That is one long, lumpy cat. And one fine brass knight.
Holy hell this is a long process. Is it always this involved? Our Canon video camera saves its files as an MTS file. One fifteen minute video has taken over an hour to convert an MP4 and it looks like it’s only a quarter of the way through. Vague memories of using Windows Movie Maker recall that it takes a bit longer than real-time to import and start editing. I’m using a fully updated VLC to do the conversion if that makes a difference. I’m also working remotely, so am on an older laptop, but it has 8GB RAM and an SSD. Anyway, damned if this isn’t taking a while.
Great validation yesterday at his kindergarten summer picnic. He wanted to bring the map to show off, and he went from kid to kid showing them his ‘real’ map and telling them what happened. Score one for credulity and the last years of childhood belief! Also found out that he’s been keeping his TA up to date with the story all along, talking to her about it, letting her read some, etc. She had no idea it was coming to such fruition, else would have lent a hand adding to the realism.
That lumpy cat is a Cornish Rex, a cat who did the impossible: attained equal status with my childhood dog in the pantheon of Greatest Pets Ever. Several pets have come and gone; only two are ‘benchmark’ pets. Love everyone else, but the extreme personality, all-around goofiness and herd mentality are on a whole different level. Good Ash. Evil Ash.
Back to staring at the progress bar…
I recognized Ash as a CR when I saw him; love that breed! But this post is really to comment on those two pictures: excellent tags for them and I’m glad you ordered them as you did because the reveal for “Evil Ash” made me Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there!
I’m glad it went well. I’ll wait for the video with bated breath.
And your cat is, uh, scary… or goofy. 
This is spectacular! I love the mind (and real life) adventure!
Might I recommend a book for you to enjoy with the great-great-great-x1000 grandfather: The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. (The sequels lost a bit of the magic of the first one, but they are still enjoyable.) It really got my kids involved in solving puzzles and mysteries (and the book is based around 4 kids who save the world!). And in a year or two (unless you want to do puzzle solving together), The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery Hardcover by Graeme Base is another great weekend project of deciphering clues.
I suspect we will see him on the board in a few years!
Well I managed got get some basic importing/exporting done. I still have about thirty minutes of treasure hunting that needs to be cut way down, but here’s the lead-up:
Keeping true to form, I wrote the last section of the story over morning coffee. Things got a bit spotty mid-morning to late afternoon, but fortunately we found an even keel to sit and read the end of the tale. I’d been re-reading the entire thing to him a few pages at a time over the past couple weeks or so. Didn’t realize how high his recollection was, or how interesting it would be to go through the daily top half of the notes (oh, that was the day we x; that was when y). It was a little melancholy as we approached the end of the Before Times and how the story pacing kind of lurched along afterwards. But fun nonetheless.
So in the afternoon we settled into our parlour chairs to read the last few days he’d gotten at school and the new pages from that morning. This how the story eventually ended. That’s about nine minutes of the story; here’s a linkto about fifteen seconds before the reveal. Little bit of a last minute change to the story from above. My initial thought had been to meet him/his grand-x and stumble through the exposition afterwards. I ended up moving the exposition beforehand, with the idea that the actual face-to-face meeting/full knowledge would trigger the rent in time. Hence it ends with the final statement “it was you.”
An hour or so after finishing the story I slipped out to set things up, came back in, and then Mrs. Devil went out to light the fuse. Six feet of slow-burning fuse gave her a few minutes to sneak back in and act casual. The upcoming Independence Day holiday meant that fireworks aren’t all that uncommon right now, but a couple close reports got his attention. Glad we’d done a test run; because I saw that the firecracker detritus had some clearly mundane markings, I didn’t give in to his pleas to “search for more clues.” The map appears, from Welcome Home Old Friend: The still patient knight. 1:30 has a new classic for the house: “This is good because it’s not a dream.”
Here is a scan of the sketches I made of the four map sections I got over the year. Here’s the fantastic job our friend did for the real map front and map back. The tin the map came in(the tin sealed pretty well, but I wrapped the map in parchment paper to be sure) and the smoking bucket.
Came back inside and got right to work. Amazing how it can take hours to write a simple letter to Grandma, but he can stay so focused on decoding a map. Not surprising, mind you, but amazing. We got to work right away. I had prepped a printout of my a scan to write the clues out on. The code resolved to simple clues like “red flag,” “yellow wood,” “follow green,” and “follow purple,” with some vague (but contextually concrete) markers like “laurels,” “gardens of delight,” and “fence.” When making the drawings over time, I centred them on the house but split the word into a couple different pieces. So in decoding, I guided him to start with the abstract clues, then the more tangible ones and finally “house.” Love how he gets surprised by things and treats them as old hat a moment later. Entire video is about 6:30; here is a link to decoding the last word.
Now to finish the hunt itself…