Captain's Log, Day 31: The ANSWER!!!

          42.

          Sorry, couldn't resist that. The deliberation has ended, and I think I'm going to see for how long I can write every day. With such a goal in mind, I present...

                                        The Pirates of the Minnesotan

          "Hey, who took my sword?"

          "Jack Sparrow" chucks a bicycle away from the wall in a futile search for her missing weapon. Captain "Skywalker" holds the carefully crafted duct-tape-and-fence-post sword out to her. "You left it over by the basketball hoop."

          Jack gratefully accepts the weapon, then wags a finger at the captain. "There are no basketball hoops on a pirate ship!"

          "Ben Sparrow" comes up, lugging a purloined tarp and enough rope to hang a dozen sails. "Shall we hoist canvas, sir?"

          Captain Skywalker shades his eyes and looks up at the ceiling of the barn. "Looks like a clear day for sailing...yep, raise the sails!"

          "You're the only one who can do that," Jack reminds him.

          With a sigh, Captain Skywalker begins unloading his weapons, remarking, "That captain shouldn't have to hoist sails, you know."

          Ben looks quizzically at the growing pile of self-constructed weapons; three wooden daggers, a fiberglass-fence-post rapier, two wooden sabers, a metal dirk, a wood-and-PVC-pipe pistol, a duct-tape-and-wood pistol, and a wooden rifle. "Are you going to start a war?"

          Jack grins. "Of course!" She hands Skywalker a corner of the tarp and a rope. He promptly shoves both in his mouth and jumps, catching one of the rafters that joined to the wall. Hooking his legs over it, he begins slowly inching his way up the sloped underside. Once he gets about fifteen feet above the floor of the barn, he carefully removes the tarp corner and rope from his mouth and proceeds to tie them fast to the rafter, one-handed.

          Once he inches back down the rafter and jumps back down to the ground, the three siblings cross over to the other side of the barn and repeat the process. A makeshift "sail" now hangs from the rafter on the two slanted sides. Skywalker reburdens himself with his instruments of minimum destruction and runs over to the wheel of the ship (a bicycle wheel lashed to a small basketball hoop, at such a height that the only way to reach it is by climbing on top of the small playhouse, the roof of which serves as the poop deck anyway). Spinning it around, he yells, "Sail ho! Prepare to fire the guns!"

          His shipmates promptly run to opposite walls of the barn and stare hard at the wooden surface as they pretend to be scanning the ocean for the ships. "They're coming up fast!" Jack reports. "It's the Royal Navy!"

          The captain thinks for a moment. "Let them board us! We'll fight them on deck!" He draws his sabers, overbalances and falls off the playhouse. 

          Then the enemy is there. To anyone unpossessed of an active imagination, it would look like the three siblings had completely lost their minds as they yelled and danced about, waving their crudely shaped swords; when in actuality, an entire shipload of the best that the Royal Navy had to offer was being thoroughly trounced. Once the crew ran out of breath, the enemy ship was "seen" in full retreat, allowing the bragging to begin in earnest. 

          Then the crew "docked" in a port, charged into a small village consisting of one house, raided the kitchen and made off with some cheese and crackers, and returned to their ship for a quick snack before they made a treasure map and buried their loot, to be dug up by a very confused family dog three days later.

*Captain's Note: I was obsessed with Star Wars back then, hence the name "Skywalker." Also, my sister took the name Jack Sparrow before I could lay claim to it. My brother liked the name Ben, so he decided to be Ben Sparrow. Whatever floats our boat, I guess...pun intended.