Side ponytails, unite!

When I was a little girl, my brother Ben and I had a club. We were the Tiger Club (tigers being both intimidating and pleasingly stripey), and mostly I remember having meetings via flashlight in Ben's closet, and plotting to build periscopes out of hand mirrors and paper-towel rolls, and always having to make up a new secret handshake because we'd forgotten the old one. Our parents inexplicably would not let us get a tiger to be our mascot; when I was six or seven, we eventually bargained them down to a turtle (practically the same thing anyway, you know) for which we saved up for months and then changed our club name to match. As you do. Scooter the turtle, I will have you know, was a fine and noble mascot for many years, and I think taught us all a lot about the joys of heat lamps and live crickets.

Last week, I picked my brother up at the airport--he's back in the States after five years abroad, and local to me for the first time since middle school. Thus begins the longest, most awesome Turtle Club meeting ever! He's so excited to be back in the land of pork and uncensored movies, and I am so excited to have him here for general bothering/fun-having purposes, even if it means driving him to every furniture store in the greater DC area until his apartment is furnished (I have a car; he does not). You can guess what we did this weekend.

So what I mean to say, I guess, is this: If you come to DC and it does not seem quite the same as it was, if it seems slightly more awesome and yet also slightly more weird, think of us, and know that the Turtle Club is hard at work.

Now, if we can just find enough hand mirrors, we can finally finish those periscopes.