Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Crissy and I are trying to cut down on junk food, so we try not to buy any (if it’s not in the apartment, we can’t eat it). Occasionally, we end up with junk food though. For my birthday, Crissy made a fantastic cookie cake. We tried to give as much of it as possible to our guests, but still ended up with leftovers.

To prevent us from eating too many of them, I hid them. It’s the whole “out of sight, out of mind” thing; but for us, it’s more of an “out of sight, still on your mind, but you can’t find them” thing.

This week, though, I’m in the Bay Area. How’s Crissy supposed to get her fix? We decided that I could create 4 “cookie caches” and give her the location of one per day. But I’m weird, I decided to turn them into riddle form: if you solve the riddle, you can find the cookie.

Unfortunately, I thought of doing the riddles after I hid the cookies, so I have to work really hard to make this work. I hid three, but Crissy accidentally found one, so I had to come up with two riddles. Here’s what I had:

• “If a delectable sweet you seek, under the kingly, crimson headpiece you must peek.”
  • Notice the clever use of rhymes and half-rhymes :-P
  • Answer – the cookie was under my red Monarchs hat (crimson = red, kingly = Monarchs, headpiece = hat)

• “Seek under the descendants of a trapped bear hunted by #26, yet above the musings of a man of whom a deck would consist of 52, and you will find your heart’s desire.”
  • This one was painful to make since I hid it in a hard to describe place; plus I wasn’t feeling that creative when I made it up.
  • #26 is Teddy Roosevelt. The trapped bear refers to the origin of the “Teddy Bear”. Descendants of Teddy Bears? Well, that’s a horribly bad way to allude to stuffed animals (teddy bears are the precursors to stuffed animals). So the first part of the clue is, “Look under the stuffed animals.”
  • “of whom a deck would consist of 52″ – the key word here is “card” (there are 52 cards in a deck). The “musings” refer to “writings”, so you need to look above the books written by Card -> Orson Scott Card.
  • Basically, the cookie is on top of my Orson Scott Card books, which happen to be on the shelf under all the stuffed animals.

Crissy got the first riddle really fast despite hearing “tingly, crimson headpiece” over the phone (instead of “kingly, crimson headpiece”).

The second one, I barely understand it. And I wrote it. We’ll find out how she does.

Yeah, I’m a nerd, I know. :-)