I hope they never find OUR secret place (A Photo Essay)

This is what yesterday's Song & A Couplet referred to:













































P.S.: We found a milkweed, so I was wrong; they still exist:

Living the... I guess "dream" is as good a word as any. (What The H?)

What the H? is going to be my first regular guest-post series here. You already know Middle Daughter if you're a regular reader of this blog. Middle, as the most commonsensical of the Older Kids (who existed before our Backup Kids, the Twins), appears here relatively infrequently, especially now that she's on her own.

I invited her to contribute a once-weekly post about her life, with these specific instructions:

1. Get it to me by Wednesday.

She did, and here's her first post:
__________________________________________________________________

So I am in my apartment and I decide that I want to go for a walk because the weather is beautiful outside and so I change and put my shoes on and grab my keys and my phone and I am out the door. I attempted to get my sister to come with my but she claimed that it was “too hot” outside. I think, Oh well, maybe I will enjoy the alone time. I could always use that time to ponder my life and where I want to be in the next five years or so, you know, real deep stuff. Anyways I am walking out the front door of my apartment building and a man is walking in.

Man: Hello.

Me: Hi.

Man: How are you?

Me: Good, how about yourself?

Man: Living the dream.

That was our deep conversation.

I continue on my merry way and the night is gorgeous. The sun is setting, it's the perfect temperature for an evening walk, and I am listening to the sounds of the night.

I am about a mile and a half from my apartment, walking past a set of four rain gutters, when I start hearing this whimper of a meow. I think to myself “Oh my god there are helpless kittens in there being eaten alive!”

(Yes my mind automatically assumes the worst about this situation.)

So I start to talk to the kittens:

Me: Hello, little kitties.

Kittens: Meow.

Me: Come out so I can see you.

Kittens: Meow.

Me: Hello, please come out.

Kittens: Meow.

This conversation goes on for about fifteen minutes before I call my mother and frantically ask her to give me the non-emergency police number or any number that can come and help these kittens out. She very helpfully gives me the number and I call:

Female officer: Non-emergency.

Me: HELLO!!!! There are kittens trapped in a rain gutter. Can you send someone to help me?

Female officer: I will send animal control to your location. Please stay there so the officer knows where to be. Have a great night.

Me: Oh thank you thank you. I will stay. You have a great night as well.

As soon as I hang up the phone I turn to look back down into the rain gutters and I see what I thought was a kitten.

It was not a kitten.

It was a RACCOON! AHHHHHHHHHHHHH…..

Prompting this conversation:

Me: Oh hello Mr. Racoon how are you doing this evening?

Racoon: (No sound. It is just staring at me with its beady eyes wondering whether I would taste better raw or shish-ka-bobbed.)

Me: I was just leaving now. You have a splendid night. Goodbye.

Racoon: (The eyes staring deeper into my soul still saying nothing.)

I immediately start to power-walk away. (I didn’t run because I didn’t want to raccoon to think that I was afraid and then decide that I would be an easy kill so I played it cool.) And I called that female officer back to tell her that it was NOT a kitten:

Female officer: Non-emergency.

Me: Um hello I just called about a kitten in a rain gutter, well its not a kitten it’s a raccoon so I am going to go home if that’s okay.

Female officer: please do I will let the animal control officer know. Thank you have a great evening.

Me: Yes, thank you, I will if I can make it home alive.

I walk home as fast as I could and I reached my apartment and see the same man from the start of my walk, outside. He is outside jump-starting his car. I walk past him and he looks up at me.

Man: Hello again.

Me: Living the dream, huh?

Man: Yep.

Me: Me too.

TWINKIE WATCH: Day 63!

Did you know? If you Google "Scientific Twinkie," this experiment is the number one photo result, and number four site result IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!

It's been a while since I posted a TWINKIE WATCH UPDATE OF SCIENCE, but not because I'm not interested in SCIENCE -- I am, as my devotion to slowly letting a Twinkie rot in my office shows. And not because I think you've lost interest -- I know that the teeming throngs of people who check this blog out on a nearly-second-by-second basis, constantly hoping for updates are mostly looking for news of The Twinkie.

No, the delay has been that I've had to replace my phone, which was displaying an annoying tendency to get hot enough to burn my hand and a far-more-annoying, to me, tendency to not work, which was seriously interfering with my ability to Tweet amusing comments about Yoda, and if I can't tweet amusing comments about Yoda, then the Sith have already won.*

*Mandatory Star Wars Reference.

Long story short -- the only time that will ever be said on this blog -- I accidentally Fed-Exed something called an "SD Card" back to my cell phone provider, which then, in a telephone conference with me and Fed Ex, said they couldn't get me the "SD Card" back and implied very strongly that it was my fault for not having removed the card from my old phone before I sent it back to them, which, only technically speaking, was correct, but it was also (in my opinion, which is the righter of the two) was far more their fault because:

I don't know what an SD card is.

So when the instructions to my new phone said to take the SD Card out of the old phone and put it in the new one, I did what you're supposed to do whenever you see instructions that you don't understand, and I ignored them.

But truth be told -- the only time that will ever be said on this blog, too -- it wasn't truly my fault because I also called the cell phone company's customer support line, and asked them about transferring my photos and apps and things, including all the free games I'd gotten like Plants Vs. Zombies, and they didn't say anything like "Hey, that SD Card thing we talked about in the instructions? It's a real thing and you should totally do that." Instead, they shrugged and said "You'll have to re-download them," which was not very supportive at all.

Anyway, the new SD card has not yet arrived, or rather, it has, but it was not the new SD card wanted: in that tense standoff between me, and the Cell Phone provider, and Fed Ex, I'd demanded a new SD card and they'd promised me the top-of-the-line one, free, but when I got the new one, it was nowhere near the top-of-the-line. It was somewhere near the bottom of the line, in fact, and I called to demand the real one, which was promised to be overnighted to me last Wednesday, and which has still not arrived, because overnights are different in the business world than in the world I'm forced to live in.

(Although secretly, I suspect that the Rude Girl on the phone simply delayed sending me the card as a passive-aggressive way of getting back at me for describing the situation as "Not a me problem, but a you problem.")

The bottom line, then: Whatever the SD card does, it involves pictures and videos and without one I can't use my phone to take pictures and videos, and I no longer have a camera that's not part of a phone, because who does? and so I haven't had a camera for a couple of weeks and could not update you on the condition of The Twinkie.

Until now, when I had a stroke of genius, and by genius I mean "science" in quotation marks, and by science I mean an artist's rendition.

That's what "scientists" do, after all, whenever they can't be bothered with real science, right? They just make something up and show us an artist's rendition of what they wish they'd discovered, and then go home for the week and play Ultima Online, and so, without much further ado, I give you:

The

Great

Artist's

Rendition

Of

The

Twinkie:

That's almost exactly what it looks like today, as shown by me. (I'm the artist.)

There has, I can report, been no change in The Twinkie (or Control Group, for that matter, as Control Group appears entirely unaffected by my having accidentally cut it in half a while back, putting Control Group near to starfish, and Wolverine, phylogeny-ly speaking), allowing me, with the help of The Great Artist's Rendition Of The Twinkie, to make these Observations Of SCIENCE:

1. There has been no change in the condition of The Twinkie.

2. I'm thinking that on Day 100 I should, on video, take a bite of and eat the Twinkie. I'm saying that because I'm pretty sure The Twinkie is never going to rot, and also, as I mentioned, this pretty much has to end with me going mano a mano (mano a Twinkie-0?) with The Twinkie, and Day 100 seems a good symbolic day to do that.

Other good symbolic days?

A. Day 365 (A Year Of A Twinkie could be the new A Year In Provence)

B. I got nothing, here.