Early Morning Geocache Rant

Okay, so I've been working on this sudoku geocache for three days now, four, I don't know. And it's a b!%@&. I am trying every method to solve this thing I can think of. I've got papers strewn everywhere and I'm going crazy. I've posted both bits on here, but to explain to those blinded by the letters and numbers: It's a 25x25 alphabet sudoku and he has given 19 different squares a unique number ranging from 3 to 25 which corresponds with a letter of the alphabet, the one that goes in that square that you are supposed to figure out. Once you have that letter you are supposed to plug it into a grid below, using it's corresponding # and, voila, you should have something that will direct you to the location of the cache (though he gives no information and you are required to figure this out on your own (not too hard, I grant)). Now, presumably this would be accurate coordinates. I'm no idiot, that was my first thought. So I thought, "Why not bypass as much of the sudoku as possible and try to figure out the lower answer by the most likely coordinates, starting with 49 and 7, North and East, and inserting point and degrees where appropriate." Well, no go. It's obvious that doesn't work out quite right, though the # of individual words still makes me think it might be coordinates. Well, I can't recall when, could have been that first day, I thought, "hey, maybe he did it in German." Nope, things just don't seem to work out with German, either. Now, granted, I could have done some research on the internet to see how they might write out coordinates and gained a little more confidence in that theory, but I didn't and so I moved on. Well, tonight, after still faithfully trying to solve this damn puzzle with only one foray into the world of cheating which I gave up as a bad job while waiting for the algorithm on the cheater to finish, I revisited trying to figure out the chart on the bottom using what would likely be there plus a little information (and I stress little - the letters V and N) I had gleaned from the past two days work, plus the possible letters associated with the numbers. After some trial and error and a few good guesses I finally determined that he did, in fact, put the coordinates in German. The only problem was he spelled two of the words incorrectly and used a gender specific version of a third, also incorrect. So I had previously disregarded the German hypothesis because of carelessness on his part. Now, you may be saying, "Well, maybe he did it on purpose to make it harder for people to get the coordinates without finishing the sudoku." Perhaps, but this is the same guy who made a careless mistake on another cache he placed which could easily have resulted in a wasted afternoon if I hadn't second guessed him while caching, and also the same guy who has buried or partially buried two caches, that I know off. It's a grey area, the way he has them, but definitely not 100% Kosher. I honestly think he doesn't put as much care into some of the important aspects of his cache as he should and puts too much time into making them special in some way or other. I'd give up special for accurate any day. His original rating of a 4 might have been accurate if this sudoku weren't incredibly difficult and he hadn't screwed up. As it stands, his current rating of a 5 is more than accurate - you have to account for the errors, after all. You know, I don't mind a little homework with my geocaching, it certainly makes them more original, but geocaching used to be about getting outside. Now it seems it has become a desk job. Thanks but I can be a couch potato quite successfully without anyone's help.

And for those of you who plan on trying the sudoku to see what my problem was, I don't want to hear about it when you solve it. Let me just take this moment to say "Congratulations. You are special" and leave it at that.

If you can catch it, you can keep it.

There are many wonderful things about Germany. If I were to write about them I could go on for hours, so I'll save you the trouble of reading all that and tell you what Max thinks is so wonderful about Germany. His list is a lot shorter than mine and it can be summed up in one word - wildlife. This place is chock full of wildlife, probably because Germans actually care about their environment and haven't polluted the heck out of their land like we have. But I digress. If you add in the neighborhood cats (including one feral tripod of a cat) Max has seen no less than 7 types of wildlife since we've been here, though he has caught sight of other things I did not see. His list of sightings includes deer, hedgehogs, some kind of squirrel, some other kind of squirrel sized ground rodent, birds, moles, voles, and the aforementioned cats. I myself have seen three additional animals that Max did not see: some sort of peccary, a fox, and a scheltopusik, a kind of legless lizard. To both myself and Max, Germany is some kind of animal wonderland. To further substantiate that claim I must add that the local zoo allows dogs, so Max has even seen an alpaca, though I hardly consider that wildlife. Anyway, Max's favorite pastime of late, since the farmers began harvesting their crops, is going for a walk in the grassy fields that border most of the farmland. Hidden within these fields are droves of voles (say that three times fast). To make things exciting for Max, the voles like to dash from one hole to another when they think they are being threatened. Well, Max is a terrier so the voles are being threatened often. He will run around the field like crazy, nose down and head flipping from side to side, until he finds the most likely smelling hole. At that point he stuffs his nose in there to get a really good sniff, then he starts digging like mad. Pause for another sniff and then dig some more. When he gets really excited and thinks he's close to a catch he will bite out chunks of dirt from the far side of the hole. Usually he doesn't catch anything, but a couple of times now he has. Squeamish and pregnant readers may wish to discontinue reading at this point. The first time he caught something Darin and I made him leave it, even though he had already killed it. I felt bad but rationalized that it would be eaten later the evening by a fox. The second time, however, I let Max have it. He caught it, he was willing to eat it, and it probably wouldn't harm him any. It's not like he's not used to raw food by now and it doesn't get any more raw than that. He scarfed the whole thing, not even stopping to pull out the guts like he did on the first. Well, I can tell you, those of you who have watched your child do something big for the first time, use the potty, say their first word, I don't know what, you can understand how proud I felt of my boy. This is what he was bred to do and he's good at it! Really good. Darin and I will point out what looks like a likely hole to us and he'll just race on by to go to a different hole and, sure enough, within moments there are voles running everywhere, fleeing for their lives, afraid of the jaws of doom on MY BOY. Yes, I'm a proud momma.