Hedgehog

I have lots of stories to tell, and I hope to fill some of them in over the next few days. Today, however, I want to talk about my hedgehog.

The hedgehog was really Nika's idea. Nika is Alla's daughter, who came to San Francisco for a week while we were there. She arrived with a cute little brown and white hedgehog toy, and proceeded to take pictures of him in various places wherever she went. Sadly, Nika's hedgehog ran away at the DeYoung Museum. He was in her purse, and apparently escaped when Nika took out a scarf to wear inside the air-conditioned exhibit hall. Since this was the beginning of an entertaining week-long project, we were all disappointed and I set out to find another hedgehog.

We visited a few toy stores near where we were when we discovered Nika's loss, but none of them had these hedgehogs. Next, we did a web search from my phone and discovered that they are available by mail order from many places. Encouraged to know that this was a common item, I phoned some more toy stores the next day and found a store near us that had them.

I wanted to buy a matching hedgehog for myself, but Nika objected that this infringed on her copyright. She did, however, allow me to buy a chocolate-and-white hedgehog, and she even paid for it. We named him Tiburon, after the city we visited together the day before. I have uploaded a few pictures of both hedgehogs in my growing California album.