Hello.
I'm not doing a very good job at keeping this site updated. I don't really have an original excuse for it. I've just been busy. I'm starting to get the impression that people that maintain weblogs regularly don't have lives. I'm not sure what that says about me over the last seven years, though.

I'm so far behind that I can't really write about the past in an order that makes sense, let alone a chronological one. I think a lot of it won't be able to manifest itself until I start reminiscing about them or having some sort of traumatic flashback. Fun times.

I don't see any signs that show that I might have more time to write in the months ahead. Winter is notoriously boring for me. But I've been managing to keep myself busy not only on the weekends, but after work most days as well.

Not sure what to tell ya. Hopefully the frequency of my posts won't drop more than they already have. But I can't say things are going to improve. The anatomy of 1,000 finds
I got my query results late Sunday. Took long enough. It really would have sucked if I never received them; I'm only allowed to run that query and export all of my finds once every seven days.

I uploaded the results to It's Not About the Numbers, which then spat out a bucnh of stats and exportable HTML code for me to share with the masses. I selected some of goodness and displayed it in my geocaching.com profile.

The problem with that, though, is that the common muggle can't see my stats without registering to the site. So I've decided to share the data here. But the charts and maps and stuff that INATN generates is wider than the column you are currently reading this text in. Though I was going to go through the trouble of shrinking all of the images and manipulating the HTML code so it can be viewed here, I eventually came to the conclusion that it would be a hell of a lot easier if I just took a bunch of screenshots of my geocaching.com profile and making one giant image out of it. So that's what I did. You can check it out here:

Jerome's geocaching profile after reaching 1,000 finds (1262px by 3552px, 470KB)

So there you go.

Because I started caching in June 2001, a lot of find rates are way off. Well, they are accurate over the course of a lifetime, but I definitely have been finding more than two caches a week (.38 a day), and I'm out in the woods a little more often than once every 13 days. After all of the charts, I display what my rates have been over the last few years.

Find rates starting in 2006:
* 178 days with a find
* 962 caches found
* 1.08 caches found per day overall
* 5.40 caches found per day spent geocaching
* Caching once every 4.99 days

A little better reflecting for recent times, no?

Also, if you're bored enough to count the total number of finds I have per state -- or simply look at how many finds I have in the U.S. -- the number is 998. That's because I found two locationless caches back in the day. They've since retired that cache type and gave them their own site called waymarking.com.

I don't know why they chose to make the legend on the map mostly in shades of blue. It's tough to figure out which states I've found 10-19 caches in and which I've found 20-49 in. Hence the chart I uploaded above it.

5-terrain caches typically involve a canoe or some sort of special equipment to find. Some day, I hope to get a few of them.

8518.82 miles is surely a lot of miles. And that's going in a straight line from cache to cache. And let's not forget the amount of miles I've put on for caches I never found! I wonder how many miles I've put on my car because of caching.

Why a top six for my county finds? Because I wanted to include Virginia Beach. :) Virginia rules!

FTF #8, In Over Your Head, never got published online. It was too close to an already existing cache. I found it and several others during a geocaching tournament.

Sean's really slacking. :)

If you want to see more stats, you can go to It's Not About the Numbers and type in "Max Jerome" in appropriate search box. Figure out how many months that I've found more than Sean has found lifetime! I'm the 41st person in NH to do it.
And perhaps the youngest NH resident to do so, too.

So I set forth today to hit the 1,000 caches found mark. As reported several times before, Ascutney was where the party was going to be celebrated. I was sitting on 998 finds this morning, and with a total of three caches along the trails I was taking, I was pretty confident I was going to hit that number somewhere, though I really wanted the cache closest to the summit to be the one to get the honors.

Found It! August 16 by Max Jerome (999 found)
I decided to attempt the challenge today, including finding the (archived) summit cache. I wasn't sure if I bit off more than I could chew, because within ten minutes of hiking, I was debating on whether or not I was in good enough shape to do it or if I should just go home. But then I remembered I'm way too close to find #1,000 to give that up easily, and this mountain isn't any taller than Mount Monadnock. So I stuck with it and found the cache. :)

It was quite the hike. In retrospect, the hardest part of this series was hiking up to this cache. Well, that and trying to get a GPS signal near Assault #2 (had to DNF). But anyway, hiking to the summit cache and Assault #2 were cake in comparison. I did the whole thing in record time: 4 hours, including walking back from the Windsor parking lot to the Brownsville parking lot.

Swapped TB's. Thanks!

"The challenge" was to hike up Brownsville trail, find Assault #1, then work your way down the Windsor trail and find Assault #2. The whole thing is about six miles of hiking and ascending like 2,500 feet up. The whole experience was expected to take six hours, but like I said above, I was able to do it in four. :) Rock star.

Before (miserably) heading to Assault #2, I detoured to the summit cache:

Found It! August 16 by Max Jerome (1000 found)
#1,000! Booya!

I had my sights set on this cache for a while as I closed in on that milestone number. I like doing my milestones on mountain tops. Monadnock for 250. Gap Mountain for 500. And now Ascutney for 1,000.

Normally, I take lots of pictures and celebrate my milestone, but rain was threatening and it didn't appear I was anywhere near a vista of some sort. I came up from the Brownsville trail, and I guess the official summit was still .3 miles away. I didn't have time to check it out, so I'll have to settle for the memory instead of photos.

The cache itself seemed in good enough shape. The container is fine. The logbook probably should be replaced (I was going to bring a replacement log, but forgot to pack one), but aside from that, it still functions like a cache should.

Left nothing as I don't think many people are going to visit an archived cache. Took the TB that was in there so it can still be moved around.

Thanks for the hide!

Yes, Sir! Strangely, finding #1,000 wasn't as exciting as I was expecting. The view sucked and the thunder was scaring me. I got there, signed the log, and booked it as quickly as possible. Didn't want to get stuck in the rain.

Couldn't Find It. August 16 by Max Jerome (1000 found)
I lost signal 300 feet from the cache, and I stood around like a fool trying to get a signal back. Trying to figure out where ground zero is from 300 feet out on a GPS known for its "rubber banding" (eTrex Legend) is an incredible feat. A feat I could not accomplish, much to my chagrin.

I didn't have the pics handy, so I didn't really have anything to go by. And with my GPS behaving like a paperweight, I scoured the area I assumed was GZ for maybe 15 minutes, but came up empty. To make matters worse, it started to rain heavily, so I had to leave the area. It really sucks. If I'm looking for a 4/4.5 cache, I best better find it. :p

My GPS would not get a signal back until I was near the Windsor parking lot, about .6 miles from the cache. Boo. :(

Good thing I didn't take the dvd in Assault #1. I'd feel like a jerk because I didn't officially complete the challenge. Had I completed it, I would have done so in a speedy 4 hours, including having to walk back to the Brownsville parking lot and finding the archived summit cache.

An hour after finding my milestone, I was already getting pissed off. Nice.

There was a dvd in Assault #1 that one could take if they intended to complete the challenge. It didn't look like anything worth watching, so I left it.

4/4.5 represents a hide difficulty of 4 on a 5-point scale, and a terrain difficulty of 4.5 (also on a 5-point scale).

Yeah. Not much more I can say about this non-find than I'm considering buying a new GPS, something with a stronger signal. I was so bullshit trying to find this cache, it could have been memorable if anyone was there to witness it.

I ran a query that would take my 1,000 finds and break them down by my find rate, how many finds I have in each state, etc, but I still have yet to get the results five hours after running it. Boo. I'll share those with you all when I can. Ten bucks says I'll eventually die from a diseased tick.
So I'm up to the almost-milestone number of 998 today. Looks like find #1,000 is going to happen on the summit of Mount Ascutney next weekend. Should make for a good time. Ascutney is kinda like Mount Monadnock, though, and I haven't hiked anything like Monadnock since the day I hiked Monadnock, so I'm curious how I'm going to do. The route I'm taking up and down Ascutney is estimated to take five or six hours, too. I can hike Monadnock in like 75 minutes. So I wonder if Ascutney is more gradual or what. It's definitely a longer hike.

There's a cache on the way up Ascutney that will be find #999. There's an archived cache on the summit for the big 1,000. Archived caches are usually ones that have been stolen and the owner can't replace it; archiving a cache is kinda like retirement. I was really worried when I saw the cache wasn't active anymore, but upon further review and contacting the cache owner, the cache is still there. It just needs some TLC: the contents are wet and the log is unsignable. It was archived because the owner isn't able to take care of it anymore. When I go up there, I'm gonna try and patch it up a little bit.

Then there's another cache on the way down, putting me at 1,001. Like Arabian Nights.

During my numbers runs the last two weekends, I managed to get a total of three ticks engorged into my skin. I go hiking all the damn time, and before this month, I've only had one tick feasting on me ever. I find that to be quite odd, because I got a lot of ticks on my jeans and stuff last year. Maybe 50 or so. This year, I can't say I've seen more than 10 to 15. And three of them fed off of me. Boo! On the plus side, two of them were nymphs (babies are really fucking hard to remove) and the other was an adult, but not of the species that carries Lyme disease. I'm hoping the nymphs are of the same species as the adult, or I could be screwed.

You know how hard it is to remove a feeding tick? Let me tell you, those motherfuckers don't make it easy. I got tired of trying to gently pull one of the nymphs off with a set of tweezers, I eventually yanked its body apart from its head and its head was still under my skin. Ha! I didn't have the tools handy to remove the head from my skin (it was near my armpit); I had to go see my mom the next morning and let her perform surgery using her plethora of needles, esthetician, and zit-popping tools. Fun times. I'm not dead.
I am a horrible person for not writing in such a long time. What can I say. It doesn't really matter, I guess. I have plenty of excuses, the biggest being that I have actually been busy. Seriously. I got some shit going on over here.

I don't really have the time to go into everything that has been happening, so I think I'll just write as if I never had some sort of hiatus. Things will probably appear to be disconnected for a while as I may reference things I never wrote about, but those are the breaks. If it makes you feel any better, you're not missing a whole hell of a lot. I just haven't had any downtime that I didn't want to use for sleep.

I suppose I should just say how today has been going, as any other unwritten days were just as exciting.

The nature of my job is such is that I take advantage of manufacturer price fractures (deals) and buy against upcoming price increases. In case you couldn't tell from going to the grocery store, everything has gone up in price in the last six months. A lot. We've been frantically procuring product to capture savings for the company on every line we can. Procter and Gamble is probably the biggest company we deal with. They also happen to be on my desk to seek out and destroy, which is a very hard task to do given how that company works. But they've been increasing the price of everything lately. Again. Paper and diapers go up next week, and pretty much every cleaning product they make is going up in September. Some of it, like soap, is going up as much as 20%. This isn't classified information. If you like to shower a lot (Jon :)), you better load up on Ivory and Zest now. I'm sure other soap, paper, and/or cleaner companies will follow suit with price hikes if they haven't already. But anyway, because they are so big and have so many price increases, I've been having to buy an unprecedented amount of product from third parties to fill our needs and capture savings. It's been keeping me quite busy. Companies like General Mills and Kraft are so fucking huge, it's scary. P&G is bigger than the two of them combined and then some. They are the 31st biggest company in the world.

It also hasn't helped that we've been shorthanded for a while. At least one random person seems to call out daily. And two of my coworkers I haven't seen in at least a week. Makes me wonder what the hell is going on, as swhorfe is one of the ones that just decided to stop showing up. It's pointless for me to call him; he doesn't answer or return my calls. Or anyone else's calls from work, for that matter. Hmm. A decent chunk of his desk is currently on my desk, and the problem gets compounded when other people choose to skip a day. So much for commitment.

Pool was tonight. That went better than it has the last few weeks. It was the first time we've had a full five-on-five since... damn, I can't even remember. I think tonight's win put us back at .500. Yeah, we've been sucking hard lately. But it turns out that every team goes to the playoffs, so I guess the regular season doesn't really matter. I think playoffs are at the end of the month. I'm still seeded #2 on my team, by the way.

I had a Little Debbie's Star Crunch tonight. I haven't had one of those in decades. I forgot they existed. Yummy.

I'll try to get back on track with my postings, but I promise you nothing.