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The unnecessary quest for perfection

So... last week I developed a geocaching activity for the 7th grade teachers at EBMS.  The activity was centered around reviewing the Science and Social Studies curriculum.  I plotted 24 waypoints weeks ago, and then turned those points into a two part hunt.  Based on the aerial view of the waypoints I organized the hunt order so that the students would have to explore a good bit between each cache.  I hid caches all over the baseball field, softball field, and practice field.  The only thing that really was a negative about having this large of an area was the fact that there were fences around every field... I'm sure this proved to be very frustrating to the students, as it frustrated me when trying to relocate the caches.  

So, my husband helped me hide the caches on Wednesday afternoon and the students would be geocaching on Thursday and Friday  We only hid 22 of the 24 because two of them wouldn't show up on the Garmin device.  It took us an hour to find the points, pick an appropriate cache, and stuff the question inside.  While hiding the the caches I remarked that I probably wouldn't plan an activity this large again, maybe because it was really hot, and I was tired.  We used plastic eggs and camouflage duct-tape covered medicine bottles (these proved to be waterproof!)  

Fast forward to Thursday morning.  The teachers had the GPS devices, they prepped their students with the powerpoint presentation on how to use the devices, and the caches were set...everything should be good to go...Then I get an iMessage from my wonderful husband...

In the moment, I thought the fact that a pile of my geocaches laying on the pitchers mound would be the absolute worst possible thing in the world.  After working so hard to get the questions, mark the waypoints, wrap bottles with camo tape, print and cut out the questions, and hide the caches I felt that all my hard work was for nothing.  Only seconds late I state that there is "Nothing I can do about it now." which is absolutely true.  I could do nothing to change the situation, and while there may have been a "pile" of caches on the mound, it most certainly would not have been all of the caches.  The activity could still go on, not exactly how I designed it, but it would still work.  When I realized that he was joking, I felt like my project would go smoothly, and everything would be fine if it didn't go perfectly.  I had planned, prepared, and carried out the activity, and my hard work was rewarded with a fairly incident-free, two-day geocaching review activity.  

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