U No U R A Geo$er When... Traditional Cache

You Know You Are A Geocacher When…

Every object you see – soda bottles, plastic fruit, TV remotes, garbage cans – morphs into a geocache container in your mind.

You hear the term “muggle” used in a popular movie series and feel gratified that geocaching is entering the mainstream.

You make more new friends in a year than in the 10 years before you started geocaching.

You would rather spend a cold winter evening crawling through snow and bushes than in front of a warm fireplace with a cup of hot apple cider.

F-T-F means more to you than N-F-L,  N-A-S-C-A-R or  B-B-Q.

You spend hours dreaming up innovative, diabolical or convoluted geocache ideas:  “Could I hide some fresh meat next to the cache and have the finders’ dogs sniff it out?”

You pride yourself on a drawer full of junk – cheap carabineers, cereal box prizes, plastic dinosaurs – stuff you wouldn’t have been caught dead with before becoming a geocacher.

You have a revolving charge account at the dollar store.

Using snap n’ seal bags for sandwiches, food storage or jewelry seems like quite a waste.

You consider logging a missing persons report when your Johnny Cache bobblehead travel bug isn’t logged for two months.

Your GPS receiver is the first thing you pack for a vacation or hike.

The Groundspeak changes to allow the entry of puzzle and multicache final coordinates on the cache page have a far greater impact on your life than any new tax laws, presidential elections or disease cure breakthroughs.

You wake up 15 times during the night and write down a new cache idea.

You suddenly love Sudoku even though you’ve always hated it before.

Everywhere you go – shopping malls, hiking trails, restaurants, public restrooms, movie theaters – you are always looking for potential geocache hiding spots.  The latest Spiderman flick is far less interesting than wondering if you could hide a micro under row 15, seat 12.

Almost all the paint you buy is camouflage green or tan.

You have to explain to the clerk at the outdoor store just why it is that you need 25 match tube containers.

You are the only customer in the military surplus store not wearing camo.

Much to your dismay, the first thought you have when hearing the news of a major flood is of all the geocaches floating around the area.

You finally know the difference between latitude and longitude.

Your life is divided into BG and AG – Before Geocaching and After Geocaching.

The image of a rusty ammo box is dearer to you than the image of an imported Swiss chocolate bar, a 47 Chevy or a diamond necklace.

Even though you had absolutely zero interest in owning and learning to use a GPS device before you discovered caching, it is now a source of endless fascination.

Every day your email inbox fills up with messages such as “CrunchyFrog83 found Travel Bug University” and a subject such as “MadCacher couldn’t find Quick and Easy” strikes fear into your heart.

Conversely, if your inbox is strangely empty, you click on the national news to see if some major crisis is underway.

More people know you by your caching name than your real name.

You introduce yourself in an important business meeting as CacheGal72.

You think that an unpainted Tupperware container under a bush is sort of lame, whereas a hollow plastic frog under a bush is the pinnacle of genius.

When you need to store some leftover food, you find a container in the garage on your geocaching shelf rather than in the kitchen cabinet.

Your hiking backpack is more likely to contain fast food prizes, plastic cars, travel bugs, notepads and a bunch of cheap pens than it is to contain sunscreen, insect repellent and energy bars.

Speaking of travel bugs in hiking packs, when you discover one you inadvertently left there over three months ago, you feel more guilt than when you forgot your anniversary.

You suddenly realize that your friend who has found only 1,000 caches is such a newbie.

You spend sleepless nights debating whether to log your own caches as “found” or not.

You get a part-time job as a laboratory technician – just to have access to the astounding array of micro and nano containers.

You ponder how to attach a micro to a live rattlesnake without breaking any animal cruelty laws (don’t try it – it’s not worth it).

You are about 15 times more fit and 27 pounds lighter than before you started caching.

Shopping at the craft store is no longer an assault on your manhood.

Skulking about the back lot at Wal-Mart and lifting lamppost skirts in your three-piece suit on the way home from work seems normal, even commendable, but storing your enchilada leftovers in a Tupperware box is, well, just plain weird.

You discover more new music from CDs left in geocaches than you do from listening to the radio.

The old shameful confession:  “I broke my diet and had two milkshakes and half a chocolate cake today.”  The new shameful confession:  “I DNFed Auntie Weasel today.”

You now know exactly how far 528 feet is.

You seriously consider offering the most recent finder of the devilish puzzle cache Fun With Quarters $500 for the coordinates of the cache (or even just one of them!).

The online discussion of whether someone should be allowed to change their caching name from HappilyMarried to CuteNSingle is vastly more interesting than the breaking news, Sapient Life Discovered on Mars.

You haven’t mowed the lawn for three weeks, turned in the analysis your boss wanted 10 days ago or bought your spouse an anniversary present (“it was yesterday?!”), but you have found every single one of 133 six-inch dirt-colored PVC pipe containers in the remote Utah desert arranged in the pattern of a giant three-mile by two-mile Kokopelli figure inspecting his sniper rifle, all in 100+ degree heat.

When your husband gives you a (belated) anniversary present – a bottle of very expensive European perfume – you pour the contents into an empty margarine carton and turn the fancy bottle into a geocache.

You consider taking scuba diving lessons just so you can find Cracked below Osprey Island, 50 feet under the surface of Flaming Gorge Reservoir.

You stash spare change for months into a secret account to fund a $250 FTF prize for a massive multi-state puzzle cache series final, knowing your spouse would be shocked at a mere $2 going to such a purpose.

Where you used to shop:  Nordstrom, Dillard’s, Golf Galaxy.

Where you shop now:  Dollar Tree, REI, General Army Navy Surplus.

You wolf down a whole jar of peanut butter – just because you need a geocache container.

You add the words “muggle,” “trackable,” and “geodog” to your word processor’s dictionary.

Despite the fact that you are a leading neurosurgeon, you consider hiring an electronics professional to rig a plastic frog to say “Ribbit – the cache is over here – ribbit” when someone presses a button on their cell phone.

You are delighted to show the extremely suspicious law officer that the ammunition box you are opening contains some plastic airplanes, an old yo-yo, a broken keychain and a plastic necklace and not contraband weapons, illegal drugs or a stash of pornography as he seems to suspect.

Going for a hike no longer seems like a worthwhile activity unless you find at least one geocache.

You have lifted more skirts in a month than in the last 42 years.

You inadvertently use the dreaded words “treasure hunt” when explaining geocaching to a friend, but quickly amend it by saying, “a lot of doctors, lawyers and pilots are geocachers!”

You come back from vacation with 18 photos of you holding various ammo boxes, one of a cache disguised as a cactus, and one with a big “1,000^th Find!” sign, but none of the Grand Canyon which you visited for the first time.

You send emails to all the U.S. presidential candidates to ask if they support lowering the 528-foot minimum distance between geocaches.

When your significant other gives you a mix CD called Music To Do It By, you are disappointed when you can’t figure out what the songs have to do with geocaching.  Well, maybe Just Can’t Get Enough and Locked Onto You are candidates.

Your outdoor activities devolve from “recreation” to “skulking about”.

You go golfing just to get the pencils (Lockjaw).

You spend untold hours tweaking a new puzzle so it will be perfect, even though you know only about five people will bother to solve it (Lockjaw).

The cache on the International Space Station is on your watchlist (Lockjaw).

"Holy Crap! I would have rated this terrain at LEAST a 4!" is now "Holy Crap! I only would have given this terrain a 2 at best!" (Lockjaw).

You can read encrypted cache listing hints just as easily as plain English.

Your To Do list contains the words "find," "solve" and "hide" far more frequently than "clean," "fix" and "trim".

The three hours of sleeplessness you experienced last night have everything to do with coming up with more You-Know-You-Are-A-Geocacher-When ideas and nothing to do with having no idea at all where the next mortgage payment will come from.

"Cache" gets your pulse racing, while "cash" is totally boring.

When visiting the animal shelter to adopt a new dog, you take an ammo box with you to see which dog is most interested in sniffing it out.

Your Recommended Daily Allowance of fiber is up around 700%.  Hey, those fiber bottles make terrific cache containers!

You are a million miles away during a high-level staff meeting and when the CEO asks you what to do about the Johnson Proposal, you blurt out, “I think we should look at those plastic bunnies over there.  One of them might be hollow.”

Your dog is trackable,

Your vehicle is a geobike,

Your karma is a ratio,

Your kid’s name is Signal,

Your guiding light is a Garmin,

And your spouse is disgusted.

Enjoy finding the cache!  Got any more additions to the above list?  Add them to your online log!