Geocaching Stats for December 2013

It's been a busy couple of months and I am just now getting around to updating my caching stats properly. I had lots of fun adventures but have slowed down my caching recently since buying a house.

Here's a run down of the highlights:

September

• Placed a new challenge cache in Austin: What size is that? Challenge
• Attended my first Lone Star Roundup event. This year it was held in Tyler.

PyroYo007 and strontium87 at the Lone Star Roundup

• On the way to and from the roundup event, I cached in eight new Texas Counties (88/254)
1. Falls
2. Limestone
3. Freestone
4. Henderson
5. Smith
6. Van Zandt
7. Kafuman
8. Navarro
   

Cached in eight new Texas Counties

• Placed a new cache in Falls County along I-35 to give people an easier way to cache in this county while barely travelling through it: Falls county I-35 Southbound
• Found six more TxGCC13 caches, bringing my total up to 58/80 for the challenge (and had one DNF at Purtis Creek)
• PyroYo007 and I placed our first ever night cache: Copperfield Night Cache
• PyroYo007 and I finally finished up Walnut Creek Super Cachers

Super Cache Member logo

• Closed out my second month in the 365 day challenge by caching every day in September

October

• Cached in a new state and got a new souvenir: Colorado

First Colorado cache with my nephew

• Filled my 2000-07 Jasmer spot by finding Tarryall (GC18) with my mom

Finding Tarryall in Colorado

November

• Attended four events including one for geocaching in space and earned a new souvenir

Geocaching in Space souvenir - November 2013

• Revived a cache out near my parents' house that had been archived: Xerophilous

I think I'll probably continue blogging every quarter instead of every month about my caching stats. As always, you can find my caching stats on my website: strontium87.com. Until next time!

Feral Cat House

I stumbled across the idea of feral cat houses by accident on Amazon of all places. I then saw some examples of houses people constructed on their own. Since we're getting our first freeze tonight, I decided to make a prototype.

Time: 30 minutes
Cost: $13 per house

Materials

• 30 qt. foam cooler
• 18 gal. storage container
• straw
• box cutter
• marker

I used the basic idea of the "Roughneck Homes" on Rubbermaid's website. It's a good, simple idea. The one change I made was to invert the foam cooler lid so that I could add more straw insulation on the top and so the storage container lid fit better. I bought enough materials to make two more, plus I have an entire bale of straw if I want to make even more.

I put this first one out front of my house to see if I get any occupants. I'll put additional ones in the back yard.

Prototype feral cat house 

Create a Geocaching Search Engine in Chrome

The Chrome browser from Google is simple and power. It provides the option to set up your own customer search engines for sites you use a lot. Well I use geocaching.com a lot to look at cache page by their unique IDs or GC codes. This post will show you how to set up a custom GC code search engine in Chrome but the steps can be applied to any site with search.

Step 0

You need Chrome, so if you don't already have it, download the Google Chrome Web browser for free.

Step 1
Click on the Tools menu icon in the upper right corner of your screen to display the Tools menu. From the menu, click on "Settings." This will take you to the "Settings" page.

The Tools menu in Chrome

Step 2

On the "Settings" page, scroll down to the Search section and click the "Manage search engines" button. This will open a popup window.

Settings page in Chrome

Step 3
In the "Other search engines" section of the popup window page, look for the three fields for adding a new search engine:

• In the first field, enter a name for the search engine. I chose "Geocache Finder."
• In the second field, enter a shorthand code for using the search engine. I chose gc.
• In the third field, enter the search link for geocaching.com. Copy and paste this: http://coord.info/%s
• Click "Done" to save your new search engine.

Create a new search engine

Step 4
To use the Geocache Finder search engine at any time, enter the shorthand code, such as gc, into the address bar at the top of the browser and press the tab key. This will initiate the search engine. Then enter the GC code for the cache page you want to view and press enter. For example type in GCK25B to view Geocaching Headquarters.

Initiate a search in the address bar of Chrome

That's all there is to it. I hope you find this as useful as I do.