After dropping off Lydia at playschool, but before going into the office, I was driving around the southeast side of town looking for the ice cream truck, because I want to lowjack it with a GPS unit and put it on Google Maps (I can’t believe I’m the only one to want to do this; Google doesn’t have news of others.) How come when you’re NOT looking for the ice-cream truck, you see it ALL the time, but when you ARE, you can never track it down?

Anyhow, I’m pretty sure that it parks somewhere down near Bolmar street, so I stopped in at Good Will Fire Company to ask those guys if they knew where the ice cream truck was (you never know, firefighters might be huge ice-cream truck customers, right?)

There was nobody at the front door, and nobody answered the intercom. So I walked around back; one of the big garage doors was open and two fellows — one a uniformed police officer with a grey buzzcut, and one a rangy, athletic-looking fellow in a T-shirt, were, you know, just tinkering on their ALL-PURPOSE FIBER-OPTIC-CONTROLLED RESCUE ROBOT. With caterpillar treads and a big gripping hook on the front. And spotlights. And video cameras.

They did not seem to mind being interrupted (phew!) working on a kink in the orange fiber-optic control/video cable, and said "sure" I could take a picture of it, but they were shy about being in the picture (I do not think this is because they are Secret Operatives or anything.) Anyhow, any morning when you stumble across a Rescue Robot is an awesome morning.

Then — and this is the best part of all — the officer then TOOK MY NAME AND TELEPHONE NUMBER, and promised to call me if he saw the ice cream truck. So, this morning, I:

1) Stumbled across a fiber-optic rescue robot, and
2) PUT OUT AN APB ON AN ICE CREAM TRUCK.

When people tell me "is it nice working in West Chester"? I just sputter. I mean, I cannot satisfactorially express THIS AMOUNT OF AWESOME in one sitting. MOVE TO WEST CHESTER IMMEDIATELY, everybody I know. Pretty soon, the ice cream will be easy to find!