Couple of Coffees

One plus one plus one... that's a lot of hats

We've done our official count of hats in the van. It has been certified, notorized and authorized by the Laura and Jonathan Traveling Circus LLC. The count does include two stocking caps, which are indeed hats, despite not being all that fashionable. It also includes several purchased during the summer, prior to the day of the contest announcement, but it does not include the crushed (and I do mean crushed) velvet one we sent back home in June due to the beating it was getting.

The final answer is, drum roll please... 19.

Which makes Chris our winner. Congratulations! You win four business class airplane tickets and a five-day stay at a luxurious condo in Bermuda, where the pink sand will get under your toenails. Uh. Oh right. Wrong script. Chris wins a prize from our minivan, hand-carried back to Oregon from some very exotic locale, like south Texas.

Although Chris was the winner, with the closest answer of 14, he commented that they'd all be mine and one would be Jonathan's. That statement was more funny than it was true, as it turns out. The final breakdown is as follows: Jonathan, 10 hats; Laura, 9 hats, including the New Orleans one which in an alternate reality should count as four hats because of its beauty and that tickly feather on the side. The stocking caps are Jonathan's, as if that needed spelling out.

Karen is the runner-up, with a guess of 13, and Doug gets style points for his 30.3 guess and the accompanying hat breeding theory, which we have our scientists working on at this very moment.

In the other winner's circle, which we know fondly as the Where's Jonathan contest, M has jumped in with both feet to win two prizes. Congrats on your clean sweep! In the nature chronicles double special edition, Jonathan was hugging Emily Dickinson's tree in Amherst, Mass., in the first picture and at Yaddo's gardens in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the second one.

Disclosure: M is my mother. But she was not prompted or hinted or shown photos of the places in question. She guessed both right on her own. Honestly. She has never commented on a blog before, either.

posted by Laura the Writer @ 3:49 PM