A few days ago, I surprised my partner with a mason jar diorama of her favorite crypid, the Fresno Nightcrawler.
For those of you that may be unfamiliar, the Fresno Nightcrawler can best be described as a mysterious figure resembling a ghostly pair of pants. I hadn't heard of them until she told me about them, and they elicit a bemused and delighted “why’s it just pants!?” from her almost every time they come up in conversation (and throughout our viewing of the movie Onward).
(source)
My partner's had a rough past couple weeks (she tested positive for COVID just as she was finally recovering from a pretty severe sinus/ear infection that had knocked her down for about a week), and I wanted to do something nice for her to help cheer her up.
I was scrolling through Etsy looking for ideas when, by some algorithmic happenstance, I came across this adorable Fresno Nightcrawler figure. Unfortunately, there were only 2 in stock and had sold out in the time it took me to chuckle at how lovingly sculpted its butt cheeks were and investigate a few other gift options. I was debating getting a smaller version of the figure from the same seller when got the idea to just make one myself.
Two days later and I had a little pair of ghost pants in a mason jar diorama ready for delivery (I've made a separate post about how I made it).
My partner lives about an hour and ten minutes away (without traffic), so putting him in the mail seemed silly when I could just deliver him myself.
The following shenanigans proceeded to ensue:
There was an all-staff meeting for Lies & Liability (the LARP my partner wrote) Thursday evening, which I figured was the perfect way to know she'd be awake when I arrived. I joined the Zoom call by phone, blaming it on wifi shenanigans, and proceeded to attend the meeting while driving to her place. Some co-conspirators confirmed that my AirPods successfully muted any driving sounds that could give me away. Success!
Even with a pit stop for a rose (her favorite flower) and some battery-operated tea lights to up the romance factor, I arrived at her place 15 minutes after the meeting ended. She lives in a more rural area, so I pulled off onto the shoulder to park rather than pulling into her driveway and risk tipping her off with headlights and tire-on-gravel noises.
Like a criminal, I crept across her front yard under the cover of darkness to her bedroom window, which is on the first floor and overlooks the sidewalk leading to the front door. My original plan to leave all the items on the windowsill quickly proved to need revision, as the windowsill was too shallow for the mason jar. It barely fit the tealights and the rose, but it required a bit of finessing.
Then the front light turned on. I froze, crouched up against the side of her house, sure I'd set off a motion detector or something. I waited a few moments and didn't hear anything, or see movement in her window, so I figured if anyone inside had noticed they probably chalked it up to an animal or something. I carefully finished placing the rose and tealights on her window, and then crept over to the front door and left the mason jar diorama and a note on the step next to an Amazon package waiting for her.
I retreated away from the house to stand by a tree in the front lawn, and called her. I could see through the curtain of her bedroom window as she answered, and I directed her to look outside onto her windowsill.
"Did you drive all the way out here in the middle of the night!?" she exclaimed in charmed bemusement as she drew back the curtain to peer outside.
In a few short moments, she'd put on a coat and mask and made her way outside to collect the mason jar and discover the l'il guy inside. He was an instant hit.
We talked for a bit outside, masked and 6 feet apart, and made plans to do a socially distanced picnic in her backyard on Sunday if she was feeling up to it.
Just as I was about to leave, she revealed that I hadn't been as successful in my surprise as I had thought.
Through sheer random coincidence and no fault of my own, she'd decided to go check for her Amazon package at the exact moment I was setting everything up. Turns out, she was the one who turned on the front light and had then opened the front door and seen me crouching in front of her window. ðŸ˜
After a brief moment of panic that someone was trying to break in, she recognized the back of my jacket. So she quietly closed the front door and went back to her room to wait for me to reveal whatever it was I was doing there. She was quick to reassure me that she was definitely still surprised, just perhaps not in the way I had intended her to be.
Upon recounting the story to my mother on the drive back, she commented "well, it's comforting to know that you don't have a career as a burglar."
Thanks Mom. 😂
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