Upside down

dn ǝpıs ʇɥbıɹ*

So, I’ve been wondering about this for a few years. My family is sick of hearing about it. At the risk of looking crazier than I already do, I’m going to go ahead and see if any of you have become aware of this phenomenon.

Have you noticed that people—restaurants, that is—are making sandwiches upside down now?

Not every place, I’m sure, but enough so that I can call it a phenomenon. I’m talking mainly about fast food franchises, but I’ve noticed it in some more upscale places.

Once upon a time, in my giddy youth, if you ordered a burger it came in the following order:

Bottom half of the bun
Burger
Lettuce
Tomato
Pickle
Other garnishes
Top half of the bun with whatever condiment was requested or usual (Special Sauce, anyone?)

And when I first started buying roast beef subs at Subway, it was kind of the same thing. The roll was split down the middle. The roast beef went on the side closest to the bottom of the roll, and all the extras went on the side closest to the top of the roll.

When you ate your sandwich, the taste buds at the top of your mouth dealt with all the flavors of all the extras, while the bottom of your mouth savored the meat of the matter.

But now, it’s all backwards. And it happened quite suddenly. One day, all my sandwiches were right side up, and the next they were being assembled upside down.

I don’t understand it.

What could possibly be the reason for this?

Is there something intrinsically less expensive in building a burger backwards? Surely a lettuce leaf costs the same whether it is on the top or the bottom of the sandwich? Is it more efficient to layer in this—let’s be honest—wrong order? But, really, how much faster can it be to slap a tomato on one side than the other?

I think it’s the thin edge of the wedge. A slippery slope. Standards are slipping. People aren’t doing things right anymore.

Or maybe, it’s a symbol of a new freedom. We are no longer to be bounded by outmoded conventions. Put that pickle anywhere you want! (Somehow, that didn’t really come out the way I meant it.)

I don’t know whether to be happy or disturbed by this turn of events. I do know that my mouth is confused. I’ve tried to go with the flow, and eat my burgers however they are handed to me, but it just doesn’t work.

Old dog. New tricks. You see the problem.

I’ve taken to rebuilding my sandwiches on the spot. Sometimes, I even just turn them over, and eat them upside down.

But I sure do wonder.

* upside down text courtesy of fliptext.com

Words matter.

They have meanings.

And you can make that work in your favor.

That’s the tip for today.

Stop worrying about a “deadline.” How about trying to reach the “finish line,” instead?

Does it have to be such a horrible, scary thing? Horror movie scary? Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Dead Ringers.

What’s the drop dead date? we used to say at work. Meaning the absolute, unequivocal, unbreakable deadline.

Who wants to drop dead?

Not me.

Finish line makes me think of success. Most of the time, when I think of crossing the finish line, I think of coming in first. (Well, really, only when I think of somebody else crossing the finish line. I never came in first in my life.) Coming in first is success in anybody’s book.

Even if you don’t come in first, crossing the finish line means you finished the race. That’s an achievement in itself. You stayed the course. You finished.

A finish line is something you race toward. It’s not something that looms over you, something the clock ticks toward with the inevitability and concomitant dread of an armed explosive device.

Plus, one definition of “finish” is “a highly developed state of perfection; having a flawless or impeccable quality.” I’d sure like to achieve that in my writing, wouldn’t you?

Shiny, polished, finished.

I’m not setting any deadlines any more. I’m going to be crossing finish lines.

No avian fatalities

Fair flying weather for the feathered flock.

I cleaned my windows three days ago, and there have been no avian fatalities. It’s a miracle!

The thing about the windows is that they sort of act like mirrors. When they are clean, they reflect the surrounding trees and sky. The birds can’t see them. So, the moment when the windows have first been cleaned is the moment of maximum danger. It almost makes me not want to clean the windows.

Almost.

But part of what makes Casa Lagarto such a great house is the view. And you can’t see the view if you can’t see out the windows. (Although to be fair, I didn’t realize how dirty they were until I cleaned them. However. . .)

I cleaned them on Friday. It’s not a bad job. As long as the weather is reasonably warm, and you don’t mind getting soaked. I’ve got a long extension pole and a squeegee and a divided bucket. A little dish soap, a little elbow grease—actually, shoulder muscles are more relevant than elbows—and it gets done. The hardest part are the ones on the second story because that’s really the limit of the extension pole. The whole operation is shaky at that point. But, I persevered, and the outside of all my windows are now sparkling clean—with, it must be confessed, assorted streaks.

Could it be the streaks that have protected the birds?

No. There aren’t that many streaks. No more than on previous occasions when we did have some serious collisions. Twice, birds have knocked themselves out. One—an ibis—sat on the grass afterwards for so long that I even called the bird rescue team. I was given specific instructions on how to safely pick up the bird to move it somewhere safe from predators pending collection by the rehabilitators. When we went to do it, however, the bird pulled itself together and flew away.

It was a traumatic experience for everyone concerned—except, maybe, the bird rescue people who didn’t actually have to do anything. I suppose, though, that was a miracle, too. Just like the one that is keeping them out of harm’s way now.

And, every day, the windows get less clean and less dangerous.

Fingers and feathers crossed.

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

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants