I turned 29 last week. This weekend I had my final birthday celebration with my parents and older brother (previously I had celebrated with my husband and his parents). Anyway, an old tradition in my family is the "treasure hunt" - making someone follow lots of obscure clues to find a present. The most infamous instance of this is when my Dad was a kid, and either he or one of his brothers created a treasure hunt where one of the directions said "Look under the little rock by the tree." Also, they neglected to keep a master list of all clues, so due to the vagueness of that instruction, the treasure hunt was effectively ruined. However, it has become a multi-generational inside joke to say "Go look under the little rock" or "by the tree." Anyway, my older brother, in true Giles form, created a treasure hunt for me:
1.
When you're tired of the roses white
Look to the porcelain best left out of site (Yes, the next post-it note was stuck to a toilet)
2.
I am the chesire cat
There is a hole above my head where I scat (the cat's litterbox)
3.
The site you seek is hard to find,
Unless cardecorators are on your mind. (A domain name my brother owns - another family tradition/inside joke)
4. (from the website)
There is a place where records spin round.
And yet today, they don't make a sound...
LOOK BESIDE THE ROCK! (a shelf where my parents keep lots of old LP's)
5.
These are not the droids you are looking for
Go back and look down, click for more (scroll down on the original webpage, deliberately made bigger than the screensize)
6.
WAIT! and you thought you were done!
But without understanding you will find none. (scroll down again)
7.
Coffee is black and eggs are white.
But the cinamon is kept out of site! (in the pantry spice rack)
8.
Go back...
Come in...
Flip me over (flip the post-it note)
Login (on the website, which links to Gmail)
9. and I logged in to find an email alerting me to an e-giftcard from Lowe's, so that I can buy some paint for what I want to do in my house.
I've got to say, that was one of the most innovative treasure hunts I've been on. I liked the e-twist.
I had two really weird dreams my last night of being 28. First dream:
ReplyDeleteThere was some other woman - I don't know who she was, but she was blond and I got the impression that she was German - and she had come up with some experiment for us. Actually, it was more of a way to save the world from nuclear meltdown. There was a nuclear reactor involved. I had some terminal disease, so I was selected to be the one to perform the final steps of the process, which would expose me to radiation poisoning. I was really panicked that I wouldn't have the guts to go through with it, or that even if I did I would mess something up, and of course I was worried that at any moment I would start to feel nausea or pain (from the radiation). I woke up before anything really started happening.
Second dream:
This one had more of an Alice in Wonderland feel to it. I was back in co-op. I was supposed to be involved in some event, and there were all these deadlines for fees that I was trying to meet. I was trying to figure out how to go to classes, get money from the bank, and then go pay the fees all in a timely manner. I went to some building that seemed to be a gym and paid my final fee. When I stepped outside of the building I was suddenly in a meadow full of bright green grass, and a flock of computer generated/mechanical butterflies swished past me, and then a flock of birds (computer generated/mechanical) took off out of the grass. One end of a long, invisible tube was wafting through the air and coming towards me. I was invisible because I couldn't see the walls of the tube, but whenever it passed between me and some object there was a little bit of distortion. The open end of the tube, coming towards me, was just a gaping blackness and from the opening came a ghostly operatic woman's voice singing "The way home! The way home!" Then I woke up.
I read a statistic somewhwere (Wikipedia?) that the majority of all dreams have themes centered around anxiety; furthermore, this is true accross the world in all sorts of cultures, not only in "high stress" fast-paced industrialized countries.