By A Tower magazine (Scanned cover of pulp magazine) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
My mom, in the last few years, has taken up photography. I’ve always enjoyed it, my dad got into it a long time ago, and then suddenly my mom decided she wanted to be Annie Leibovitz. So she’s jumped into into it with both lenses and as a consequence, has many photos.
But hadn’t exactly devised a system to keep them straight.
So yesterday she was looking for a specific group of photos but couldn’t find them. Anywhere. And my dad, resident IT person, couldn’t figure out where they’d gone either. While we were talking on the phone, my mom said she unearthed one.
“Great,” I said, “right-click it and find the properties.” Find the file path, find the photos. The plan couldn’t fail.
“I’d moved it to another folder, the rest aren’t here.” Plan failed.
“Huh,” I told her. “You handled the evidence with your bare hands and now we can’t collect DNA.”
Alas.
But I was determined, and in exchange for promised lemon-ricotta pancakes, I vowed to find the photos. I’ve written a mystery, how hard could it be to solve one in real life?
Well, yeah.
After collecting on the pancakes (delicious, by the way), and dealing with my own technical issues (far less glamorous), I endeavored to uphold my end of the deal. A deal’s a deal, after all.
I settled in before her computer. I tried organizing by date. Nope.
I tried searching by date. Nope.
“There,” she said “that’s where I copied them.” I narrowed my eyes at the photos in the folder. An idea dawned.
“Are those all from the same batch?” I asked.
“Yes,” she told me.
Using the handy search box that bleached itself white in the last update for reasons unknown to all except those who hate corneas, I looked for an image name one number below one in the file.
Bingo.
That picture came up. A right click on properties told me exactly where it was hiding.
Gotcha, elusive photos.
I turned to my mom, who was now aglow with relief. “You destroyed the DNA evidence, but we still had fingerprints.”
(Dramatic music).
Case closed.
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Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)
Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended)
The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.
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Happy Monday, friends! It arrives no matter how we feel about it, so we might as well greet it nicely, and maybe it will be nice to us.
I was a little girl, there was the persistent belief that you could make a wish by blowing on a dandelion. As an adult, I can now see that the only wishes likely granted that way were the wishes of the dandelion to spread its weediness far and wide, but seeing these the other day made me think about the nature of wishes.
A Bit to Read 