Out of order

So I missed making a post yesterday, the first time that’s happened since I started the blog. I’m going to blame the penguin ornaments. Taking down the Christmas trees — all three of them — and the other penguin ornaments turned into a big chore this year because I decided to start the blog and needed to take pictures while making sure I had accounted for all of them. I also thought it would be a good idea to measure each one to provide a sense of scale and to assign numbers to the first couple of hundred ornaments like the ones I began numbering as the collection grew. Since January, my dining room table has been the staging ground for this operation (and a large portion of my TV room floor). Last night I could see the light at the end of tunnel and set a goal to free the table from the penguins once and for all. I was so focused on the task that midnight came and went before I realized that I had not made a blog entry for the day. Oh, well. It was bound to happen. I thought about doing two entries today to make up for it, but it would still leave no entry for March 29, so I’m just going to move on and try not to screw up again. For tonight, we have a small straw-like penguin that I’ve randomly assigned the number 40. I’m almost certain that’s too low, but this one has been around for a long time and certainly belongs in the first hundred. It’s really cute, designed well and executed beautifully, and it’s one of my favorites. I put it on the wood tree in the TV room last year because it’s made from some sort of plant stem fiber, along with a couple of other straw-like penguins you’ll be seeing here a little later. The last few posts have been in numerical order, not that I’m going to keep that up forever, but I’m skipping over No. 39 tonight because that ornament figures in a bigger story that is yet to come. Maybe we can pretend No. 39 is the missing post of March 29, 2010.

Small, straw-like penguin

Number: 0040

Size: about 2.25 inches tall