SNAKES ALIVE!

After a long hiatus from geocaching, the GeoKidz and I finally had a chance to jump back into our favorite game/sport/obsession this weekend! Saturday, we attended the monthly meeting of the Georgia Geocacher’s Association, which was held this month at Little Mulberry Park in Dacula.

The feature presentation this month was given by Dr. Mark Patterson of the Georgia herpetological Society, with assistance from his slithery friends, the snakes.  Not just any snakes, mind you… but snakes that are native to and prevelent in our backyards (literally) here in Gwinnett and Walton counties.  He brought out some really beautiful critters, such as the black rat snake, the red rat snake (a/k/a “corn snakes”), the pine snake and even a small copperhead. (Don’t worry, the copperhead was kept in a sturdy plexiglass box the entire time!)

Photo Courtesy of The Georgia Geocacher's Association (www.ggaonline.org)

Dr. Patterson provided a wealth of information about these species.  He discussed their habitats, what they feed on (mostly rats and mice, so they are actually good to have around. Since we now live in a very old farmhouse in a big ole meadow… I’m good with that. 😉 ), and what to do if you encounter a snake (screaming and running may be understandable, but unless it’s venomous, don’t kill it!).  Did you know that one lone rat snake can curtail the rat/mouse population in its immediate area by over 19,000 rodents a year???? Before you aim that gun, think of all 19,000 of those mice moving into your home in the absence of their crowd-controlling predator!

Dr. Patterson also discussed what to do if you are bitten by a venomous snake.  First, don’t panic and run.  Panicking and running will increase your heart rate and your adrenaline production – both of which will only serve to speed up the spread of the venom throughout your body. Definitely not what you want to happen!  Call 911 and do your best to stay calm.  Do not apply a tourniquet, and do not do the old “cutting into the wound and sucking out the poison” routine you’ve heard about your whole life.  All that does is make you bleed more and introduce a whole slew of new germs into your wound, greatly increasing your chances of infection.

The good news, according to Dr. Patterson, is that an extremely small number of people actually die each year from snake bits.  I cannot recall the exact statistics, but the number is actually quite miniscule.  So, the good news is that if you get bit, chances are you will make it just fine, so long as you seek prompt medical attention.  Folks who have a much higher risk of complications from snake bites are the very young, the very old, and people with fragile immune systems.  (Side note to any EMS folks out there…feel free to chime in on this in the comments and correct, add to, or otherwise expound on this info. You know WAY more than I do about this stuff!!!)

All in all, it was a fantastic meeting.  The GeoKidz and I had a great time.  We also kicked butt in the raffle following the snake presentation. GeoKid2 won a key chain for his collection, and I won a nifty little tote bag with the Georgia Geocacher’s Association logo on the front.  We also met many other geocachers, some of whom we’ve “met” online discussing caches and events, but never in person.

After the meeting, the GeoKids and I went out in search of geocaches.  It’s been too many months since we’d done so, and were just itching to get back into it. 🙂 We found one on Saturday, and then three on Sunday afternoon… including that pesky one hidden at the Oasis Bowling alley that we’ve searched for over the course of at least six months! And yes…we’d walked right past it a trillion times and somehow missed it. Till yesterday! Ha!

Sunday afternoon, we also went to Tribble Mill Park, which is a veritable gold mine of geocaches. We finished finding the last two of a series of caches honoring John Wayne: The Good (which we found on 01/02/11), The Bad, and The Ugly.  The kids really enjoyed searching these out.  As we walked back to the car, my eight-year-old GeoKid said very seriously, “I love nature.  It’s all beautiful and stuff!”

And that’s what it’s all about. 🙂

Happy hunting, everyone!

What a Month!

As I mentioned earlier this week, April was one massive whirlwind of events!  Some were good, some not so good, but all of them were exhausting. 😉 Thank God for coffee, that’s all I can say – ha!

It all started with the littlest GeoKidz and I attending the Georgia Geocacher’s Association April meeting at Mistletoe State Park in or near Augusta, GA.  Yes, during Masters weekend! I am not a golf fan in the least, so I didn’t much care about all the fuss over who’s playing in the Masters, who’s winning, who’s losing… WHO CARES?! 😉 (Sorry to all golf fans out there – no offense intended… I’m just not into sports much at all.).  The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and it was a PERFECT day to be outside.  Of course, the pollen count that day was roughly ten trillion, so the Kidz and I were all stuffy and fighting off pollen-induced sore throats.   

The highlight of the day was the game of “human checkers” that the event organizers put together.  I have pics on my camera that I hope to download tonight (I’ve been saying that for two weeks, so don’t hold your breath TOO much… I put the “PRO” in “Procrastination”…got it down to an art form. 😉 )  They had cut out huge plywood squares big enough for folks to stand on, and painted them red and black.  The people playing the red checkers were given red t-shirts and red bandanas.  The black checker people had black t-shirts and black bandanas. 🙂 At each end of the checkerboard, there were ladders upon which the team captains sat.  They had a perfect overview of the board and could order their people where to move.   GeoKid2 had been dying to play checkers all day, so he jumped right in as a black checker. 🙂 He had a great time playing for the first five or ten minutes, then he was “jumped” by the red team – game over for the little fella! He took it in stride though and thought it was all just the funniest thing!  After the game, the kids and I took off and found a couple geocaches hidden in the park.  There are several more I want to find, but since this was approximately two-and-a-half hours from home and it was getting late in the day, we decided it was best to go ahead and mosey on back towards Loganville and call it a day. 🙂  I’m pretty sure that day was the only day we were able to get out and hunt some caches… stupid “real life,” intruding on my hiking/playing time! Grrr! Ah well, it was better than nothing. 🙂

My Prodigal Son (GeoTeen2) returned home on April 21 – a/k/a the Thursday before Good Friday, a/k/a “Maundy Thursday.”  So far, so good.   Keep your fingers crossed and send up the prayers that he stays on track this time and continues doing what is good (and court-ordered – lol) and avoiding what is bad.  🙂  Easter was the usual whirlwind of activities, culminating in a beautiful Easter service and then the traditional dinner and egg hunt at the in-laws’ house. 

This past weekend, the Geokidz and I – yes, all four of them! – went camping together.  GeoKid2 is wrapping up his first year in cub scouts (awww….cute!) and this was the annual “Family Camping” event held up at Mount Rainey Mountain near Clayton, GA.  We had a GREAT time (except for GeoTeen1, who is terrified of the dark and the woods… .and seeing as how there wasn’t much anything by way of city lights or any lights in the camping area after sundown… she stayed curled up in a ball in the tent zipped up tight while the rest of us roasted marshmallows. She refused to come out or even budge from her hidey-corner till daylight).  GeoKid1 had his first-ever experiences shooting BB guns and bows & arrows…he earned a couple cub scout belt loops for his accomplishments.  GeoTeen2 likewise got to partake of the shooting of BBs and pointy things, as well as saving the day and helping me get the camp fire started when it was being stubborn. 🙂

All in all, April was fantastic… lots of great things happened, some rough things happened, but in the end, God is good and so is life. 🙂

Rock on, everyone!

Our Bamboo Forest Adventure

Well, after a reasonably successful day of geocaching yesterday, I was more than ready to attack the bamboo forest in Gainesville today following our visit with my son at the YDC.

After visiting hours were over, GeoTeen1 (“GT1”) and I headed out for the forest. I’m very NOT familiar with this area, so I got a little turned around here & there till we finally found where we were supposed to be.  Parked our GeoVan at about 10 till 3, and away we went.

The forest itself was WAY COOL! It was smaller than I expected… for some reason, I’d thought it would be acres & acres of winding, serene trails.  It was much smaller than that, but nonetheless, it was still gorgeous. It was also several degrees cooler in the forest, which was good…I’d worn a long-sleeve shirt, and with it being in the low 60s today (yay – FINALLY!) it was kinda too warm.

We spent the first several minutes just wandering around the forest, enjoying the view.  It was like a whole ‘nother world in there!  A hawk would periodically screech, birds were chirping, etc. 😀 Very serene and pretty!  After our sight-seeing tour, we got down to business to try to find this durn geocache!

I remembered reading in the online logbooks that GPS reception was spotty at best in many places in the forest.  The bamboo, which was sky-high, created a very thick canopy between us and the sky.  The other geocacher’s experience proved to be true for us, as well.  I spent almost an hour zig-zagging back and forth and going into random circles.  Oooh, 38 feet left!….no, wait… 52 feet right…. no…. 23 feet back the other way… up this hill, down this hill, maybe over here, and…. argh! Finally, when the GPS told me AGAIN that it was 26 feet from me, I decided to give up using the durn thing (yes, still learning, slowly, not to rely too much on it!).  I randomly picked a spot (a tree, actually), and started circling around the tree, poking anything & everything with my walking stick to find the buried treasure. 🙂  Every circle around the tree, I went wider and wider until I was reasonably sure that it wasn’t there.  When I was done with that little exercise in dizziness, I picked a new spot to start over in.  After a couple more rotations around the new spot, I stopped and looked around for a minute.  If I were a geocache, where would I hide?  What doesn’t look quite right…what doesn’t quite fit in??? Suddenly, something caught my eye that of course I’d passed by ten billion times before.

I walked over to this area, and using my walking stick, nudged this thing (won’t say what it was so as to not spoil the fun for others) over a bit to see if anything was under it.  And… SUCCESS!!!!!! Yep, there it was, the small geocache container I’d been searching for forever. 🙂 OK, maybe not quite FOREVER, but it was starting to feel that way. 🙂 My GPS still insisted it was 48 feet in the opposite direction though, LOL! GT1 and I signed the logbook, swapped out some trinkets, and headed back home. 🙂

This was definitely an extremely neat, fun, awesome, and UNIQUE cache! 🙂 If you ever happen to be up this way, try to find this one. It’s absolutely beautiful scenery, and, whether you find it or not, you won’t be sorry you visited there. 🙂

If you want to see all the pics I took, click HERE. 🙂

Happy hunting, y’all!

 

Greetings, y’all!

Howdy! Welcome to my humble little blog, brought to you from my humble little home in my humble little town.  🙂 Allow me to introduce myself for a moment, if I may. 🙂

My name is Kat – “MamaKat” to friends far and wide.  Residing with me are hubby and four kids -the GeoTeens (Tiff (17) and Jacob (15)) and the GeoKids (Kathryn (9) and Jeff (7)).  A few weeks ago, we discovered the fun, adventurous and HIGHTLY ADDICTIVE hobby of geocaching. What is geocaching, you may ask?  Geocaching is essentially a big ole treasure hunt that takes you all over creation and back again.  Geocachers cleverly hide a cache – which can be as small as a pencil eraser or as big as a ten-gallon bucket (or bigger) and everything in between –  then list the cache on the Geocaching.com website, together with its GPS coordinates and whatever helpful hints or info they feel like providing.  Then, other geocachers  take those GPS coordinates, put them into their trusty little GPS units, and go off on a quest to find that which was hidden and cleverly concealed. It may be in a shopping center parking lot, OR it may be way off in the woods somewhere involving a pretty lengthy hike.  There are caches for all levels of adventure-seekers…from tame to  not-tame, LOL.  Once a geocacher finds the cache, which may be hiding in plain sight or covered in leaves and branches or magnetically stuck to something, they then sign the log book in the cache.  Often, there are neat little trinkets in the cache (usually dollar-store type stuff, but sometimes folks leave pretty neat stuff in them).  If you take a trinket (otherwise known as “swag” – “Stuff We All Get” – then leave something in return of equal or greater value.  Of course, no taking or leaving of trinkets is required – that’s just a neat little added bit of fun (kids love it especially!).  The fun of geocaching is in the hunt itself, and in finding the sneakily-hidden cache.   Check out this site for all kinds of good info on it.

Anyway, I discovered geocaching a couple weeks before Christmas and was hooked, as were the GeoTeens.  We were not very successful with our hunting, though, because I did not have a hand-held GPS unit (and my BlackBerry is so old & out of date, I can’t download any GPS/Geocaching apps to it!).  We wandered all over Loganville for hours without success.  But then, Christmas Day arrived, and Santa-Hubby got me a hand-held GPS, just for geocaching! Yay! And thus was born a new addiction hobby and fun-filled family activity. 🙂

There is one minor detail you need to know about me, however.  I have NO – and I do mean NO – sense of direction whatsoever.  Think I’m exaggeratiing? I’ve gotten lost in parking lots. Heck, now that I mention it, I got lost in a parking lot today – and yes, I had my car GPS on (but it wasn’t recognizing the un-named road we were on, so maybe I’m not totally hopeless).  So, a hobby that is directly linked to navigational skills is rather an odd one for me to fall into, hahaha! But since when have I ever done anything the easy way, or stuck to the well-worn path?? (Now literally as well as figuratively?) OK, so perhaps the reason I’m so often on the road less traveled is because I’m hopelessly lost and ended up there by accident, but whatever.  It’s an adventure all the way, and life is good. 🙂

This blog came into being at the suggestion of one of my Facebook friends, who thought that Geocaching was the perfect opportunity for an exercise in photojournalism, haha.  With all the random adventures me and the GeoKids & GeoTeens are having, it sounded like a good idea to me. 🙂 Of course, another minor glitch is that at present, I don’t have a camera. My previous BlackBerry had a great camera I loved… right up until it went swimming in a glass of sweet tea one day as I was driving to work (I’m not so good at this coordination thing, either, haha).  One of my bosses, God bless him, had mercy on me and gave me one of his old (old, old) BlackBerrys, for which I truly am eternally grateful.  It’s the camera-less version, however (which makes sense, cuz why does a commercial litigator need a BalckBerry camera? haha).  So, at present I am without a camera, until we can work one into the budget.  Hopefully that won’t be too terribly long. 🙂  For the time being, this will be a photo-less journal of our treks and adventures.

I won’t bore you with details right now, since it’s getting late and I have much to do in real-life grown-up world, but this weekend was our first time taking out my new GPS and hunting for caches.  We found two yesterday, and three today. We meandered into a shopping center plaza, two local parks, and a patch of kudzu by the side of the road, for starters.  Along the way we saw a collective total of three bunny rabbits and a frog, along with miscellaneous squirrels, oddly-shaped trees, and a plethora of vines and sticker bushes. (ouch!)  Each find was met with much celebration and high-fives all around.  The little GeoKids had a great time.  When I asked what their favorite part of geocaching was? They said it was seeing all the cool nature stuff.  Chalk one up for sneaky educational opportunities, hehe.

Well, that’s it for now. Signing off and getting back to cleaning and laundry and other much less adventurous stuff of the Mom variety.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!