Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Sherlock Van Giggle

Our family has been on a Sherlock Holmes kick lately because of the BBC series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. They are terribly entertaining (and at times astonishingly faithful to the original stories), but with some definitely not family friendly scenes and/or episodes - so be sure to preview before sharing with your kids (especially episode 1 of season 2 ). The series has led a number of us to dive into the original stories - most of whom had never done so before.
I don't know if it's because of all this Sherlock or out of sheer desperation, but we managed to solve a very minor, but very frustrating mystery last night in such a surprising and classically deductive way, that I just had to write it down.
We've had a lovely summer with Ria home from college. Unfortunately, she managed to lose her cellphone almost immediately after she got home and we've been desperately looking for it ever since. I have offered rewards and we all did lots of cleaning and organizing, all the while wondering if it wasn't permanently lost somewhere away from home.
Last night Gus came up with the idea of looking her account up online, where he found a record of calls. It turns out that there was a flurry of calls on the last day it was used, just a few days after she got home from school, back in May. We realized that she had gone to her younger siblings' track meet that day, which involved multiple cars and people hopping around to different places. This caused the kids to do another, and even more thorough, search of both cars - to no avail.
Next, Ria was trying to figure out which tote bags or backpacks might have gone to the track meet that day. Gus came up with the idea of looking at pictures taken that day and spotted a familiar little red freebie backpack. Unfortunately we own four identical bags of this particular sort!
But they were happy to have a lead, and the scramble was on. After tracking down several cellphoneless bags , Ria finally spotted one hanging in the game closet of all places - and there it was - cellphone and all. :)