Spilled milk - Day 1 of the Chill

I think New Year's Resolutions are quite funny.  It seems that most people make resolutions and then don't follow through on them.  "Oh, I'm giving up chocolate this year."  Then, a week later, they're eating a chocolate chip cookie or chocolate bar.

Resolutions are promises to yourself.  I like to use the word goals.  Goals are something you strive to do.  They might have a definitive ending or might not.  What happens if you don't reach your goal?  Do you cry over spilled milk?  No, I actually think that you re-evaluate your goals and see what could have been done to improve upon that goal for the coming year. 

In 2013, I found 1244 geocaches, making my goal of getting at least 1200 finds in a calendar year.  Looking back over my totals, I felt that the way I was now finding geocaches, I could probably find 1500 in 2014.  At the end of this past year, I ended up with 1424 finds.  Did I fail?

Some people would say that I did fail because I didn't reach my goal.  Looking at my statistics, I think I did fairly well at reaching my goal, even if I didn't quite reach it.  In 2013, I went caching on 161 days, which means I averaged 7.7 finds each time I went out.  In 2014, I only went caching 137 days, but found 10.4 caches every time I went out.  My average was up, but I went caching 24 less days which means that if I'd gone caching the same number of days, I would have found 1674 caches in 2014.  

So the key question becomes, why didn't I reach my goal?  Well, certain things conspired against me.  Usually, when I travel, I have lots of opportunities to geocache.  My yearly camping trips with my son usually allows us to geocache every day, getting at least one or two each day with other days where we'll find a lot more.  My son's schedule didn't include a camping trip this summer.  I did go camping, but it was a much shorter trip, so not as many cache finds.

July is usually a very good month, caching-wise for me since it's in the middle of summer with lots of time off when I can geocache.  In 2013, I found 199 geocaches in the month of July.  In 2014, because of family commitments, which limited my caching, I found 61.  I suspect this upcoming July will be similar because we're having a wedding that month.  I can live with that.  If I want to meet the goal of 1500 cache finds this year, I'll just either have to get out caching more during the rest of the year, or find more each time I go out.  I can see where a combination of both techniques will help me achieve the goal.

That's one of my goals for this year, to continue to enjoy geocaching and try and find 1500 caches by December 31st.  I think that's achievable and actually, I think the more important goal is to enjoy the game.  If I enjoy the game, the numbers will come.  

I have several other goals that I'll share with you over the next couple of days.  For now, this is my first post for the 20 days of Chill Writing Challenge.