The Zucchini Story (part I (a serial!))

  8/17/2013

   First of all, I'm going to have to talk about the Zucchini itself. (Yes. The Zucchini. With a capital Z and everything.) 

   Brad, the guy I work under (you know Brad,) Brad's got this garden, apparently. Up in Data Quality we've got this thing called the Snack Alley, where I used to work before they moved me to Main Street. You know Snack Alley. Brad, see, his cubicle is right next to Snack Alley. He can peek over the cubicle wall down to the Snack Table, to see if there's any of what he calls "temptation food." And occasionally, apparently, he offers his own contribution to the table.

   It could have been any amount of time ago; I think I remember it being a month or so from when I write this. It's in my journal, but I don't have that on me. He's got a garden, apparently, and this year's crop of zucchini had been particularly profitable. By the time he got to the center of the patch this year, his zucchini had had so much time to grow, that after all this time, when he finally got into the center, there it sat.

   The Zucchini.

   Actual estimates to its size and weight vary, and have grown to legendary proportions over time. No accurate measurements were ever made. To my knowledge. Maybe Brad himself knows; I don't know. What is generally agreed upon is that it weighed at the minimum 15-20 pounds. I'm not sure what the average weight for a zucchini is supposed to be, or if that's particularly heavy for a zucchini, but I'm trying to stick to the facts here. 

   I think maybe that's why big fish stories were invented. Everything's so much more extreme up close, sometimes you paradoxically need to exaggerate the facts in order to be true to life. More is more. In this instance, though, less is more, so I'm sticking with that estimate. 15-20 pounds.

   And it was fun to heft, too. My companion and I got more total exercise in those couple of weeks that we had that thing, than in the entirety of the our missions up to that point.

   All photographs of me actually hefting the Zucchini itself make me look really ugly, so I'm not going to show those here. Maybe it'd be anticlimactic of me to publish a picture of the Zucchini at all, after all that buildup. But maybe it won't be. (I'm not sure; a zucchini of that size is no longer outside the realms of my experience, so I've got nothing to compare it to.) I'm going to do it; if anyone out there can say "I've seen bigger," well... nnnng. Remember, though, the ideal zucchini is more or less indistinguishable from a cucumber from the outside.

   (That thing was hard to cut.) And on the inside, with another, average zucchini on the side for comparison of size (and to prove that it was in fact a zucchini and not some other squash variety.)

   Yep, that's clearly the same species, alright.