… I’m sure our creative members will come up with something a lot better. Maybe good enough that we can have our own Christmas coin next year…

[Jeremy]

Marc, are you still going to have the expedition if the marsh is not frozen? It might be iffy if the current weather pattern continues into January.

If you don’t have this the same weekend as the Waukesha Janboree (January 20th) and the marsh has a comfortably safe layer of ice on it, I would be willing to make a return trip to the Navarino area to grab this one.

[Jeremy]

@Cheesehead Dave wrote:

Here’s an interesting method I worked out. It uses Java Script and CSS and because of that, it will only work on pages that you can fully edit, such as a personal home page that you get from your ISP.

Very clever way of editing the stat box image… I like how you shifted the burden of editing the image to the client accessing the web page instead of some poor server somewhere. 😀 Hopefully this solution will tide people over until geocaching.com (possibly) allows organizations or individuals to submit custom images for the stat box.

What I didn’t like was the small WGA logo itself. Nothing against what you did Dave, it is just that when our normal logo is reduced to that size it is nearly impossible to read or discern anything. So for those of you who want to try the custom WGA logo stat box, I came up with a couple logo variants that are also 44×44 pixels that I think look a little better. I also copied Dave’s original small logo to the WGA server to give it a permanent home.

WGA logo, no text, GPS and ammo box
(No need for words… you ever notice how our logo has the outline of the state of Wisconsin, a GPS receiver, and an Ammobox = WGA. Deep. :))

http://wi-geocaching.com/banners/wga_icon_44_1.gif

WGA logo, full text, GPS and ammo box, white background

http://wi-geocaching.com/banners/wga_icon_44_2.gif

WGA logo, big WGA text, GPS and ammo box

http://wi-geocaching.com/banners/wga_icon_44_3.gif

WGA logo, big WGA text only

http://wi-geocaching.com/banners/wga_icon_44_4.gif

WGA logo, full text, GPS and ammo box, tan background, Dave’s original logo

http://wi-geocaching.com/banners/wga_icon_44_5.png

[Jeremy]

@I M W/U wrote:

PS Jeremy, I was talking with Santa tonight, he said get the stable ready for your pony and world peace is on its way! I was requesting gear to prepare for THE GAUNTLET! 😉

Great! …Er wait, you wouldn’t be lying to me would you? Now that I know lies exist in this world I’m just going to curl up in a ball and die… or maybe I need one of those lie detector machines like the police have so I can question the owner before I seek another cache? 8)

Speaking of lies, the clever thing about this liar’s cache (The Gauntlet) is there were no lies in the cache description that The Lil Otter provided. (OK, except maybe the difficulty/terrain ratings, but she could have just clicked on the wrong thing… as she often points out she is blonde. ;)) The sense that this cache is a great challenge and adventure, the mystique, and the greatness came solely from the lies in the logs all the folks who visited the cache provided. You had so many people lying that even when the stories became incredible and lacked any sort of coherence, others still believed that this would be the toughest cache they’d ever gone after.

Unfortunately, the power of the Internet allows one person to discredit all these upstanding cachers lying on behalf of The Gauntlet by shouting out to everyone who hasn’t found it yet. In the past, something like The Gauntlet would have become legendary and tales about it would have gone on to be accepted as the truth… non-believers would have been easy to ignore or quiet by the majority.

[Jeremy]

@lonesumdove wrote:

@GrouseTales wrote:

I loved kbraband’s encrypted log from 4/16/05 🙂

😳 😳 scratching head…. what is in the encrypted log? I need help here, don’t get it. I read it, read it, still don’t get it??? The cache is archived so WHAT WAS the encrypted log? ❓ ❓ ❓ 😕 (feeling dumb… 🙄 )

I hate to give away Ken’s little secret, but I can say that he made it clear that the logs were ALL LIES… 🙂

[Jeremy]

Note you have to be logged in to the Groundspeak forums to view the topic referenced above.

Unfortunately, the WGA logo is not one of the choices for the stat box logo and it looks like Groundspeak is not accepting new logos from other regional organizations. As soon as they do, we can whip up a small version of the WGA logo for the stat box and provide it to them.

An alternative would be to modify the stat box image coming back from geocaching.com… the WGA server could be instructed automatically replace the Groundspeak logo with the WGA logo. This would increase the load on the WGA server, as everyone using a stat box with a WGA logo would “hit” the WGA server to get the stat box image file…

[Jeremy]

Questions, questions…

@bnb wrote:

Jeremy, do you keep your hands in the muff while you walk through the woods?

Yes, I would recommend not using the muff when going over rough terrain… I do use it while walking on trails though. You could probably take your hands out of the muff in time to break a fall, but not having your arms free does mess with your balance and makes you more likely to fall.

On a related note, someone else mentioned using a walking stick/trekking pole in the snow… this is a great idea if you are going to bushwhack with significant snow on the ground as you don’t know what is under there to trip you up.

How do you carry the car brush with your hands in the muff? 🙂

Another hot tip for you Ruth… they make this thing called a backpack that lets you carry items while keeping your hands free. 🙂 Seriously, 90% of the time the snowbrush is strapped to the outside of my backpack. If I don’t have my backpack on, it means I’m close to my car and can go back for the brush if needed.

@bnb wrote:

Do you ever get strange looks from people who see you walking through the woods carrying your car brush?

I get strange looks from people regardless of what I am carrying. Carrying a snow brush is probably slightly more suspicious looking than a carrying a GPS unit… and slightly less suspicious looking than carrying a machete (waiting for a summer caching tips topic to talk about that).

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