Sep 28, 2016

Teenage Zombies


I don’t know whether to applaud or curse the fact that we were able to access YouTube through our TiVo to watch this movie. Though it was released in 1960, this black and white film looks like it was filmed in the early ‘50s. It begins with three kids meeting at the soda shop (two malts were a total of 50 cents). They’re wondering what kind of clean cut fun they could have - Morrie leaves to go horseback riding, but arranges to meet the others in a couple of hours. Stick with me here because that’s important to the story.

Cut to a boat where Reg, Skip, Julie, and Pam are all set to go waterskiing. They discover an island (that apparently was really hard to find) and land to have their lunch. Since they’re already there they decide to go exploring for a bit.

Nothing much to see here and they keep going and are surprised to see a building in the distance. Even more surprising is the line of workers shuffling down a path. There’s a woman in an evening gown that appears to be overseeing the procession and when she catches sight of the kids she halts the parade, but the kids get scared and high tail it back to the boat.

Oh, no! The boat is gone! Figuring they might have just misplaced it, the start following the shoreline to see if it magically moved somewhere else. They wander for quite a while before finally sitting down to rest. The girls decide to keep resting while the boys mosey on up to the house they saw.

Being the polite sort, they knock on the door. The woman they saw earlier, Dr. Myra, opens the door and invites them in, offering them a soft drink. They ask about their boat but she plays dumb. She tells them they have no boats because no one ever leaves the island. The guys get kind of cranky at this point and threaten to go to the sheriff - an empty threat without their boat to back them up.

Suddenly, they hear a couple of screams! This hairy hunchback named Ivan has the girls in a cage down in the basement. Dr. Myra takes the boys down there and has Ivan throw them in the adjoining cage. She tells them if they behave, Ivan won’t hurt them.

Back at the soda shop, Morrie is getting a little worried about the others because they never showed up like they said they would. And because this is the ‘50s, a teenager being a couple of hours late is something to worry about and the soda jerk advises Morrie to talk to the sheriff. So off Morrie and his girl Dottie go to the sheriff’s office.

The kids get kind of panicky as they tell the sheriff how worried they are about the other four, and convince him to send out a search party (which consists of the sheriff and a deputy tooling around in a boat). They meet Morrie and Dottie at the dock and tell them they didn’t find anything, so after the adults leave the kids liberate a small boat and go looking themselves.

Big surprise, they go almost directly to the island, even though the sheriff missed it after being out there for hours. Of course they go exploring instead of going back for the sheriff, and the first thing they see is Ivan lurking around. They manage to avoid him and follow the path to the house. They knock on the door and Dr. Myra (wearing a different evening gown) lets them in.

They ask about the four missing kids, but get kind of nervous and skedaddle out of there when the good doctor tells them that no one ever comes to her island. Their boat is waiting where they left it, and as they’re pulling away from the island, two men in suits are pulling up to the beach.

Turns out Dr. Myra is a mad scientist and the suits are there for a progress report on their plans to conquer the United States. She takes them down to the lab for a demonstration of the mind control gas she’s been developing. Her victim of choice is a gorilla because “unlike a man, he’s not human.” Once he’s gassed, the gorilla is docile and obedient and the suits are impressed.

Meanwhile, the boys have managed to pick the lock of their cell, but they’re having trouble with the girls’ lock. They have a bit of an argument with the girls, but decide to leave them behind and go look for a boat or help or something and promise to come back for them. Of course they don’t find anything helpful, not even the boat the two suits came in. Just as they’re about to give up hope they get the brilliant idea of building a raft, but they don’t get much of it done before it starts getting light and they figure they’d better get back to their cell.

Back in town, Morrie and Dottie tell the sheriff about the suspicious island they found and how the woman lied about living in isolation. It takes a lot of convincing, but finally the sheriff agrees to go have a look.

Dr. Myra tells Ivan to bring the two girls - he drags them in kicking and screaming and the boys follow surreptitiously behind. The girls are shoved into the testing chamber and the boys don’t know what to do. At this point the sheriff and the other two kids show up and it looks like the sheriff is in on Dr. Myra’s evil master plan.

Ivan corrals Morrie and Dottie. The boys look for something to pry open the door to the testing chamber, the adults start arguing, the sheriff goes off in a huff and one of the suits shoots him in the back. Ivan is forced to let go of the kids so he can dispose of the body, and once he leaves all hell breaks loose and it’s a free-for-all fight between the adults and the kids.

Oops! Dr. Myra managed to release the gas into the chamber and the girls are doused with zombie gas. The kids win the fight and make her open the chamber, but it’s too late. When she refuses to produce the antidote, the boys put her in the chamber and turn her into a zombie. Unfortunately, she’s a little too zombified, so they threaten to put the men in the chamber next. One of them caves and points out the antidote.

After pouring some of the liquid into two glasses, they set the beaker down on the desk. They try it on Dr. Myra to make sure it works, and the first thing she does is sweep the beaker onto the floor. Good thing they poured two glasses of it. The boys de-zombify the girls and a scuffle breaks out. While the boys are fighting with Ivan and one of the suits, the other suit and Dr. Myra escape. But the gorilla (no idea where they were keeping him) wanders into the lab and licks up some of the antidote from the floor. He takes care of the suit and Ivan, allowing the kids to escape.

The other suit and Dr. Myra reached the boat the sheriff came in at the same time the kids do, and the adults prove to be no match for the determined kids. The kids deliver their prisoners to the sheriff’s office and the deputy tells them the military will be very grateful. It’s implied that they’ll get to meet the president himself for this. They’re heroes.

This was kind of a fun movie, set as it was in a simpler time. You couldn’t get away with a story like this these days. Well, you could have the mad scientist trying to turn the U.S. into zombies, but you wouldn’t have anyone blink twice at teens being a couple of hours late meeting a friend. And I think kids themselves are a little more savvy today.

The hubby says, “It wasn’t the worst bad movie we’ve seen, but it did have its dumb moments.” I think that’s supposed to be a good thing. ;-)

Sep 26, 2016

Monadism Monday

monadism ~ theory that there exist ultimate units of being

We had a stealth cricket in the house last week. I call him a stealth cricket because normally the first indication there’s a cricket in the house is the noise, followed by hours, if not days, of searching to find the culprit. However, this time first indication was the june bug sized black body creeping across the floor.

He was so big even the cats didn’t want to mess with him. Armed with a glass bowl, I turned on all the lights to try and find him, but didn’t have any luck. So I left the bowl in the kitchen and sat back in the living room and the little bugger, clearly mocking me, went from the bookcase to under the hubby’s recliner. I went back and got my bowl, just as he was traversing the carpet back to the bookcase, but before I could lower it over him he started to jump.

Do you have any idea how high a cricket can jump? Almost as high as I can. ;-)

We did spy him again later that evening and managed to relocate him outside without causing him any harm. You do know it’s bad luck to kill a cricket in the house, don’t you? This is a superstition passed down to me from my mother. She never killed a cricket in the house but always live-trapped them and released them back into the wild.

I can’t really blame him for wanting to be inside though. It’s like Mother Nature flipped a switch or something. After the first day of Autumn it became cool enough we didn’t need so much as a fan, let alone the air conditioning, and Friday I even wore a jacket when I went grocery shopping.

Saturday I spent most of the day huddled under an afghan as I relaxed in my recliner - although part of that could have been because I was sick from the cold the granddaughter gave me. Hers was mostly in the chest, mine was all in the sinuses and the first medication I took was an extra-strength, all purpose one. Did you know that extra-strength usually just means double the Tylenol? And I guess I don’t handle Tylenol well because it made me feel worse than the cold. So I switched to that super-duper decongestant I had from before and it seems to be doing the trick.

Saturday night I went to bed forgetting that the window was open in my office, and the temperature went down to the single digits (Celsius, which would make it the mid to high 50s Fahrenheit) so it was a mite chilly in the house Sunday morning. Even after shutting the window and keeping the deck doors shut all day, it still wasn’t overly warm. Which, to be perfectly honest, was okay by me. I’d rather be too cold than too warm any day.

Not a lot to report on the bathroom. Hubby got the first coat of filler on to make the walls all nice and smooth, and worked on some electrical stuff. It doesn’t really look all that different from last week’s picture, but you can see the drywall dust footprints he left on the carpet in the front hall. :-D

Because I just know you’re all wondering about the cricket superstition thing, I decided to do a little research, and here’s what I found out:

Superstitions regarding crickets come from all over the world, but only the Chinese kept crickets in tiny bamboo cages for luck.
For generations, the cricket has served as a watchdog in many Asian countries - at the first sign of danger, the cricket’s chirping will stop.
Almost every Native American tribe believed the cricket brought good luck, and it was considered disrespectful to try imitating one.
It is considered very good luck to find a cricket in your house, and very bad luck to kill a cricket, even by accident.
If you want to know the temperature, count the number of chirps a cricket makes within fifteen seconds and add the number thirty-seven. (I’m assuming this would be in Fahrenheit).
In Brazil, the chirping of a black cricket is taken as a sign of impending illness, that of a grey cricket money, and that of a green one hope.
A constantly chirping cricket foretells pregnancy.

Unfortunately, it does not say what happens to the good luck of finding a cricket in the house if your cats eat it. Guess I'd best stay vigilant ;-)

Sep 21, 2016

The Incredible Petrified World


Once again hubby and I fell victim to false advertising. I mean, look at that poster. Octopus getting over-friendly with a woman, the weird creature with the spear, the volcano in the distance - it looks like it has all the makings of a good creature feature, right? Yeah, that’s what we thought too.

This black and white movie, filmed in 1957, begins with footage of what we’re supposed to believe is a storm tossed sea. Cue the suspenseful music. Now we see a squid and a shark duking it out on the ocean floor while the storm rages above. And I feel the need to point out, this was the only appearance by a squid in the whole movie. The suspenseful music speeds up - looks like the shark won.

The narrator starts talking about a “phantom layer” in the ocean that rises to the surface at night, and descends back to the bottom during the day. It’s filled with luminescent fish that apparently have the ability to turn their glow off and on at will.

La la la - boring description of these black and white fish that look like they’re swimming around in some big aquarium. Okay, now the lights come up and we see the narrator is actually a rich dude showing a film in a library. He talks about this diving bell he’s financed, to be used to explore the ocean depths and how there’s another one being tested in the Caribbean as they speak.

This diving bell was created by Dr. Wyman, and he’s really excited that the divers will be going deeper than anyone has ever gone before. The bell, which is pretty much a big water tight metal sphere, is manned by two men, Paul and Craig, and two women, Lauri and Dale (because you have to keep the numbers even, right?). Paul, Craig, and Lauri appear to have some kind of scientific background, and Dale is a reporter.

Down, down, down they go. At 1700 feet the lights start to flicker and the diving bell is rocking. Communication between the ship and the bell is lost. Dr. Wyman feels really bad because, you know, it was his bell and all and was lost so deep there’s not a chance of rescuing it ... or the people inside it.

Meanwhile, the bell is resting on the bottom of the ocean and the groggy crew are just waking up. Dale immediately goes into hysterics until someone slaps her. They realize the cable the bell was attached must have broken, but they couldn’t be as deep as they thought because there’s light outside the bell. If they’re high enough to see light through the water, then obviously they’re high enough that the pressure won’t kill them, so they get into their wet suits (which they just happened to have packed in a suitcase), and abandon ship - or sphere.

They start to swim slowly (VERY slowly) to the surface. The radar on the boat actually picks them up, but Dr. Wyman doesn’t think they have a prayer of making it to the surface, what with the pressure and all. They’re just too deep. More footage of them slowly swimming. La la la. Oops! They surface in a cave. I’m kind of impressed. Despite hours of swimming, the girls’ hair is not only dry, they retained their fancy hair-dos.

Meanwhile, on the boat, the captain asks Dr. Wyman how long it’ll take the bodies to surface. They decide to wait another five hours. The men from the sphere decide to leave the women in the cave and go back to the bell for their shoes so they can climb to the surface through the cave system. They go pick up shoes for everyone and one of the guys sharpens a stick to bring back with him.

On the way back to the cave, the guy with the stick manages to kill enough fish for them to dine on for dinner. Then they all take a nap. The next day, dressed in perfectly dry street clothes (no idea where they came from), they begin wandering through the caves. They see a lizard that hisses at them (showing us how loudly Dale can scream) and continue to wander. It didn’t occur to them that they could have eaten the lizard, but they do stumble across a small spring to drink from.

Leaving the women at the spring to rest, the men wander off to explore a bit. Lauri wants to be friends, but Dale is a bit of a snarky bitch. It’s at this point I have to wonder where the light in the cave is coming from. I mean, in the ocean we could say it was the luminescent fish the narrator made a point of talking about, but the cave is pretty well lit without there being a source.

Wandering, wandering, and more wandering. It all looks pretty much the same to me. Ruh, oh Shaggy, the gang found a human skeleton. Eek! There’s an old bearded man spying on them through a hole in the rocks above them. They yell up to him but he doesn’t answer, so they climb on up to see him.

He tells them he’s the survivor of a ship wreck and he’s been there for 14 years. There’s a volcano nearby that provides air, but there’s no way out. Not sure why the volcano means they can’t escape, haven’t any of them ever read Jules Verne’s Journey To the Centre of the Earth? Everyone settles in to make the best of things.

Meanwhile, Dr. Wyman has gone to the rich guy from the beginning. He heard he cancelled the launch of his own diving bell and persuades him that he knows what went wrong with the first bell and how to fix it on the second one. Blah, blah, blah, way too much technical explanations. Wyman’s younger brother worked on the second bell, and together they fix the new bell.

Lots of machinery spinning, lots of consulting. Finally they’re back on the boat. The second bell has launched, just in time because they spot the two guys from the original bell as they’re swimming back to scavenge for parts and one of them has run out of air. They make it to the second bell where the guy is revived by a cup of coffee from a handy dandy thermos.

Back in the cave, the creepy old dude is putting the moves on Dale and he must have angered the volcano gods because the earth starts to shake and an eruption is imminent. He gets buried by rocks and the two women run back through the tunnels. More running, more rock falling. The guy who came back for the women gets knocked out slightly. Now we’re seeing some really fast moving lava and the earth pulling apart.

Um, I guess he’s okay because they’re all aboard the second bell now and before you know it they’re back on board the ship. Happy, happy, joy, joy - smiling faces all around. As the ship powers off into the sunset I’m left wondering two things - if they really were on the bottom of the ocean, as we were led to believe, why didn’t the pressure kill them? And where the heck was the volcano that erupted? There wasn’t so much as a hint of it on the surface of the water - no rock sticking up out of the water, not even a puff of smoke.

This movie wasn’t even that bad, it was just incredibly boring! The incredible part of it was that we sat through the whole 70 minutes.

Sep 19, 2016

Milleflori Monday

milleflori ~ glassware made of coloured rods embedded in clear glass

I’m late! I’m late! At least I’m late with this post. Still, at least I’m here now, unlike my update post on my Other Blog. I missed that post altogether because there just wasn’t enough to report. But that’s my writing blog and this is my regular blog, so I’ll save that rant for another time. ;-)

As expected, the bathroom renovation has slowed somewhat. It’s a little hard for the hubby to work in the bathroom when he has to work all week. And bowling season’s started as well. Still, there wasn’t much he could do in there until the plumbing for the tub was put in, and the plumber wasn’t able to come until Friday morning.

Friday mornings, for those of you who are new to the whinings of my life, are my busiest mornings because that’s when I grocery shop. And along with the plumber we had a guy coming to do a house inspection for our mortgage renewal. And I had to go in to babysit early. So you can imagine the amount of fun I had that day.

However, the plumber and his handy assistant did their thing, and now the rest is up to hubby. Unless he decides to replace the window with glass blocks, in which case we’ll get a contractor in to do that. But he made good progress putting the dry wall back up, and it’s even starting to look a little bit like a real bathroom again.

You can see from the picture just how tiny that bathroom is, made even tinier with the bigger tub. Now imagine being closed in there to work, without so much as a fan to give you some relief. That’s a south facing window and it’s painted shut, so that small space heats up pretty quickly. Kudos to the hubby for working with the door shut (both to reduce the mess spilling into the rest of the house and to keep the cats from getting into stuff they shouldn’t. I suspect the sun coming in that window would make it hot even in the winter.

I seem to talk an inordinate amount about the weather, but I can’t seem to help myself. Last week the weather was fabulous. Clear and cool and sunny and did I mention cool? We didn’t need the air conditioner at all, and only used the fans some of the time. And I spent one whole night without the fan at all. Sheer bliss!

And then ... the weekend. The humidity rose faster than the temperature, so even when it wasn’t exactly hot, it was really, really damp. I hate the damp worse than I hate the heat. And I hate feeling damp even more than that.

Today is starting off a little cooler than predicted, but it’s supposed to warm up again this week, then back to something a little more seasonable for the weekend. Ha! Just in time for the changing of the seasons, so it’ll be official.

Speaking of seasons ... I’m sure by now everyone has noticed this is the time of year when we have pretty much pumpkin spice everything available. While I enjoy a pumpkin latte every once in awhile, along with a piece of pumpkin bread or pumpkin pie, even I have to admit things have gotten a little out of hand this year.

We have Frosted Pumpkin Pie Poptarts, Pumpkin Spice Oreos, Pumpkin Spice Peeps, Jif Whipped Peanut Butter and Pumpkin Pie Spread (that even sounds gross!), Philadelphia Pumpkin Spice Cream Cheese (actually a good idea), and Thomas’ Pumpkin Spice Bagels or English Muffins. And let’s not forget the Lindt Lindor Pumpkin Spice Milk Chocolate Truffles, Pumpkin Spice Cheerios, Pumpkin Spice Malted Milk Balls, Dreyer’s Slow Churned Pumpkin Patch ice cream, Planters Pumpkin Spice Almonds, Nestle Toll House Pumpkin Spice Refrigerated Cookie Dough, Barbara’s Pumpkin Puffs, and Kellogg’s Pumpkin Spice Frosted Mini Wheats,

But for those of you who just aren’t into pumpkin, don’t worry. Peppermint season is just around the corner. ;-)

Sep 14, 2016

Monstrosity the Atomic Brain


As much fun as shark month was, it was kind of nice to get back to our normal bad movies. This turkey lemon bad movie was filmed in black and white in 1963. It runs for 64 minutes which is plenty long enough, I assure you.

It begins with our mad scientist (c’mon, you had to know there’d be a mad scientist) breaking into a mortuary/cemetery to steal the body of a young woman who’s just died. After his henchman (who kind of looks like a wolf man and the narrator tells us he’s one of the doctor’s “mistakes”) kills the poor, clueless security guard, they load the girl’s body into the back of their station wagon. If they wanted a fresh body, why didn’t they take the security guard? Ah! Because he wasn’t a woman! ;-)

The scientist, whom we’re told is Dr. Frank (the hubby claims he’s not sufficiently evil enough to earn the “enstein” part to the name) is working for this very rich old lady who wants her brain put into a much younger and prettier body. Wouldn’t we all like that?

The machine Dr. Frank built to do this is atomic and as he explains to the old woman (Mrs. March) and her henchman (Victor) it has a radioactive failsafe. In case the police or anyone ever want to search the place, he can set off an atomic explosion to destroy all the evidence. Okayyyy.

Dr. Frank demonstrates his machine for Mrs. March and Victor, using the, uh, fresh body. The room is like a big iron boiler with a viewing window - to enter it, Dr. Frank has to wear a radiation suit but no such precautions are needed for visitors to his lab. The woman he’s experimenting on is naked (of course she’d be naked!) but has two strategically placed straps holding her to an upright table.

Now despite the fact that this whole thing is to put Mrs. March’s brain into a fresh body, he brings this girl back to life without finding her a new brain first. Apparently, once the brain is dead you can’t bring it back to life. No idea why not. So now we have a sexy, brainless zombie to wander aimlessly around.

Nevertheless, Mrs. March is impressed enough that she hires three girls from Europe as servants because there won’t be any embarrassing questions when they disappear. Of course it’s pretty obvious right from the start which one she’s going to pick - the hot blonde with the huge rack and the jiggle butt.

Mrs. March has the doctor examine all three (which makes one of the want to quit on the spot) and he discovers one of them, named Anita, has a birthmark on her back. The old lady tells him he can do what he wants with her. Anita gets a room in the basement, Bea (the blonde) is given a room on the second story, and Nina (the one who wants out of there) gets a room in the attic.

The next day, Bea and Nina wonder where Anita got to and Mrs. March tells them she left - funny, since they were told no one gets to leave. The girls sneak down to Anita’s room and all her stuff is still there so they decide they need to escape. They wander around the basement some more and find a door they’re able to jimmy open but they hear someone coming and don’t go through it.

These girls are so dumb they almost deserve to get used in Dr. Frank’s experiments. They don’t leave through the door they jimmied open, they don’t leave through the freaking front door, they go back to Bea’s room to make plans.

Mrs. March goes down to the lab to see how Dr. Frank’s latest experiment is going. He successfully put the brain of a cat into Anita’s body. Anita not only acts like a cat, she makes pretty authentic cat noises too and even kills an eats a mouse. Mrs. March is impressed.

Meanwhile, the wind blows open the door the girls jimmied and the zombie girl wanders out to walk aimlessly around the estate. The girls, who are cleaning one of the sitting rooms, catch a glimpse of her through the window and see the wolf man attack her. The good doctor beats him off with a cattle prod but it’s too late. The wolf man ends up being chained up like a dog.

The girls realize they really have to get serious about escaping, and Bea decides to seduce Victor for the keys to the car. She seeks him out and because the wolf man is safely chained up, they go for a walk through the gardens. Before they get very far (or should I say, before Victor gets very far), Mrs. March summons him. Bea wanders over to a stone gazebo and sees Anita perched on the top of it. Anita springs on her and we hear screaming.

Nina, not knowing what happened to Bea, also catches a glimpse of Anita, who’s up on the roof now. You’d think if someone’s up on a roof they’re there for a reason, but no, Nina decided she needed to rescue Anita. Anita does NOT want to be rescued and Nina chases her across the roof where Anita falls to her death.

Running down to the lab to tell the doctor, she finds everyone in the lab with Bea, who’s still alive but badly hurt. One of her eyes had to be removed but the doctor has it in a big beaker of some kind of solution and he’s quite excited about the prospect of putting it back in her.

Mrs. March gives Victor the heave ho. Once she’s in her new body, she’s not going to need an old fart like him. Later, Nina finds him in the study, drunk as a skunk, and he spills his guts - tells her how Mrs. March has made her heir, but it won’t really be her it’ll be Mrs. March in her body. She agrees to make him rich if he helps her, but then she goes off to pack or something and Mrs. March stabs him in the back with this really, really long needle.

Nina tells Bea (who’s in her bedroom now) that they’re going to escape, and then goes back downstairs to find Victor’s body. Mrs. March keeps her busy while the doctor chloroforms her.

Cut to the lab where the two women (Nina and Mrs. March) are strapped to gurneys. Dr. Frank asks Mrs. March why she had to go and kill Victor - she tells him “he was a fool.” You can almost see the wheels turning.

Nina wakes up alone. The doctor figures if a deal was good enough for Victor it’s good enough for him, and has put the brain of Mrs. March into his cat. As he contemplates what he should do with Eva, he goes into the atomic chamber. The cat (Mrs. March) presses the button that seals the door and then turns on the machine.

Bea, sensing something’s going on (gee, ya think?) gets out of bed and pulls off the bandage around her head so we can get a good look at her scratched up face. She makes her way down to the lab and frees Nina. They turn for one last glimpse and we see the doctor become a skeleton inside the machine. Bea sees her eyeball in the beaker and turns to rescue it. Of course she’s killed.

Eva runs into the night, the cat following her, the mansion being consumed by flames behind them.

The end.

I can’t believe I actually paid money for this DVD! Fortunately, you don’t have to:

Sep 12, 2016

Mundane Monday

mundane ~ lacking interest or excitement; dull

The weather’s turned cool enough that last night I actually slept without the fan on in the bedroom, and I even had a light blanket on the bed. Be still my heart! It’s supposed to warm up slightly as the week goes on, but not to the extremes we’ve been having lately. We are officially entering my favourite time of year. :-)

On the renovation front .... the sink and the faucets for the tub were delivered early last week. The sink is larger than we expected, and heavy (what can you expect from a glass sink) but it’s beautiful. And still in its box so I can’t take a picture.

Not much else to report. Most of what the hubby’s been doing is scraping down walls in there in preparation for new drywall, and wiring for the tub, which you really can’t see. Yesterday the son-in-law helped him carry in the tub and put it in place, and he discovered that the outlet he’d wired in for the tub to plug into had to be moved. Knock on wood that the plumber can come in sometime this week to hook up the tub.

Oh! One thing I could mention. Before moving the tub in, the hubby filled it with enough water to cover the jets so he could test it for leaks and to make sure the jets worked before bringing it inside. Everything worked fine but I was not impressed with the amount of gunk floating around in the tub. He tried to shrug it off by saying the tub had been sitting for a while - yes, it has. In his father’s basement, and then in our driveway covered tightly by a tarp to keep the motor for the jets from getting damp. So where did all this gunk come from? From inside the jets, of course. You can bet I’ll be researching what kind of cleaning solutions I can use on it before I ever set foot in it. Gross!

I have to tell you. I live in a small town - maybe not quite so small as it used to be because subdivisions are springing up all over the place to accommodate all the Torontonians moving down this way, who are all about big houses with teeny yards. But really, a lot of the time there’s not much that goes on here.

To be perfectly honest, I’m kind of boring. So sometimes it’s hard to come up with something to talk about on Monday mornings. I don’t do a whole lot other than reading, writing, and babysitting. And nothing much ever happens in our quiet neighbourhood.

I’ve woken up the last few nights to the sound of coyotes catching their dinner. I kind of figured they were back because the squirrels have been making themselves scarce. Haven’t seen much in the way of blue jays lately either, but I think that’s just a coincidence. My neighbourhood gets blue jays, the daughter’s (a couple of blocks north) gets cardinals. Kind of weird how that works out.

Haven’t seen the frog from my pond lately - I hope he just moved on and wasn’t killed. Although the only creatures I think would eat him would be the raccoons, but they’re messy eaters and I haven’t noticed any little froggy parts scattered about. They have left me a half-eaten, very small, watermelon and various apples stolen from my neighbour’s tree, although the apples could just as easily been left by squirrels.

My two sisters came for an overnight visit, but you probably don’t really care about that. Although they’re more well travelled than I am (one just got back from Italy, one’s getting ready for a cruise) sometimes they can be as boring as me. At one point we were sitting on the deck enjoying the breeze, not saying much, just kind of yawning at each other and trying to keep from being the first one to nod off. LOL

Saturday was our last really hot day and I spent it doing laundry - sheets and towels. Yes, I spent the whole day doing that, with a short break between loads to babysit so the daughter and her hubby could go to the wedding of a friend in the afternoon.

When we painted the upstairs bathroom we got rid of the old, falling apart laundry hamper - and did I mention it was really ugly? It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but now we have no place to put towels waiting to be washed. Guess I’ll have to keep my eye out for a new one.

Last night the hubby and I did something we haven’t done in a while - we watched a really bad movie for me to review this week. How bad was it? You’ll have to come back Wednesday to find out. ;-)

And there you have it. Even a boring life can fill up a blog post.

Sep 5, 2016

Mediagenic Monday

mediagenic ~ able to present a good image in the media

Well, last week was certainly a week. I tell you what.

The hubby took the week off for the bathroom renovation, even going so far as scheduling the plumber to come in to do his thing. So the first day he started to take out dry wall in preparation for removing the old tub and discovered this:

Fortunately it was not the extremely toxic black mould that forces people to abandon their homes, but it did set the work back a bit. And while the strapping did need to be reinforced, it didn’t have to be replaced. Mostly what was accomplished last week was removing stuff: tub, toilet, sink, medicine cabinet (which was trickier than you’d think because the light fixture was attached to it) - and ripping out dry wall.

So last week was all about removing stuff from the bathroom and re-enforcing the floor and walls. Right now it’s pretty much just a nice empty room. A little on the small side perhaps, but there’s not much we can do about that without tearing out some walls completely.

We have the tiles for the walls stacked up in the music room, the faucet for the sink and the toilet stashed in the work room, the new (to us) tub is in a trailer in the driveway, and the sink and the faucet for the tub will hopefully (knock on wood) be here this week. I have a fistful of paint samples to pick a new colour for the walls - paint and flooring are still on the “to buy” list.

I guess that’s just the nature of renovations, they take three times as much time as expected, and cost twice as much money.

Last night I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark during an Indiana Jones marathon (the Star Trek marathon having ended). It was maybe not quite as thrilling as the first time I ever saw it, but it was still pretty awesome.

And this was before the days of CGI (computer generated images) so the special effects really were special. That was a real person holding onto the whip being dragged under a truck. All those snakes slithering around in the Well of Souls were real. And I remember reading something about the lengths they had to go to, figuring out the timing to get that truck Marion was supposed to be in to tip over.

If that movie was made today I think some of the magic would be lost because computers would have been used for so much of it. A shame really. Just because we have the technology doesn’t mean we should use it. Which brings me to the other big happening last week, I finally broke down and bought myself a tablet:

It’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab E - whatever that means. So far I have figured out how to put a password on the screen, and take it off again because when the screen goes dark after 10 seconds of inactivity it got real old real fast, having to turn it back on and put the stupid password in. Then I figured out how to make the screen stay on longer. I can check my email, even send one if I’m feeling adventurous. And I can play solitaire on it.

I freely admit to being somewhat intimidated by this little piece of technology. I seriously have to sit down and have a look at the manual - I’m sure there are all kinds of handy dandy things I could be doing with it, if I only knew how.

I remember a time when computers were my thing. I knew all kinds of useful stuff about the technology. But then I let it get ahead of me and now I’m practically a luddite. However, unlike in those early years, today’s technology is so simple even children can use it - maybe I just need to find a child to help me. ;-)

And once I’ve mastered the tablet, can a cell phone be far behind?