In case you ever wondered what a walnut fruit looks like before it’s husked, shelled and the nutmeats turned into pies and such, here you go. This picture is from a young tree in our backyard that is producing fruit for the first time and as such I was deeply confused as to what sort of thing it might be, but as it turns out the Internets had the answer. Oh, Internets. You always have everything.

I reached 20,000 Twitter followers last night and I had mentioned a while back that when I reached that plateau I’d do something special for the folks over there to say thanks. So I wrote a short story and posted it over there, using TweetDeck’s “Deck.Ly” service.

Having done that, however, I want to also have a version of the story that is better formatted than Deck.Ly’s terrible default formatting, and also isn’t archived on a site over which I have absolutely no control, so I’m also posting it here. You’ll find it below. For people visiting the site’s front page, it’s behind a cut; for those of you following on RSS, well. Hi, have a huge block of text!

Fun fact: the story is just over 2,000 words long, but in a nod to Twitter, each individual sentence in the story is less than 140 characters. Which is to say it would have been entirely possible to tweet the whole thing, one sentence at a time. I didn’t, because that would have been vaguely obnoxious. But it’s the thought that counts. Also, the subject matter was taken from suggestions from my Twitter feed last night. Blame them.

So, with that said, enjoy “The Other Large Thing.”

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