The Race to 100 Finds

Finally the sky is clear! I found an easy geocache last night before a meeting. That was my quick fix. PhotoV5 recently said that she was at 99 finds. After I hung up the phone with her, I realized that I am not too far from 100 -- after finding two caches today, I have 88 finds.

For me, part of geocaching is about just being in God's natural world. So today, we spent about five hours in Thomas Mitchell Park just being. We tried to introduce a friend to geocaching at the park, but we found stage one of a multi-stage cache instead of a regular cache, so no immediate treasure. Rather anti-climactic.

My favorite spring time flowers are beginning to emerge. Spring flowers always remind me of my grandmother. She and I hiked in our woods and looked at flowers when I was young. I remember her talking about searching for mushrooms, but I don't recall ever looking for mushrooms with her or seeing any on our property. Here is a photo of what my grandmother called "sweet williams." In books, I see it listed as phlox.

We also saw a man with a lingerie bag half-full of morel mushrooms. We looked once last year for the fun of it, and were unsuccessful in finding any. The man let us hold and feel a couple of them. He said that he had looked for about two hours, and that he and his wife use morels in the same way that I would use button mushrooms.

We also saw frogs, tadpoles, birds, squirrels, and more flowers, some in bloom, some not. I was finally able to make my first report on Project Budburst for two Jack-in-the-pulpits (To use the project's terms, "first flower" -- ha! More like "only flower." I don't know that I have ever seen a patch) that my older daughter found, and for numerous patches of mayapple ("full leaf"). I've been waiting all month to use my gps-r for this.

I also made a track log a la _Fun with GPS_. I hope to work more on the track log next week. I just found out that student portfolios are due next weekend, so that means I need to arrange materials nicely this weekend in order to have the mail delivered to our portfolio assessor next weekend. As usual, business first.

Still raining

We've gotten a lot of rain. As of today around 6:30 p.m., we have collected 1.85" of rain since last night around 9:30 p.m. Last night in the dark, the rain gauge was not replaced exactly in its bracket. I found it laying on its side this morning, so we surely received more rain than recorded in our gauge.

The friendly people at the Iowa Geocachers Organization spoke earlier this year about checking water levels to see if their caches would be unreachable and needed to be disabled. You can monitor your "floody places" here and here. My younger son immediately noticed the amount of "high," or black, points on the Iowa map. It must be April -- snow, rain, sun, wind -- because of the quickly changing weather. We have gone from 81 deg F to 46 deg F in three days. I am still waiting for a tornado in our area. That would be a truly Iowan April.

Rain and more rain

I heard rain while I lay in bed this morning. I checked after giving a couple lessons -- 0.7"

One major deluge late in the afternoon left us with 1" of rain. Gabe filled a couple buckets -- one gallon and five gallon sizes -- with the runoff from our gutters full of pine needles. Total = 1.7"

"A" and I attended a very nice confirmation mass at the basilica. We drive through rain on the way home. Park the car in the garage and check the rain gauge again -- another inch. Total = 2.7"

We still have a light rain falling. I'll check again tomorrow.

Brown Creeper Sighting

I have been preparing for a Celebrate Urban Birds weekend, at the suggestion of a fellow home school mom. Our kit just arrived today, and it reminded me that we saw a brown creeper yesterday.

I watched it creep up and around our ash tree, thinking, "What kind of nuthatch is that?" Then it dawned on me that it was not a nuthatch. I tried to point the bird out to my daughters for what seemed like forever before they saw it on our ash tree. The feathers make a perfect camouflage.

We feel quite special after reading that brown creepers are rarely seen. Rather, they are heard, like many birds. I am not sure if the creeper was interested in our suet. I read that they are mostly insectivorous, and "A" and I noted that it was pecking as it crept up the tree trunk. The bird eventually left for the evergreen coverage of either our back tree or the neighbor's hedge. They blend in together and share space along the fence.

Celebrate Urban Birds looks interesting. You are asked to ID only 15 different kinds of birds, and there is a survey form to fill in. Much easier than when we participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count a few years ago. That covered every kind of the bird you saw, and data was entered online. Paper is quite convenient -- when I see the paper sitting out, I remember to look for birds.

We've seen northern flickers at the base of our trees and on the ground, and our usual family of cardinals at our feeder and in our trees. We know it is the same family because one of the three is whitish. It looks chalky with a red bill. We've seen it since we moved here.

Happy birding, everyone!

Hey-o to Mrs. Janes's classes!

I spent a couple hours this morning in school! Mrs. Janes, an enthusiastic sixth grade teacher, asked me to speak to her social studies classes about geocaching. She has her eye on placing a geocache in the school's outdoor classroom. Hopefully the board will approve such a placement, because I think geocaching and gps units make a great fit in a school's curriculum. I also think of it as a small part of education -- reading, playing volleyball, singing, using a gps unit, etc. are all lifelong leisure activities, and all are certainly appropriate to introduce at school. I am not saying that a school is obligated to teach geocaching or mapping, or that geocaching is equal to reading, but I will say that most everything in life is educational. And that makes everything a candidate for learning in (and out of) school. Mrs. Janes also had me talk about travel bugs with the idea of having class travel bugs. Here are some of the kids I talked to -- see the yellow Garmin in the front? Nice Statue of Liberty stance, by the way. Very good form for reception. Watch for a new cache, all you geocachers in the area!

I thought about what Mrs. Janes said in class -- relating my adult geocaching in terms of sixth grade life, making parallels between geocaching lingo and abbreviations and sixth grade text messaging lingo and abbreviations, and comparing the cost of an iPod to a gps unit. I forgot to mention PodCacher -- one of her classes was creating a podcast.

On a related note, I love that geocaching has opened me up to great new places. I ran a new trail twice this week, and got a kick out finding a humorous geocache along the way -- GC102A0, The Easiest Cache in the World. I would not have tried running in this area until I saw the traffic it got during our cliff swallow trip (see _Testing My Photo_ , a post from March 2007), which was also a geocaching trip. My new wish may be to get the family some off-road bikes. The hills there are fairly fun on foot, but with the speed of a bike, I think the fun meter would go up a couple notches.

I could take the gps-r along to record bike speed and relate speed to a map our bike travels, an idea I got from _Fun with GPS_, by Don Cooke. I found the book while walking out of the Clive Public Library earlier this week. I already like running with a gps unit. Now I am inspired to try a couple new things with it.

Lastly, I promoted a phenological survey (done online) a while back at the IGO Forums. Today, I finally got to take a couple waypoints for it (although no flowers yet). Peace to all!

Gray treefrogs

I took all of GAIN Academy with me today to Engeldinger Marsh. Today was our last day with the Park Pack from the City of West Des Moines. It's theme was Life in a Pond. "A" of GAIN felt pretty left out of our visit here on Halloween 2006, and the weather seemed so nice that I felt we had to be outside. "C" also loves any excuse to use his new boots. And the younger two enjoy using the zip-off feature of their convertible pants. I like my convertible pants, too, so I understand how they feel.

We got the marsh and immediately noticed that the grass had been burned prior to our visit. We also noticed frog sounds. Those spring peeper "peep" sounds were wonderfully absent. What we heard was similar to a chorus frog, but lower in pitch and pace. Since I had the entire park pack along, we were able to pop the tape in for confirmation on the sound. The enclosed book indicated that this time of year is appropriate for hearing gray treefrogs, so we're 80% sure that is what we heard.

The Park Pack had a very nice laminated quick ID guide that we used after we were done with the nets (also from the park pack). We got to see frog eggs, crawdad parts, three kinds of snails (including a type that "G" named "Sneaky Guys"), a speedy beetle, worms, and a couple larvae. We narrowed the one larva to two options on the quick guide, with the help of the enclosed magnifier box. It just didn't hold still long enough for us to count legs!

The only downer of our of time there was losing my sandal. The water was shallow and warm, and there is very little trash in this area, so I wore sandals. I decided not to step on the hummocks for the walk back to the car. Well, when someone behind me called for help, I had to stop my quick pace. That was it -- I sank, both feet, in the "sucka mud." Deep. I got both feet out, one with a sandal and one without. After three tries, I pulled my right sandal out with my foot. I had a different pair of shoes to wear for the ride home.

Pleasant and Unplanned Sights due to Geocaching

Today we had to return our library books. I wanted to just return the books, then visit a different library where we could check out videos -- free of charge for three weeks -- YAY Clive! So 3/4 of GAIN and I hopped in to the van. ("N" and Matt are away at a Boy Scout camping weekend.) I asked if we could find just one geocache, GC119ZC, after we visited the book return. They agreed to it.

After nearly getting an arm cut off with all the joshing around at the book drop, we headed over to the other side of the fence to the cemetery. Yes, a geocache at a cemetery. Glendale Cemetery happens to be where my maternal grandmother's mother, father, and step-father are buried. We've been here before, but Glendale is such a large cemetery that I never explored much of the grounds. I usually get down to business when I come here, visiting the places on the map that the office people kindly marked for me, then leave. Maybe if I walked my dog there, I would know more about the things you can see, but we don't have a dog.

We got near the cache, a part of the grounds that I had never seen before. "A" quickly found the geocache. The younger two were off like shots through the dead forbs and grasses. "I" used her baton to clear a path because she hadn't seen the pre-existing path, and "G" found an empty nest of some sort. (I'll get a photo here after I figure out how to get it out of my camera; that is usually Matt's job.) It was open and cup-shaped, completely made of grass, and rather close to the ground. I'll look in our Bird Nest book. (I know, Iowa isn't east of the Mississippi River, but I have yet to find a nest that wasn't in here.) I was unsuccessful in removing it from the plant it was built on. I think mice and voles and such have spherical nests. Stay tuned for an update.

Once we got back in the van, I noticed that our gps-r showed that we were close to stage two of a multi-cache, GCZ0TX. This lead us to the area where Great-Grandma Ross's stone is located, near the boundary for the Masonic Cemetery. We found an evergreen tree that was thickly coated for at least the bottom 15 feet with sap! We stood in amazement, because we thought our old tree, removed in 2003, was a leaky old thing. Never would have seen that unless the gps-r pointed us there! Everyone enjoyed the creativity of stage two. I saw that we were close to some other geocaches, but looked at the time and told everyone that we needed to go.

The kids were quite reluctant to leave, having found interesting large family plots and tombs, Spanish War cannon, and a sticky tree, and positively identifying the call of a northern flicker for the first time, but since the library closes at 5 on the weekend, we headed west for the library with the free videos. The ride home was silent, as is our custom after library visits. The next hour or so was also quiet, everyone engrossed with a book or video. A wonderful way to close the day.

Snowflakes in April

Don't be fooled by the pictures. They were taken last year. So, yes, you read the title correctly. We have had snow twice this week. The flurries are sporadic, so there may have been more snow that I just didn't see. With the wind as strong as it is, the weather is so bitterly cold that I don't even care about saving my lettuce. I just want to stay inside. I look at photos like these two to help my attitude about the weather.

I thought I was pretty clever to plant lettuce. Meg, a home school gal I know, had lettuce in Feb. one year, if I remember right. I thought I ought to try to do the same. But alas, the weather is not cooperating. Everything was alive and well yesterday, getting a second set of leaves even.

Since the weather is so cold, I have no motivation to find geocaches. Instead, I am working on puzzle caches. Solving puzzles to help me find the coordinates of a cache seems like a good substitute right now. I think my previously frost bitten ears would protest if I went out with my gps receiver in the forest right now.

On another note, I have researched Margo Frankel Woods State Park. I have found very little information online on it, except that one man has a brochure for a self-guided tour for the park, and it seems to be unavailable to the public. Margo Frankel Woods is state park, yet run by the township in which it is located. We are big fans of the park on the east side of the highway. My nephew, older daughter, and I found a geocache, Billy Goat's Bluff, GCNDGP, there. Last year, at about this time, a month before we found the geocache, we decided to search for morels. We didn't find any, but we did find bloodroot (the kids had to test it by pulling out a root), bluebells (see photo), spring beauty, trout lily, phlox (Grandma called it Sweet Williams), a northern leopard frog (can you see it in the photo?), all the early spring time things, and one man who was very, very lost. We weren't much help to him. My grandpa laughed when we came back from our hike -- wet and muddy from the rain.

I remember that my mother always said that the west side of the park, west of the highway, was the better for horseback riding, especially along the creek. I really want to explore this part of the park. I have never been there. She thought that side of the park was probably as large as her lot and my sister's. mapquest is showing it to be quite a bit larger than that. My dad tells me that the only parking area would be the shoulder on the highway, thus it is less developed than the east part of the park. Sounds perfect to me.