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Four Lizard Day

It always amazes me the sorts of things that come to define a city. In the midwest, for example, you get used to squirrels. They become background, like cellphone conversations or that guy who always follows me to my bus stop on Thursdays.

But what defines my summer city isn't the insane taxis, like in Chicago, or the tiny cars, like in the UK. What fixes this place in my memory is the lizards.

I've always equated lizards with tropics for some reason, but they're everywhere here. The first two we saw, clambering around on our front porch like fetal dinosaurs, surprised us to the point that we named them (Skittles and Leezard). Since that day, I increasingly feel like I'm in a bad sci-fi movie a la Beginning of the End (which featured killer grasshoppers) or The Giant Spider Invasion (which featured... well... yeah).

To occupy myself on the walk home, I began counting the lizards between the bus stop and the house. That was fun for about a week, but I gradually began to notice a pattern. The hotter it was, the more lizards I saw.

And so, like any rational person, I invented the Lizard Scale of temperature measurement. Figuring that the hottest day I'd walked was about 95, and the coolest about 75, I paid more attention to the range of lizards and developed the following scale:

1 Lizard = 75 degrees
2 Lizards = 79 degrees
3 Lizards = 83 degrees
4 Lizards = 87 degrees
5 Lizards = 91 degrees
6 Lizards = 95 degrees

"It's a 3 Lizard day!" I'd announce when I got home, in response to which my wife would slowly close her eyes and shake her head. Or she would say she wanted to go out to eat and I'd reply "Are you crazy? It's a 5 Lizard day out there!" She, of course, is very proud of my new Lizard Scale and greatly enjoys it when I talk about it.

Unfortunately, my entire scale rested on the assumption that I was observing lizards at the same rate regardless of temperature, but the truth was that when it got very hot I simply lost interest in anything but surviving the walk. I played around with trying to figure out some kind of equation to factor in the loss of interest, but I sort of lost interest in it.

So, granted, the Lizard Scale is hopelessly and permanently flawed. But at least it's better than Celsius.

Full post as published by Clever WoT on July 12, 2007 (boomark / email).