Just had to say it was great, albeit briefly, to see the nice smiling
friendly faces at RI's recent mysterygathering! Sorry we missed
legerdemaine, lonemasswolf, and others! We did, however,
catch the unveiling of the new little "dressed-up box" version of
K-Martha, which we had originally thought would be the same
standard tupperware K-Martha hitchiker that we had found in
Oregon on our trip at the end of May, and had put out shortly
thereafter at one of our own mystery boxes, appropriately
enough, "Going Downhill"! She was still patiently waiting there
the last time I checked about a month ago, as I recently wrote to
legerdemaine, but now it seems that both "Going Downhill" and
"K-Martha HH" have finally been found by Laurette on her second
try after a couple of months!!!

So, now here's the question, legerdemaine: How are we
supposed to count them? K-Martha #1 and #2? K-Martha the
hitcher and K-Martha the event stamp? Perhaps they are like
those ants we were counting? But the ants were all different and
these stamps are almost-but-not quite identical! Not that I mind
clones, mind you. Some of the first stamps I found in Maine were
clones because the person who put them in thought that all her
plants were supposed to have the same-type stamp (but at least
the boxes had different names!) Same with a few boxes around
here in southern New England where, for example, "And a little
rose too" and "Elizabeth Park" have the same stamp (with
bought stamps it was only a matter of time!) Anyway, what I think
happened here is that some folks just didn't realize that we only
rarely post our hitcher finds on-line because we don't want folks
to get too annoyed with us, or think we're trying to "hog the show".
(We have, after all, now found over 50 hitchers, but please try to
remember that that's still less than 4% of our total count, and we
do try to get them back out quickly!) Pete also doesn't always
update his hitcher webpage if he wants to keep something
special as a surprise, as he tried to do with K-Martha, but I
dropped a hint anyway, since I didn't want anyone on the West
Coast to be disappointed that she'd headed East. Meanwhile,
unbeknownst to us, Funhog admitted to us on Saturday that she
had been repeatedly checking our webpage for K-Martha
updates and didn't find any! Poor thing, she probably thought
WE were hitchkiker kidnappers - heaven forbid! Anyway, now
we're blessed with 2 K-Marthas, so what do we do? As the old
Polish song goes, my vote would be to just have fun with the
both of them!

Cheers,
Wanda