So on my actual birthday, I thought briefly of going on my quest before work, leaving at 5:30am or so. But fate, tiredness, and kids who needed to get ready for the first day of school put a damper on those plans. So I remained patient and waited until my important meetings were over at work and decided that on my birthday, I could leave a little early. At 3pm, I left for Ipswich. It was a beautiful day to be on the road with the windows down and the country music playing.
Once I got up to the Sanctuary, I went inside to sign the log book and make sure that what I thought was the path to the Observation Tower really was. With my pictures in hand, I set off to see what I could find.
The first thing I found was the Observation Tower! And
the stairs were familiar. In fact,
they were a match!. After hunting around for a bit, I crawled under and found a plastic bag seriously taped to the underside of the stair runner. It looked like it was put there to stay. But I removed it. And what do you think I found inside? Well,
a key, of course!
So, I took the key back to my car and much to my horror, it didn't open the box. Turns out this was a known problem and Carl had tried to make it up to Ipswich to replace the key with one that would work, but hadn't been able to beat me to it... So I called him and we agreed to swap keys and pretend it never happened.
Once I got back to Lexington to make the swap, I opened the locked box. "What was my present?" I hear you ask. Well, turns out that the contents of the box was a plastic bag filled with strips of a piece of paper that had been run through the shredder. Luckily for me, a fairly generous non-cross-cut shredder that left me with 2 dozen 1/4" wide pieces of paper. Once I reassembled it, I found the following clue:
If you are WickedSmaht123, the password you need to find the treasure, is the full name of George Bailey's Guardian Angel!!!
Well, I knew that George's Guardian Angel was named Clarence, but I couldn't remember his whole name. Luckily, I received a DVD of
It's a Wonderful Life last Christmas (hmmm... Coincidence?) so I popped it in and fast forwarded to the scene in the gate house after George had jumped in to save Clarence (who was saving George by jumping in to force a rescue).
"What's your name, anyway?"
"Clarence Oddbody, AS2"
"What's AS2?"
"Angel, Second Class"
Logging onto Yahoo mail, I was able to get into the email account (don't worry, I later changed the password). And there was
an unread email just begging to be opened. The email was as brief as it was confusing.
Tell the Oracle, a user on Leeuwenhoek the game computer, the not so creative name Jack Sparrow gave at the end of the world, to the old geezer who lost both his arms and part of his eyes. Then you will know where the treasure lies.
Well, I at least had a starting point for the second half of the message. But I had to get a hold of
the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I was hoping that iTunes would have it to rent, but they only have it for purchase. Then I hoped that Comcast might have it for rental in OnDemand, but alas, they only had Speed Racer.
So I was waiting another day...
To be concluded...
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