If you build it ...

... they will come.

It's been an exciting few days around the house, especially for me and Piper. On Saturday night, you see, I placed my very first puzzle geocache. A puzzle cache (for the unaddicted) is a geocache listing where the posted coordinates are fake, and you must solve a puzzle in order to determine the cache's real location.

I had fun designing the cache and the puzzle, but the real fun was watching outside my window and seeing the cachers arrive. The final coordinates, you see, take you to the end of my driveway.

Piper has been pretty much beside herself with all of these strangers out front, and the best part for her is that she gets to meet them, too. One of the aspects to geocaching is that there are geocoins and other trackable items, each with a unique code, and a cacher can "discover" these as he/she goes along.

Well, Piper has a GeoDog geocoin on her collar, with its own unique tracking code, so cachers can register that they've actually met her! And Piper is ecstatic at all of the patting she's getting from these people. It's a win-win situation, any way you look at it.

In the meantime, I'm going a little stir-crazy. I'm not as intrepid as these other cachers, you see -- it's too cold for me to go out. I like my windchill above -25 deg. C, thank you. So I'm getting my caching fix by planning new ones, and making lists of which caches I'll find, and in what order, as soon as it warms up a bit out there.

If it ever warms up out there.