All Washed Up

Hello World, Happy Autumn! For all of us residents of the Northern Hemisphere, we observed the Autumnal Equinox on Thursday, where just like its vernal counterpart in March, the daylight and night time hours are exactly the same length. I would say that "it's all downhill from here," but in actuality, the days have already been getting incrementally shorter all along, since the Summer Solstice in June, which marks the longest day (in terms of daylight hours) of the year. Around here, the summer has resolutely refused to loosen its grip, with temperatures hovering around 90 degrees on many days, practically all the way through the entire month of September, and wilting humidity on top of it all, thanks not. If it keeps up like this, I expect the big Halloween costumes this year to be the cast from "Baywatch," with skimpy swimsuits and flip-flops, and neighbors throwing ice water on the trick-or-treaters, the way they do at marathons. Suntan lotion, anyone? In other seasonal news (or perhaps this is a season whose time has not yet come, and frankly, may never come, I dare say) I'm sure that alert readers may have noticed, but were too polite to cast aspersions, on one of my previous notes from a couple of weeks ago. Our crack research staff went to great lengths to describe how The Flag Brigade staunchly flies the colors, weather permitting, for Memorial Day, Flag Day, July 4th, and Labor Day during the warmer months, before retiring them back to their regular posts indoors for the remainder of the year. This seemed rudimentary enough to explain, but - alas and alack! - the scourge of modern technology stepped in at precisely the wrong moment, and made a hash out of the business, entirely on its own initiative. What started out originally as that great American holiday, Independence Day (obviously mis-spelled slightly, but not egregiously so) ended up in the final version as the completely fictitious "Impendence Day," and I don't mind saying, thank you so very much not, auto-correct. Webster's College Dictionary defines "impendence" as: something that is imminent, about to happen, or near at hand, and I have no quarrel with their interpretation in any way. Personally, I blame the Microsoft spell-checker in Notepad for misconstruing my typing error of "Inpendence Day," and blithely substituting the comically ridiculous "Impendence Day" in the place of what clearly should have been "Independence Day" instead. So a great big fat virtual raspberry to the inept minions behind the MSN auto-correct feature (and a failing grade to our crack research staff on their faulty proof-reading) for making me the laughingstock of cyberspace, even more than usual, and no way to blame this on the usual culprits of Comrade Mischka, the evil spirit of Affirmed, or our old friends the dinosaurs, try as I might. Frankly, if this is the best they can do with artificial intelligence after all this time, I'm not as worried about robots taking over the world as I used to be, and that goes double for HAL and Daisy on a bicycle built for two in 2001. On the local scene, for anyone who may have wondered - and well may they wonder, indeed - whatever happened with the other couple that we were trying to meet for dinner last month, and instead went to two different Italian restaurants on the same street, here's an update. Not leaving anything to chance, the four of us put our heads together to come up with another date in our busy schedules, and then they invited us over to their house, rather than trying to meet up somewhere out there in the big, bad world, where anything can happen, let's face it. This time we had no trouble getting all four of us together in the same place at the same time, and our hosts greeted us warmly with steaming plates piled high with lasagna and garlic bread, which we happily devoured, and not by half-measures, believe me. There were also ice cream sundaes for dessert, and we made short work of those as well - and even better yet still, they sent us home loaded down with left-overs, so we had even more to enjoy at another time. We were glad for the chance to right a wrong from our busted dinner date in August, and this certainly worked a whole lot better now than it did back then, and you can believe me when I say that a good time was had by all, including their resident feline, her majesty Princess Ella, her own royal self. Although it must be said that it doesn't make nearly as good a story in retrospect, as the slapstick classic mistaken identity restaurant mix-up, which we are still laughing about to this day. In an interesting coincidence, I was looking through some miscellaneous papers in the den last week (old bills, junk mail, copies of church reports, catalogs and the like) when I stumbled across a menu from Carlo's restaurant, which they had carefully mailed to us last year (actually, it was addressed to RESIDENT, but we kept it anyway) and ended up in this loose pile of effluvium heaped on the far corner of the desk. It's only funny now because Carlo's was the Italian restaurant where our friends showed up on the ill-fated dinner date in August, while we were up the block at La Villa Brick Oven Pizzeria instead, and I had been saying all along that Carlo's was a place that I had never heard of, and had no idea that it was even there to start with. So obviously, their going to all the trouble to send us a menu did not have the impact that they might have been hoping for (and that's putting it mildly) and finding it now added just one more absurdist element to an anecdote that was already pretty darned absurd as it was, and I ought to know. And speaking of absurd things, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up this last tidbit, that would make even the least discerning among us shake our heads and wonder. It all began innocently enough, as these things so often do, when I needed to take in the ruby red rocket, Captain Scarlett, for its annual inspection, or know the reason why. For decades, Bill and I had all of our automotive needs serviced at the same small neighborhood place, by our exceptional mechanic extraordinaire, until he retired (and well-deserved, I might add) after years of faithful, yeoman service at all hours of the day and night, and in weather that would make a Russian trawler pilot blanch at the prospect. At that point, his son took over the business and tried his best to make a go of it, until he finally threw in the towel and gave it up as a lost cause. The station was taken over by Tariq, who our mechanic's son assured us was highly qualified and reputable, so we had nothing to worry about on that score. Previously the business was not certified for car inspections, and our mechanic would send us around the corner to his cousins for that (which I don't mind saying, was more of a hit-or-miss proposition than we would have preferred) but the new ownership had other ideas. In order to be approved for inspections, it was necessary to increase the square footage, and they accomplished this by removing a few walls in the office, which heretofore had hidden some of the more unsightly aspects of the operation from the general public in the waiting area. Now that everything was wide open to view, there was no disguising the bathroom in plain sight - and which, in fact, you can now see directly from the street in front of the place, like it or not, which I might not consider an improvement over the previous arrangement, to be honest. My favorite part was the big sign right next to the bathroom door, which announced in blaring type for all the world to see - ================ EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS ================ And here I'm thinking, heck, the employees would be coming out of the bathroom and going into the shop full of grease, grime, muck, and grit, so you would think the very last thing anybody would care about was whether they washed their hands or not. In fact, it would make more sense to ask them to wash their hands BEFORE going into the bathroom, rather than after they came back out again, as far as I can tell. Then again, we all know that cleanliness is a virtue, and virtue is its own reward, so I won't quibble with their dogged pursuit of good hygiene practices. I think it was Nathan Hale who once famously said, "I regret that I have but two clean hands to give for my country," and let's face it, without him and the rest of the Founding Fathers, we wouldn't even have Impendence Day in the first place, by George. Elle