What I learned about pumpkin carving

at the pumpkin carving party.

Yesterday, we carved pumpkins. Here’s what I learned.

It’s good to get the little kids to scoop out the innards. Their hands fit, and they don’t mind the essential ookiness of pumpkin guts. (Well, 50% of them don’t mind. 1 out of 2. The pumpkins got emptied.)

The pumpkin carving tools sold at the Halloween store are useless. The plastic awl breaks. The plastic lever breaks. The scoops are too small. The saw must be handled very, very carefully, or it will break. (You’re not going to hand a tiny saw to a four-year-old anyway. Go get some real tools!)

You don’t actually need any creative ability anymore. There are templates. Any reasonably persistent and averagely coordinated adult can turn out a jack-o-lantern of amazing artistry.

You can have daytime pumpkins and nighttime pumpkins. The daytime pumpkins are like Mr. Potato Heads with foam felt features, all pre-cut with stick-on adhesive. All you need to do is poke strategic holes in your pumpkin for the insertion of pipe cleaners (now known, for some unfathomable reason, as “chenille”).

Little kids do better with the daytime pumpkins. Like I said, you’re not going to hand a tiny saw to a four-year-old. So, guess who’s really doing the carving? (Not me. I put the ears on the pirate and the bubble-gum balloon in the princess’s mouth. FYI, the self-stick stuff doesn’t stick well to pumpkins. I suggest Elmer’s Glue as a fall-back position.)

We ended up with a pirate, a princess and a cat in the daytime pumpkin category. The nighttime baton will be carried by a Frankenstein, a carved cat, and an old-fashioned freestyle jack-o-lantern.

A final word of advice. If you have free-roaming bunnies, you might want to put the pumpkins on the porch closer to Halloween.

I’m just sayin’.

Learn something new

Every day.

It keeps you young.

I read that somewhere.

Sort of hoping it’s true, because I have been invited to a pumpkin carving today. By my first cousins twice-removed.

Now I am going to help you learn something. First cousins, twice removed, means that my grandparents were their great-grandparents. I know that’s what they are called because I have a lot of cousins. A lot of cousins. And, once upon a time, my mom gave me this handy-dandy relationship chart, when I was doing some genealogical research, so that I could get the terminology right.

All that is actually beside the point, however.

The point is that I have been invited to a pumpkin carving by my little first cousins, twice removed.

I don’t think I have ever actually carved a pumpkin in my life.

And my little first cousins, twice removed, are somewhere south of six-years-old. (I don’t know their exact ages. What do you want from me? I know they are twice removed!)

Being south of six, I’m guessing that most of the carving is going to be done by the adults in the room. This could be. . .interesting. The problem, as I see it, is that the pumpkin is actually supposed to look like something when you are done carving it. I’m guessing that dadaism is unlikely to be appreciated.

Oh, well.

You’re supposed to learn something new.

Every day.

I guess today is my day for pumpkins.

You might have had to be there.

But maybe not.

I found this video. And I’m laughing and laughing. You won’t understand why, probably, unless you were a fan of the groundbreaking television series Cagney & Lacey.

Cagney & Lacey was the first, and quite possibly, the only tv show to have ever been brought back from cancellation by its fans’ campaigns on its behalf. It ran for seven seasons from 1981 to 1988, it enjoyed an uninterrupted and unmatched six year winning streak of Best Lead Actress Emmys for its two stars, and when it finally left the airwaves, it came back in four separate reunion movies.

I think it was also the first show where the two main characters were women. Previously, almost all dramas would center on one or more male leads, a couple of supporting men, and a token woman. As if one woman was enough to represent all women. As if there were no differences among women. As if the defining characteristic of any woman was that she was a woman.

And then we got Cagney and Lacey.

Two completely different women. In the same show.

Smart scripts. Extraordinary performances by Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless.

Let me say that again.

Extraordinary.

Fully-realized, three-dimensional, very real characters who changed and grew and suffered and thrived—and solved crimes! It was a police procedural that took on big issues—women’s rights, career vs. family, police corruption, love and loyalty and friendship. No other show I have seen has ever struck and maintained the balance this one did between the professional and the personal.

It had a great supporting cast, but the center was always Cagney and Lacey, Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless.

I loved it! And I still love it in the few DVDs that are available.

But what I’m laughing about today is this video I found of Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless singing at a 1999 benefit. If you were a fan of Cagney & Lacey, you’ll probably agree that it’s hilarious. If you weren’t, you might enjoy it anyway. If not, go get the DVDs. Watch a few episodes. Then come back.

Either way, here’s the link:

Sharon Gless & Tyne Daly Sing

Aaaagh!

The unbelievable gardening accident that ended well.

I hope.

I spent some time weeding one of my flower beds yesterday. It’s finally gotten cool enough that a person can stand being outside more than absolutely necessary. So, I’ve been catching up on my weeding, a little at a time, over the past week.

I have these flower beds—although why I’m calling them flower beds when only 2 of them have actual flowers is something we can examine later. Anyway, I have these flower beds. There are about 7 of them. Two feet wide or so. Running along the length of various portions of the house, with concrete borders.

A while back, we bought some large river rock to use as—what?—a sort of ground cover. In lieu of mulch. I’ll say this for the river rock. It makes it easy to see what’s a weed and what isn’t. Because there’s not much else planted in these beds.

We have some larger, shrub-like plants, a vinca, a ton of canna lilies, a couple of spider lilies and a hydrangea. In the back, there’s a begonia, in a pot, sitting on top of the rocks, and a flowering shade plant whose name I cannot remember and which has yet to grow more than an inch or show any sign of flowering. Anything else green that pokes its head up through the rocks is a weed.

I like that. Knowledge is not required. See a green thing. Pull it up.

But yesterday, this lack of knowledge could have had some disastrous consequences for a baby lizard.

What happened is this.

I was weeding. Specifically, I was pulling up dollar weed. This is something of a losing battle. In a defined area, however, it is possible to eliminate visible signs for a while. If you are careful, you can also pull up a fair length of the subterranean runners. They are tubular and white.

So, when I found a small round white ball, I thought it had something to do with the dollar weed. I picked it up. And then I dropped it. By accident.

Imagine my surprise at seeing a wet and slimy baby lizard clinging to a rock after the round white ball—otherwise known as an egg—broke open.

Imagine my horror at realizing I had just played midwife to a lizard—and caused a premature delivery.

Imagine my relief when the slimy little thing dried out and scuttled away.

I’m not enamored of lizards, but they are harmless and amusing, and I don’t want to kill them if they can manage to stay outside—which, so far, most of them have. Even if they come inside, I try to have the MotH catch and release. (Haven’t quite gotten there myself. Maybe someday.)

So, I’m thankful that the lizard seemed okay after our mutual shocking experience.

Next time I see one of those small white balls, I’m leaving it strictly alone.

What is it…

…with me and doormats?

That’s what I’m wondering.

When we lived in New York, we had an odd thing happen with our doormat. One day, it was just missing. Gone.

Who would steal a doormat?

That’s what we asked ourselves.

It was kind of a nuisance, but no big loss. It wasn’t like we had invested a lot of money, time or thought into choosing the doormat. We just shook our heads over the astonishing triviality of the theft and went about our day.

Next time we crossed our threshhold, the doormat was back.

What could this mean? Was someone playing a particularly pointless prank? Was the building’s porter moving it when he mopped the floor? Moving it out of sight?

We had no idea. A day or two went by, and then the doormat went missing again. It continued to vanish and return at odd intervals.

Eventually, we discovered that a homeless man was entering the building late on cold nights, collecting doormats and carrying them up to the stair landing next to the door to the roof. I guess they made some sort of bed, and he carefully returned them to their rightful doors in the morning. And, as usually happens, eventually he moved on—to a better place, as they say—which may or may not have been of this world.

Now, I live in Florida.

And my doormat has taken to moving in the night. Again.

It’s not disappearing. And heaven knows, it’s not cold enough for any homeless person to need it as insulation. It’s just migrating a foot or two.

Is it bears? An armadillo? A lizard the size of a Buick?

Maybe it’s a raccoon, or a dog with a strange liking or disliking for doormats. (If it’s a squirrel, that’s it. I will get that water cannon if it’s the last thing I do.)

I see no possibility of solving the mystery without time-lapse video.

But I’m wondering.

That’s redundant

And a good thing, too.

Yesterday, I was talking about how I got lucky with a computer crash and how that luck was based on preparation. So, today, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about what those preparations were—and are.

First, hang on to all installation disks. If you download a program from the internet, copy the installation file to a CD or a DVD. And don’t forget the operating system. My laptop has a built-in system recovery feature. A portion of the hard drive is set aside to store the installation files. That wasn’t anything I did. That’s how it came. It’s not my preferred method, though, because who is to say the drive itself won’t crash. Often, a disabled hard drive can be resuscitated by a complete reformat. At that point, you’d need the installation disks. In my case, there are no disks for the operating system. I won’t make that mistake with any future purchase. A recovery partition is great. I won’t turn it down. But I want the installation disks for the operating system, too.

Second, backup all your data. All your word processing documents, all your videos, all your photos, all your databases, spreadsheets, everything. Back it up twice. Keep one backup offsite, if possible. Sure, a set in your desk drawer is great if your hard drive crashes. What if your house burns down?

I used to leave a backup at my mom’s house. Hard drives got bigger, and it became impractical, both in terms of time spent and DVDs used. Now, I use Carbonite. For a low yearly fee, Carbonite backs up a single local hard drive to their remote servers. If you change a file, a new version gets backed up. It happens in the background. After the initial backup, it happens quickly, quietly and without slowing down your computer. I highly recommend it. (Just remember it’s not an archive service. What Carbonite is doing is synchronizing your hard drive with files on their server. If you delete something, they will too—after a specified period, of course, because what good’s a backup if you can’t restore things you’ve accidentally erased?)

I also use Second Copy. It works in much the same way as Carbonite, except that it’s making a local copy—to an internal or external drive or to another PC on your network. There’s no yearly fee. You buy the software, install it, and that’s it (unless you decide to upgrade to a newer version at some point). I use it to synchronize the files on my laptop with those on my desktop machine as well as to make a backup to an external USB drive.

At any given moment, I’ve got three copies of my data in my office and one in the cloud. Could I still lose it all? Sure. But, at that point, I think we’re all gonna have bigger problems.

My point—and my tip for this Tuesday—is that bits and bytes are fragile. Do you know where your backups are?

Luck

Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.*

Or, sometimes, necessity.

My laptop crashed last week. Just refused to boot up. “Missing or corrupt system file.”

Dead. Dead. Door nail dead.

Today, I am writing this blog post on that same laptop.

I got lucky. But I planned to be lucky.

Today’s Monday Miracle is two-fold. It wasn’t a total hardware failure, and I was able to recover from the crash because I had the sense to be prepared for it when it came.

First, I had all of my installation disks for all of my software. Second, I had a record of all the product keys and serial numbers that so many of them insist you enter when you try to reinstall. Third, I had two complete and current backups of all my data. Fourth, this happened once before—a number of years ago.

I can’t even remember whether the prior crash was this laptop or the previous one. The point is I have experience. And I took notes. So, I knew what to do.

I lost some time, but nothing else.

My question to you today is are you going to plan to be lucky? Or are you going to cross your fingers and hope everything always works out okay? (There’s a guy named Murphy that will give you good odds on that one.)

It’s not just about computers.

Do you get the oil changed in your car? Do you know how to change a flat tire? Does somebody have an extra key to your living space? Have you thought about making and filing a copy of everything in your wallet? Is your resumé up to date? Do you have an emergency fund? Insurance policies?

Are you reading something every day about the industry that you’re in or that you want to join? Have you stretched yourself lately? Learned a new skill? Added some new people to your network? Re-connected with some old acquaintances?

If something unforeseen happened—good or bad—are you equipped to leverage the good and minimize the bad?

Luck doesn’t just happen. Unless you’ve got a winning lottery ticket—and even then, you had to buy it.

* Seneca

Transplants

A 50/50 chance.

I re-potted some plants yesterday.

It was kind of a mass promotion. With less mayhem than in the days when the British army would toast “to bloody wars and dread diseases.” I’ve also heard that it was the British Navy and the toast was “to bloody wars and sickly seasons.” It meant, of course, that the officers had no hope of promotion unless there was an opening above them. Since superior officers retiring, by definition, required years, the fastest route to higher rank would be someone else’s death.

Fortunately—and somewhat astonishingly—none of my plants had to die in order for several of them to move up in pot size.

Oh! Wait! That’s not true. The tomato plant!

The tomato plant did yeoman service throughout the summer. But it went the way of all tomato plants—or, at least, any that I’ve ever owned. Yield tapered off. The leaves turned yellow. The stalks dried out.

I dug it up.

Which left me with a very large pot.

I never planted the tomato plant in the ground because I have the illusion that container gardening will require fewer insect encounters than in-ground gardening.

For a while, I left the pot empty. I did set my chrysanthemum on it—the one that became such a baroque resting place for the lizard—but I left it in the small container in which it came and just set it on top of the dirt in the larger pot.

I had a vague plan that, eventually, I would either plant the chrysanthemum in the large pot or transplant the Northern Lights grass into it. This is the kind of vague plan that can evaporate due to lack of initiative and an unwillingness to murder defenseless flora. (I’m not good with plants.)

However, I was weeding one of my flower beds the day before yesterday (I’m good with weeds), and I found several shoots of vinca in places where I did not want them. The vinca has proven to be very hardy—by which I mean I haven’t killed it yet. So, it seemed like careful extraction of these shoots and re-potting them might be a good idea.

Ergo, everybody moved up. It was a game of musical chairs—without the music and without the chairs. The Northern Lights went into the very large pot. The chrysanthemum went into the medium pot. And the vinca shoots went into smaller pots.

Sounds a little like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, doesn’t it? I wonder which pot will prove to be “just right.” Odds are against all three of them making it.

I’m a transplant myself, you know. Putting down new roots is hard.

I’m so bummed!

But I’ll get over it.

I’m bummed because I have been faithfully blogging every day since June 10th. Every day!

It was a little goal I set for myself. Start a blog. Write every day.

For four months, I have been meeting that goal.

Thursday, however, something went wrong.

I wrote a post on Wednesday night. I looked it over. Spell-checked. Proofread. Formatted. And I thought I scheduled it. But last night, when I logged in to work on a post for today, I discovered it sitting there with a big bold “Draft” label on it.

Oh, it had the right date and time listed where the schedule information appears, but something happened. I must have neglected to push the button that would switch it from a draft to a scheduled post. I thought I did. I even think I saw the post appear in my inbox. (Yes, I subscribe to my own blog. How else am I going to know if something goes wrong with the delivery system?) Apparently, I was seeing things, however, and it never went out.

So, today, you may get two posts. Because a person can’t waste a perfectly good blog post, can she?

But my perfect record is spoiled.

Sigh.

This is a very dangerous moment. It’s like having a piece of birthday cake for the first time since you started your diet six weeks ago. If you let it become this big failure, you figure you might as well eat the whole cake.

Oops. Failed to meet the standard I set for myself. Missed a blog post. No point in continuing.

Or, you can decide that a piece of cake during a celebration is not a terrible lapse. You can eat salad tomorrow.

So, I’m bummed. And a little annoyed with myself for not double-checking. (Rushing to watch the VP debate–but that’s no excuse.) On the other hand, there are far bigger tragedies in the world. Far bigger.

A 14-year old girl was shot by a bunch of religious thugs because she wanted an education.

Yes, it’s important to adhere to goals and maintain standards. On the other hand, my message to myself today is to keep a sense of proportion.

14-years old. She wanted an education. They shot her in the head.

My little blogging error doesn’t seem like such a big deal, does it?

The most amazing thing has happened

I can draw!

I’m no da Vinci, but I’m sitting here with a couple of semi-respectable drawings.

It’s all thanks to this website I found: Drawspace.com

Drawspace offers over 200 free lessons in how to draw, and they’re pretty good. I’ve been working my way through the beginner level, and I’ve learned some stuff. I’ve managed some pretty good anime drawings, assorted simple cartoons, a decent line drawing of a fish and an awesome hand.

I’m not so good with lips. They all look like an alien spaceship or something you’d expect to come out of the Little Shop of Horrors, but I think I’ll improve.

Eyes are also a hit or miss proposition just now. Conceivably, I’d do better with some actual drawing materials rather than a #2 pencil and the back side of laser printer paper. I’m going to look into that now that I am not the artistic failure all previous art classes led me to believe.

I’m not saying I’ll ever be da Vinci, but I’m having fun. Someday, I might be able to leave the sample drawings behind, and sketch something recognizable out of my own little head. Wouldn’t that be something?

It just goes to show that taking the time to work at a thing and paying attention to how it’s done is half the battle. Because if I can draw, I figure just about anybody can.

You should check out Drawspace.com. But be warned! Drawing practice is as much a time sink as Facebook—and that’s saying something.

So far, I’ve been very disciplined. I’ve managed to keep up with my workouts and my yard work and some other commitments I’ve made. But the housework is starting to slip down the scale. And the writing has tended toward the bottom of the pile for the last few months (years?) anyway.

That will have to stop.

But in the meantime, I think one creative endeavor usually feeds another—and, besides, I can draw!

Who knew?!

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Monthly Archives: October 2012