Is Friday night still the kiss of death?

When I was young, maybe six years old, I got to stay up late on Friday nights. I can't really define what "late" meant back then. I can't really remember what time I was normally supposed to go to bed. I keep thinking that my parents normally sent me to bed at eight, but until recently it just seemed unreasonable that anyone went to bed much before ten.

Now that I'm older and have a different schedule, I find myself drifting off to sleep at nine or sometimes earlier, so maybe they did send me to bed that early, just so that they had a hour or two for themselves before they fell asleep too.

Anyway, when I was very young I got to stay up late on Friday nights and watch stuff on TV. And that was the only night that I was allowed to stay up late, because Saturday morning was the only day that I was allowed to sleep late. When I was six or so, I watched a scary show, which I think was probably Ghost Story/Circle of Fear. (I'm not entirely certain that this was the show, but I've now found some of them on YouTube, so I'll watch some later to be sure.)

So I grew up thinking that Friday night was the best night to watch anything on TV, though after Ghost Story went off the air I don't really recall watching anything in particular most of that time. I think eventually The Powers of Matthew Star came on Friday nights. But in between that and Ghost Story I don't really remember anything. I just remember thinking that was the best time to watch TV, and I remember wondering why there wasn't good stuff to watch on Friday nights.

"Good stuff" being defined by pre-teen me as either horror or sci-fi. I remember seeing a lot of stuff, but I don't remember when most of it was on, and except for Ghost Story and Matthew Star they weren't regular series. Most of what I liked turned out to be pilots of shows that didn't sell, which were turned into Movie of the Week stuff, which may or may not have been shown on Friday nights. I don't remember.

When I got older I learned that the Friday night schedule was the kiss of death for TV shows. This I learned from reading behind the scenes stuff about Star Trek. It seems that for other people Friday Night was date night, not TV night. On the one night of the week that it is okay to stay up late, you're supposed to actually go out and do something with the evening, not stay home and watch TV. So if you're an actor or director or producer, you don't want your TV show to end up on the Friday night schedule, because in theory most of your desired audience is out doing something cool and cannot possibly watch your TV show.

So, even after you found something you liked to watch on Friday nights, this was bad, because the show was probably going to get cancelled.

As for Friday night being date night or anything like that, I didn't get to do much of that until 1985.

A bit before that, we got a VCR. I think that a lot of other people also got VCRs. My family got a BETA, which was a better machine than what most of the other people bought, but that's another story and we won't get into that.

I got married, and then Friday nights stopped being date night. Between our work schedules and not having much money, we didn't go out much, and certainly not on Friday nights.

In the early nineties I joined a Star Trek club, so then I again had something to do on Friday nights. A bit after that there was a show called The X-files. By then most of us had VCRs, so we were able to go to the club meetings and then watch The X-files afterwards. Of course, since it was both a good show and it was on Friday nights, we all expected that it would soon be cancelled.

It wasn't.

Later came the Sci Fi Channel. I didn't have cable at the time, and I still don't. But I was aware of it and sometimes watched it at a friends house or in a motel room when we went out of town. There were a few interviews with actors and directors and producers, some behind the scenes stuff, but mostly lots and lots of reruns. So people could spend time watching stuff that had been made years and decades before, like Lost in Space.

And then the Sci Fi Channel started making new programs. The first one I remember was Farscape. Stargate moved to the Sci Fi Channel from Showtime. Farscape and Stargate were on Friday nights.

I don't know if the Sci Fi Channel assumed that we all had VCRs and it didn't really matter what night they picked, or if they figured that none of us were dating.

Stargate was on for ten years, and it's first spin-off lasted five years. There is supposed to be third series coming soon.

So is Friday night no longer the kiss of death because we all have VCRs?

Now Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Joss Whedon's new Dollhouse are on FOX Friday nights. FOX has had a lot of good sci fi on Friday nights, but except for The X-files they usually cancel the show before it's had a chance. But I think now there's another problem.

Why move all the sci fi to Friday nights, when they must realize that most of the sci fi fans are already watching something on the Sci Fi channel? What was wrong with leaving Terminator on Monday where it was?

Of course, that caused us to miss The Big Bang Theory....

My trip to the most boring place in Texas

Okay, I can't say for sure that this is the most boring place in all of Texas. Texas is a big place, and so I have not really been to all of it yet. In fact, I have there are whole big chunks of it east and south of here that I am totally unfamiliar with.

But this particular boring place is where my grandparents used to live, and where my dad lived fifty years ago. So I went there often until I became a teenager. Since my husband had to work there for the day, I thought that I would go with him and see if I recognized anything. And it was only the one day, so no matter how boring it was and how bad the motel was, I figured that I could put up with it for this one day.

As I said in the previous post, my husband decided that it was just far enough away that we needed to go ahead and go there the day before. So we headed out, and about halfway there we stopped and ate at The Green Frog in Jacksboro. This is a place that we traveled past many times in my childhood, but rarely ate at. We must have eaten there at some point, cause we were always asking if we were going to eat there this time, but I don't remember actually stopping there. Contrary to the opinions of ten year old children, people do not starve to death during three hour road trips. But people do have to make other stops, so if we did not stop at The Green Frog we at least went to the gas station down the street and got soda and candy.

My husband had decided to try to make this a really nice trip for me, early present or some such thing, so we ate at this restaurant of my childhood memory before going to some historical fort that he wanted to take pictures of. We got there about an hour before it was starting to get dark, and lots of deer came out to look at us. We were not to their liking, and they went back to wherever they came from, and we went back to taking pictures of old buildings built by people who were smaller than us and used up a lot less space. The jail wasn't much bigger than my bedroom, but it used to house twelve prisoners in four cells.

Then we got back into the car, and while we did not go to any of those places suggested by Bulletholes, one of them was a very good guess, as it was in the general neighborhood. The motel was small and not new, but it seemed clean enough and had lots of cable channels. It was too dark to do much of anything other than find the motel. So we watched The Librarian and some historical drama on PBS, and then we went to bed.

The next day we went to lunch at Subway. Nothing really looked familiar. The cafeteria that my grandparents took me to was gone, and I did not find The Dairy Mart or anything else much that looked familiar. I did not even find the park. I think that I did find the house, but it was hard to tell. The place was an odd mix of newer houses built right next to old falling down things and rusty trailers.

After driving around a bit more, my husband had to go to work, and I tried to knit a baby's hat. I had almost finished the thing, but then I did something wrong. I tried to unravel a bit of it to fix it, and ended up unraveling almost the whole thing instead. But I've started a new one and am halfway through with it.

I have some odd memories of this place. Like only old people live here. Not in the sense that a lot of old people move to Florida and Arizona. But just that there seem to be a lot of stubborn old people who stay in places like this after all the other people move away. I often went there for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the occasional trip after church on a Sunday. And we would stay for a week or two in the summer. And there mostly seemed to be a lot of old people. There were a lot of people my grandparent's age, and some people my parents age, but hardly anyone who was younger than my parents. Most of the people we knew in town seemed to be related to us somehow. There were four others who were about my age, and two younger cousins. One girl my age was visiting her grandmother, and the rest of the time she lived in Denton. The others lived there all year.

And it just never seemed to get through to me that they really did live there and that they did almost everything in this little town. Like, I thought that they must go to school somewhere else. I mean, they talked about school a lot, but where was it? I really didn't see a lot of other kids, and when I did I just assumed that they were also visiting grandparents and didn't live there either. Surely there were not enough kids in this little place for this little place to have a school? But apparently they did in fact have a school, and they even had a football team, and my cousins were in band.

But all I ever saw were old people wearing cowboy hats.

Yesterday we meant to take pictures of more falling down things and look for the park, but we decided that it was too cold and headed back home, taking a different road this time. We were going to another of those restaurants of my childhood memories, but after several people told my husband that two of the three Pioneer restaurants weren't worth going to anymore, we went to McBride's instead. I might have been there once or twice, but I don't remember it if I did. Steak isn't really my thing now, and I'm sure my parents did not often waste good money taking me out to have steak much when I was a kid. But once in a while it isn't a bad thing. And the wait staff brought me enough baked potato toppings to feed five people. A nice enough place. Not my favorite now, but when I was a kid, this was the place that all the adults liked to go. We spent too much money, but since we were planning to go out anyway, I figure that this place only costs a few dollars more and was a lot nicer.

We didn't do much after that. It was too cold for my liking, so we just headed home. We were a week or two too early for my favorite surviving memory of childhood anyway.

...and they eat us. The end

I've been discussing whether or not certain plots for science fiction stories are plausible. This reminded me that is has been a while since I have asked for help in finding a certain item from Omni Magazine. So, I think I'll have another go at it here.

Omni Magazine was a little bit of science fiction and a little bit of science fact. It had a lot of H. R. Giger's artwork. It had stories, and it had rumors about upcoming movies, and it had little articles about rock musicians claiming that the cure for the common cold was whatever illegal drug that they were taking.

And it had the funniest cartoons. Ripley from Alien says, "You men go out and die stupid deaths while I strip down to my underwear." And it had games and I.Q. tests and other stuff.

And one issue had a maze that supposedly contained the plots for all sci-fi movies. So you start in the middle of the maze--on Earth. And then maybe you stayed on Earth, or you went to the moon, or people colonized another planet, or people went to visit another galaxy, or maybe someone invented the time machine, etc.... And then from there you made another turn where something else happened, like maybe some aliens come to visit, or the spaceship breaks, or a bunch of people get sick, or whatever. Some of the maze routes were very small, such as-- we're on Earth, and we stay on Earth, and we invent something, and we blow ourselves up, the end.

There were a lot of things that could happen if we met aliens, but after all of the twists and turns we usually end up with--and they eat us, the end. One was, and the aliens take our women and leave, the end. And another one was, and the aliens take our women, and then they eat us, the end.

Anyway, I just loved this thing, and I kept that issue of the magazine. But then I got married, and I moved, and stuff happened, and at some point I lost the magazine. So if anyone out there has the thing, I would love a copy of this maze.

Was life really this bad in 1973?

So with the heat and the boredom and the laziness and all, we are downloading stuff to watch on the computer. Our latest find is the British show Life on Mars. I guess that I've been living under a rock again, as I have only recently heard of this. The American version will air here in a month or so, and Colm Meaney will be on it. So how did I miss hearing about it?


Anyway, we're watching the original British version, and are maybe a third of the way through. Life on Mars has nothing to do with the planet Mars. There's a present day police detective who gets hit by a car, and then he wakes up in 1973. And he knows that it can't really be 1973, and in 1973 he was only four years old, so he can't be an adult police detective in 1973.


But, he's still a police detective, and if you give him a case to work on he'll try to solve the crime. What alternative does he have? It probably isn't real, but it might be, and if he makes a big deal about this not really being his life they might lock him in a padded cell. So he tries to catch the bad guys, without a cell phone or a computer or DNA testing, etc....


Things really seem bad in this TV version of 1973 England. And since I've never really been to 1973 England, I can't say that this isn't a fair representation. I'm sure that a lot of it was like that. I'm sure that there were a lot of dirty cops and that a whole bunch of them were sexist and racist and that a lot of them were just plain rude. I'm sure that a lot of this stuff is just the way it was there, and that a lot of it was just the way it was here too.


But I'm wondering if things were really all that bad in 1973. I was six years old back then. I went to first grade, I wanted to wear flare-leg pants all the time, I played with my dog and climbed trees when the weather was warm, I went to church on Sundays, and I watched cartoons on Saturdays. The rest of the week we watched Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, The Brady Bunch, Truth or Consequences, and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. Once or twice a week we had candy and sodas. Dad went to work, and Mom stayed home to cook and do laundry and such. The Avon lady and the Tupperware lady came by once in a while. We ate pretty dull food sometimes, but we were made to eat all of it because there were starving kids in China. Most of the people I knew were reasonably polite and wore clean clothes. There was a war going on someplace else, but I knew nothing about it. I'm sure I was sheltered from a lot of things, but were they that bad?


Everything on this show looks dirty and run down. The only normal person the detective works with is a woman who has also studied psychology and nursing, and he's the only person who appreciates her. He's a grown man about my age, he has a steady job, and he's the second ranking man in his particular part of the police department. So why does he live in such an awful little apartment? It looks like some fleabag motel rooms I had to stay in back when we were on the road a lot. And his apartment doesn't even have a normal bed, but something that looks like what we would sleep in at summer camp, only with the top bunk taken off.


In 1973 my dad was a bit younger than this guy. He wasn't a cop, but he had a steady job. Besides taking care of himself, he had a wife and three kids. We lived in a regular house. Martha Stewart did not decorate for us, but things were clean and nicer looking than what things look like in this show. My parents had a regular bed, and I had a regular bed, and my siblings had bunk beds that looked a lot better than the thing that this guy sleeps on.


My dad didn't wear leather jackets. Maybe this guy can't afford a good place to live because he spends all his money on beer and snappy clothes.

I know that we didn't have cell phones and computers and debit cards and such, and it would be hard to go back in time and try to do without stuff we are used to having now, but was the rest of it really this bad in the 70s?

Turnips?

Sunday we were watching Foyle's War. When you're making some historical piece like Foyle's War, you have to have people say stuff to each other that they would probably not normally say to each other, because it's really something that needs to be said to the audience to get a feel for what things were like way back when. So when it is 1944 in England, people probably did not go around reminding each other that it's 1944 and there's a war going on and everything is rationed. The people in the story already know that sort of thing, but you want to try to remind the audience of stuff like that without it sounding like everyone in the story is an idiot.

So in the story there is this old man who's lost most of his marbles, and he lets the chicken or whatever is for dinner burn while he works on a crossword puzzle or something. That way his wife can come in and yell at him for being so careless and lecture him on everything being rationed, etc.... And they could not just go over to the farm next door and get another chicken or anything else because that was their meat ration for the day or the week or whatever and it was gone, period. There was just nothing to be done about it, and they'd just have to eat turnips on toast.

Turnips on toast?

So that just struck me as a really odd thing for a person to be eating. My husband reminded me that people in England like eating odd things like cucumber sandwiches, so maybe turnips on toast was just one of those things. Maybe it is. But I would think that there was something else going on with the cucumber sandwiches, like either it meant that you were well off enough to buy produce from someone with a greenhouse, or you had one yourself and were bragging about your green thumb. A cucumber is probably one of those summer things that you look forward to, but a turnip is probably just a turnip.

In this country, it seems like eating turnips is a sign that either you are from the south or you are poor or both. I see turnip greens in the grocery store next to the mustard greens and the collard greens, and I remember when my mother used to try to force us to eat them, because they had vitamins or something like that. Of course, she served us that awful canned stuff that possibly did not have any vitamins left in it, and since we never actually managed to eat much of the stuff whatever vitamins it might have had was not going to help us anyway.

Ten or fifteen years ago, we lived somewhere else and had a really big garden and tried growing a little bit of everything. And at first a little bit of everything included turnips, but then we really didn't know what to do with them. They look like the somewhat unattractive big brother to the radish, but I liked radishes and not turnips. We usually gave some turnip greens to grandmother, who probably remembered them from the good old days or something. I don't remember doing anything with the turnip roots.

I don't know anyone else who eats them. But someone must eat them, because they are always there at the store. They wouldn't always have them at the store if no one ever bought any, and if someone is buying them then someone must be eating them.

Does anyone eat these things?

The Incredible Hulk

Okay, I promised a review of this movie, and a friend is waiting on it, so I guess I'd better get on with it.

I am not a big fan of comic books, or at least, I don't read them much. I read Elfquest a bit way back when, but I haven't even kept up with that one. Other than that, I just don't read them.

Which isn't to say that they don't often have good stories that make excellent movies or TV shows. When I was a kid I watched Shazam and Isis, which I think were first comic books. Later came Spiderman and Wonder Woman. I watched the short-lived series The Flash. Now I watch Smallville, and before that I watched three other shows based on Superman. And of course I watch all the big movies that are based on comic books--Superman, Batman, The X-Men, Spiderman, etc.... I think Hellboy was a comic book first. And Ironman was excellent. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch Ironman.

When I was about eleven there was a show on called The Incredible Hulk. And at first either I didn't know about the comic book or it didn't look much like the comic book and someone had to tell me that's were they got the idea from. This was a science fiction show about a scientist who had made a terrible mistake experimenting on himself. And while he did end up rescuing a lot of people from this and that, he wasn't like other comic book heroes who deliberately went around looking for people to save, and he didn't run around in a spandex costume beating up bad guys. This guy was spent most of his time trying to find a cure for his odd condition, just as before this happened he was trying to find something that would make people stronger, and before that he was trying to cure cancer or something.

I joke about wanting to marry Mr. Spock. But I think even when I was eleven I loved David Banner. And as an adult, I still think he's pretty special. This is the guy I want. I want someone who would look at me like that. And if he happens to look like Bill Bixby, so much the better.

While I love David Banner from the TV show, I hardly know anything about Bruce Banner from the comic books. Actual comic books are not really my thing. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but I just never really got into them.

So a few years ago someone made this movie called The Hulk, and I went to see it. And it wasn't about David Banner from the TV show, and I don't know if the fans of the comic book liked it or not. To be honest, I didn't care for it, and the main thing that I remember about the plot was that his problems had as much to do with his father's research as it did his own. And I didn't like the CGI big as a building Hulk. Lou Ferringo did such a great job on the TV show, and this movie replaced him with a cartoon.

Anyway, that movie had nothing to do with the TV show.

So then I heard that there was another movie, and again there's another big as a building CGI Hulk. Okay, maybe not quite as big as a building, maybe he's more RV sized. Anyway, no Lou Ferrigno, so I was thinking maybe it was just a sequel to this movie I didn't like. Except that Ed Norton was now playing Dr. Banner. Would Ed Norton be in a sequel to this movie that I didn't like? Not sure.

So I go see the movie, just in case. This movie is a whole lot more like the TV show. The opening is even a lot like the TV show, except that the scientist who is dumb enough to experiment on himself at least isn't dumb enough to do it after hours in a room by himself. So when the Hulk makes his first appearance, the resulting damage puts Banner's girlfriend in the hospital. And then he goes on the run, not from a reporter, but from the whole US military. So Bruce Banner is in hiding, in a country where he doesn't quite speak the language, and everyone who knows him thinks that he's just a little bit nuts. Or maybe a lot nuts.

Ed Norton's Bruce Banner is a lot like Bill Bixby's David Banner. Not quite, but give him a few years and he'll probably get there. Except right at the end of the movie, maybe they're going to go a different direction with this.

And still there is the giant CGI Hulk. No Lou Ferrigno. Now, I know that they couldn't have really hired Lou Ferrigno, that even though Lou still very much keeps in shape, they would want to hire somebody younger. But they didn't. This cartoon is better than the other movie's cartoon, but it will never be Lou. Surely there is someone out there like Lou who could do the part better than a cartoon. Surely there are a few body builders out there who don't kill themselves with steroids and can act.

I don't know why they did this again. Other movies, even movies based on comic books, don't do that. I know that they use a lot of CGI, but for most shots, I think the orange guy in The Fantastic Four is a guy in a suit. And for the most part, Hellboy is Ron Perlman in a ton of makeup. So why can't the Hulk be an actor in the movies?

What else can I say about the movie without plot spoilers? I hate spoilers. I just need to see an interesting preview and hear that someone liked the movie so I'll want to go see it. I don't like to hear anything else about the movie. So if my opinion counts to anyone, there it is. Go see the movie.

There's a lot of cameos and familiar names in this movie. Lou has a cameo. Stan has a cameo, he always does. Even Bill has a cameo at the beginning of the movie, but don't blink or you'll miss it. And there's nothing to be gained by sitting through all the credits. There's this little scene with a cameo from another movie, but they show that right before the credits. All that stuff was fun.

Okay, that's about it. If you were a fan of the TV show I think that you'll like this movie. And if you're not a fan of the show but are a fan of the comic book, I don't know if you'll like it or not. It is significantly better than the previous movie. Ed Norris is in it, Liv Tyler is in it, William Hurt is in it, and they blow up a lot of stuff. Hulk smash! So go see the movie, and if you haven't already done so, go see Ironman too.

Some Random Thoughts

Before I write anything else, let me remind everyone that tonight is the last Jericho. Not the end of the season, but the end of the show. That's it. No more Jericho. The end.

I have spent a week out of town with my husband, and now I'm going to spend a few days at home by myself. And I have decided that I'm going to enjoy this time by myself. I usually don't deal with it very well. I don't like sleeping alone and such. Mainly, this is because I don't get enough sleep. I wake up in the middle of the night, realize that I am alone, hear some stupid little noise and panic over nothing.

I am determined that will not be the case this time. There are good things about having the house to myself. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I can watch TV or listen to the radio or get up and eat ice cream. I can do anything I want. There's no one else here to disturb. I don't have to be quiet.

And with that knowledge, and one little sleeping pill, I got a full night's sleep. I don't remember the last time that happened. I fell asleep a bit after ten and slept til nearly six. And then I actually got out of bed and had a bath and turned on the lights and everything. And I watched the episode of Medium that I taped last night. I never get to do that. I wake up early and wait til five or six and then I come in here and blog until he wakes up which usually isn't til seven or eight. Cause blogging is the only thing that I can do without waking him up. Sometimes I think that I would have mostly given up blogging a year ago except for the fact that I needed something to do in the mornings that didn't make noise.

A full night's sleep. Unbelievable. And that was after an almost three hour afternoon nap too.

I was thinking about when I was a kid and we had these big Easter egg hunts. Someone took thousands of eggs and hid them in the park while we were in church. That must have taken an hour or two. And then we would spend time in the park finding the eggs, and then we would go to lunch. Some of the eggs were those candy eggs that were partially made of wax. Some of the eggs were actual hard-boiled eggs. Hardly any of the eggs were anything cool like chocolate or a plastic egg with something inside it. Just almost rock hard candy eggs and real hard-boiled eggs. So the eggs must have been out of the fridge for like three hours or so before we got them home. And then we usually didn't have the sense to put them in the fridge then either. And we usually ate a couple of these eggs. And then usually by the end of the day one of our parents would take the eggs away from us and say that if we wanted to eat anymore eggs we should eat the ones that we'd made ourselves that were in the refrigerator.

I just can't think that anyone would do that now. Obviously, eggs that aren't refrigerated go bad and shouldn't be eaten. But it seems like we ate some that had been out for several hours, and I don't remember anyone ever dying from it.

I read a few blogs, not because I care about the writers, but just because I've been drawn into the whole soap opera. My favorite one has ended. After two or three years of writing about her life and wondering why she can't seem to find that one special guy while she's having threesomes and such, she decided that writing the blog wasn't the thing for her anymore. Now, a lot of us say that, and then we change our minds after a few weeks. So I suggested that she leave the blog alone for a bit, and not delete it, and maybe after she'd had a rest she might change her mind. And, if she was mostly worried about the blog being so public, she could make the blog private and keep writing. So, after about a month, that is what she decided to do, make the blog private. And, not being one of the few people given the password, I was not able to read the blog for a month or two, but once or twice a week I would type in the address to see if the blog was public again. This morning I typed in the address, and the blog has been deleted. Oh, well. I hope that she made a hard-copy for herself first.

I had some computer access during the week I was away, but I spent most of my computer time writing my own blogs posts and checking my email for news of my dying friend. Now that I'm home I'll try to catch up on reading other people's blogs.

I used to read more blogs regularly than I do now. Something in my life changed, or something in the other blogger's life changed. There's one that I hardly read at all now, but to be fair, with the different things going on in her life, she rarely posts anything now. But she does stop by once in a while, and about a week ago on her own blog she posted some pictures of her recent weight-loss. And it looks great. And she got a haircut, and that looks great too. Unfortunately, my own weight-loss of fifteen pounds from two years ago is no more. I'm back at my pre-tragedy weight. It stayed off for like a year and a half, despite everyone telling me that the weight would come right back on. But it is finally back. I need to go eat some broccoli. And I think this week I'll get my hair trimmed. But I won't look as good as my fellow blogger, even though she probably still weighs a little bit more than I do.

I brought home a bunch of clay to recycle about a week and a half ago, so I would have some clay ready to use when I got back from spring break. But, of course, I didn't do anything about that when I should have. I didn't even look at the stuff until the day before yesterday. So yesterday I decided to push most of it through a kitchen strainer, and now I have these little cuts on the tips of two fingers. And I cannot find the antibiotic ointment, so I shall have to go and buy more. That's just one of those things that I can never find when I need it. Someday, if I ever move away from this house, I am going to find several dozen tubes mostly full tubes of antibiotic ointment. And then I'll find all those other little things that hide from me like safety pins and emery boards and socks.

Today in school, at least three of us were rather aimlessly wandering around the lab, trying to remember what it was that we were supposed to do. Having a lot of time off just messes things up for me. I vaguely remember what I was doing before I left, but I can't seem to just pick up where I left off. I'm supposed to glaze the tall vase, but I'm still waiting for a test piece to be fired first. I'm supposed to glaze the other vase, but that one requires using a spray gun, and I knew that I'd feel bad afterwards and decided to put that off til later. I should work on either the Martian cricket or the Triffid, but right now I just can't seem to think how to get back to doing whatever it was that I'd been about to do before I left. I don't want to do anything with the Alien face hugger until Friday, because I think it's best to work on it for several hours in one day, and Friday is the only day that the lab is available for that length of time. That pretty much left the Sleestaks, which are technically not school assignments and I'm only supposed to work on them after I'm finished with school work. And then I remembered that I'd left the plaster molds to dry, and that they should be ready to start making bowls and plates for my series of Halloween dishes. So I poured slip into those and worked on a Sleestak while I was waiting for the slip to set up in the molds. So I've mostly finished one Sleestak now. In a day or two it will be ready to be set out to dry, and I'll at least be able to get something off of my shelf. The plates and bowls are going to take longer than I expected. The plate mold works very well, except that the clay is too soft right out of the plaster and the plate didn't hold it's shape. I put the clay back into the mold and will let it set overnight. The bowl will just have to wait.

Remembering Valentine's Day

Now I know that I said that I was going to post about people who don't know how to spend money, but I think that I might put that off yet again. Maybe I'll post that instead of doing Freaky Friday tomorrow, or maybe it can just wait until next week. Anyway, I have this idea that I should post something else, since it's Valentine's Day.

I used to really like Valentine's Day when I was a kid. When you're in grade school you buy these silly cartoon Valentines and give them to other kids. Not that you just go up and give them stuff. Everyone had a decorated box, and you put the Valentines in the boxes. We had a contest to see who could make the prettiest box. I never actually got first place in that, which I didn't think was fair. It was obvious that either the other kid's parents had done most of the work, or else it was mostly a store bought thing to begin with. My box was my own work, except for when my dad had to glue something for me, since the project often required some toxic chemical that I wasn't allowed to use by myself.

So that was fun, and it lasted three or four years. I don't remember the school after that making a big deal of the day. By sixth grade, I hardly did anything fun with the holiday at all. Funny that the day meant less as I got closer to the age that it was supposed to mean something. In seventh grade I had a boyfriend, but I don't remember him getting me anything special that year. After breaking up for about a year and a half, we were together again, and it seems like that year we tried to make a big deal of it. But he didn't have any money and I think I was grounded for something anyway.

There were a few years when the holiday just seemed to remind me that I didn't have anybody. When I was seventeen I had someone, but he didn't have any money. I think maybe he made me some fudge or something.

When I was nineteen, finally, this was the year that I expected to get a pretty red box of candy and so forth. My fiance presented me with a stuffed animal, which he assumed that I would like better than candy. And normally, he would have been right, but I'd had just been wanting one of these silly heart shaped boxes for so long I was a bit disappointed. He saw that, and later he went and got me chocolate too.

The next year, the fiance was still around, though the actual engagement had been put on hold. He supposedly didn't have time for me, so I didn't think that I should sit around and wait for him. I didn't want to be engaged anyway. I wanted to get married. Being engaged is just this stressful period of time when you are waiting to get married. I was in college, and I was supposed to be having fun and dating, not waiting around for this guy who I might or might not get married to later. So I went back to dating, and it seems like there were about four guys in the picture, and they all seemed to disappear for a week or two right around the middle of February.

When I was twenty-one I finally broke it off with the college fiance, and found myself back with the guy I was with when I was seventeen. I'm sure that there were the traditional gifts and and nice dinner and such, but I don't remember that stuff. What I remember was that I had gone through a bit of a crisis in December, and he was really there for me. But after the crisis was over, we were talking about getting married, and I realized that I couldn't marry him. I was very much in love, but he wasn't a Christian. Since I knew that I wasn't going to marry him, and the purpose of dating was to figure out who I would marry, I really shouldn't date him anymore. Having come to this conclusion, I thought that I would leave it to him how we should deal the break-up. Should we just immediately stop all contact? Should we try to stay friends? Should we just gradually see less and less of each other? Should we still date sometimes but also see other people? He didn't get it, and he had to hear again. We weren't going to get married, so we were eventually going to break up, so we should do it sooner than later so we didn't get hurt any more than absolutely necessary. He could choose how to handle that, but if he didn't choose then I would. At that point he lied to me and told me that he was a Christian but that he just didn't feel comfortable in church. And then he lied to me about some other really important things.

And then we were engaged. Not anything official, since we hadn't picked out rings or set a date or anything. But we would be getting married sometime, whenever we had the money. And I was in college and there didn't seem to be any rush, but I did expect to be married in a year or two.

So I don't think that we really ever made a big deal of the holiday. Until these past two years, I was very much in love and always happy to see him. Even with the financial problems and figuring out that he'd lied to get me to marry him, I was still very happy. I was a happily married woman and didn't need a special day for it.

So Valentine's Day itself was no big deal. The following week was somewhat special due to buying a lot of clearance sale chocolate. But except for that it was really just life as usual.

The thing that I really associate with February and Valentine's Day is buying stuff for my dad. His birthday was less than a week away from the holiday, so he was often presented with heart-shaped Mylar balloons that were on sale, or heart-shaped cake, or red tins of popcorn. If I took him to lunch or dinner, there were hearts and flowers decorating the restaurant. Stuff like that.

Dad would have been 66 this year. I miss him. I know that he was in pain and probably ready to go, and I know that he is in a better place now. I have totally gotten used to the fact that he isn't here, but there are times when it is especially irritating. I can't tell him about some movie I've seen or some thing that happened at school. I can't ask him if he likes the new Terminator series. I can't ask him what he thinks is wrong with the car. I can't ask him to tell me again about the giant checker-playing computer that one of his rivals entered into a high-school science fair.

Happy Valentines Day. And Happy Birthday Dad.

Christmas Lights, Robots, and I Feel Bad About My Neck

I recently went on a business trip with my husband. During the drive we listened to this audio book. It is written by the screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally. It is one of those non-fiction books where the author pretty much complains about all the things in her life, but somehow it all ends up being funny.

To start with, the woman doesn't like her neck. In fact, all of her close female friends hate their necks. They look good for their age, except for their necks, so they all wear turtleneck sweaters.

She talks about other things that you have to deal with as you get older, like your eyesight isn't what it used to be and how you don't know or even care who the new musicians are and how you don't really like the new electronic stuff cause you can't even get half the stuff on your cell phone to work. She then goes on to talk about cookbooks and getting various jobs and renting apartments. She was married several times, and she was more attached to her apartment than any of her husbands.

I very much enjoyed this book, as did my husband.

After spending most of three days alone in a motel room, I noticed some lines on my neck. I'm sure I'd seen them before, but I just hadn't really given them any thought. Well, that's not entirely true. When I'm making a costume, I think about my neck and where the wrinkles and bulges are. But the rest of the time I don't dwell on that sort of thing much, and my neck usually isn't high on the list anyway.

But I'm alone in this motel room, and I'm looking at myself in the big mirror that most motel rooms have over the sink with the bright overhead lights. And there are these lines on my neck. And I don't like them.

I am nowhere near as old as the woman who wrote this book. But I think that I should like to go out and buy a bunch of turtleneck sweaters. But that really isn't the problem, is it? I like turtleneck sweaters. I especially like black turtleneck sweaters. I can go out and buy a bunch of black turtleneck sweaters and be very happy with them. But I can only wear them until maybe March. Someday I will have to move someplace where I can wear the turtlenecks year-round.

Anyway, I went on this little trip with my husband, even though except for the drive I didn't actually spend lots of time with my husband. So why did I spend most of three days knitting and wasting time watching cable when I have all of this stuff to do at home? Mostly, I just had to go because my husband was taking this little trip to the town where I used to live, and it happened to be on the last days of the season when the Christmas stuff was still up at the college. When I was little, we used to go an look at these decorations every year. But we moved away just before I became a teenager, and I think that this is only the third time that I've been in the area at the right time since then.

It's mostly silly stuff. I'm guessing that most of this stuff was originally bought in the sixties, or maybe even the fifties. Perhaps it is not that impressive today. You cannot see the lights from outer-space or anything like that. It seems like there's some Disney stuff and there is a nativity scene and some stuff from A Christmas Carol and several displays with Santa.

And there's a robot. This is a fifties-type robot that looks like the one from The Jetson's, only more square. He's supposed to blow bubbles, but that wasn't working the day we were there.

So I went on this little trip, because I doubt that I'll ever get to do it again. It is difficult to schedule stuff like this in December. And I don't know how much longer the college will continue the tradition anyway. I think the college has had the decorations since about 1971. But the decorations are older than that, and they won't last forever.

The day after we saw the lights we went to a clearance sale and bought chocolate and a few decorations and some other odd things. And I bought a pencil sharpener that looks a lot like that robot at the college. I never can find a pencil sharpener when I need one. I buy lots of cheap mechanical pencils, because not only can I not find the pencil sharpener for regular pencils, but then I can't find the refill lead for the mechanical pencils either. So I just keep buying new ones. If I have a pencil sharpener that looks like a robot, then maybe I won't lose it. Maybe.

A strange lady at my school

Tuesday's post was a lot of fun. Just thought I'd flat out say something and see how many people were offended, but if anyone was, they didn't say so. And I had wanted to do something about being a Christian or being a Baptist before I got to the Gay Guy at Galaxy Fair post. So that worked out just fine, since I'll probably post about the gay guy tomorrow.

But I think I'll post a bit more about people making strange comments about God.

I went to a Christian school. It wasn't like what you see on TV sometimes. This was a really small school in a Baptist church, and we didn't even have uniforms or anything.

One of the teachers there was Mrs. H. I use the term teacher here because her actual title would mean nothing to my readers. The "teachers" at the school were mostly other people's moms. Most of the time, they didn't teach anything. Mrs. H was almost an exception, because she almost taught an oil painting class. But the class was cancelled after a bunch of high school kids gave her a hard time, and there weren't enough of the rest of us to have a class.

Anyway, Mrs. H was the mother of a girl a year or two younger than I was, Tammy. Older and wiser me now looks back and sees that Tammy had all kinds of problems, but at the time I just thought Tammy acted like Tammy because Tammy was a teenager. One of her problems was that she believed her step father didn't care about her that much, which may or may not have been true. What was true was that her little brother got more attention, but that was probably because he had learning problems and not because his parents loved him a lot more than Tammy.

Another of Tammy problems was that her mom was a bit of a ding-bat.

For the most part, I liked Mrs. H. I was into arts and crafts, and if we ever got to do any of that at school it was because of Mrs. H. But she didn't seem all that bright, and she was one of those people who thought ET was the anti-christ because he rose from the dead. She was clueless about most things, and she seemed to giggle a lot.

Mrs. H was always saying odd things like ET was evil and women shouldn't be allowed to wear pants. But I remember one conversation that seemed odd even for her.

At the time most of the girls younger than me were obsessed with putting stickers on everything. They put stickers on the outsides of their notebooks and on several pages inside their notebooks, and on their pencil holders and on their desks, and possibly even on their Bibles.

So one day most of the kids were out playing ball or something, and some of the girls who were not playing ball were just standing around doing nothing. And the girls have their notebooks out and are looking at all the stickers. And Mrs. H came by and looked at the stickers too.

So she was looking at some stickers that were pictures of flowers, and we she got to the roses she got very happy and started talking about roses. She said that she used to grow roses, and she pointed out some that looked like ones that she used to have. Her whole face lit up when she talked about the roses. We listend to her talk a bit.

And then she suddenly stopped smiling and got very serious. "Of course that was before I married Mr. H. I don't have any roses now. Now I'm doing what God wants me to do."

And then it got really quiet. No one knew what to say after that. I think that we all made excuses that we had to go to the bathroom or something.

She made it sound like Mr. H and/or God hated roses and didn't want her to have any.

Probably it all makes sense. Probably the roses were at a different house that she lived in before she married Mr. H, and now she doesn't have them anymore. Maybe they don't have room for roses, or maybe they don't grow well in that soil, or maybe they don't have enough light to grow roses. Or maybe Mr. H is allergic to roses.

And as for God not liking roses or not wanting Mrs. H to have any, that really sounded strange. But maybe Mrs. H was spending too much time gardening instead of doing church work or spending time with her family. Maybe she gave up gardening to have more time for doing what God wanted her to do.

But she didn't say anything like that. And the roses obviously made her happy, and not having them made her unhappy. And the way she was talking, it sounded like God didn't want her to be happy.

But maybe it was something altogether different that made sense only to Mrs. H. Maybe she gave up roses because ET the anti-christ liked flowers. I don't know.

The most hated man on Star Trek

According to Tara, today is Star Trek villain day, or something like that. Anyway, it is on her blog, and on Dmarks' blog. So I have had to give this some serious thought.

Dmarks makes a lot of good points. But, he has already made them, so there's not much point in my repeating them.

Khan is a really good villain. But we've probably blogged enough about him for a while.

There are a lot of really good villains on Star Trek. But even the villains are like family now. Turns out most of the Klingon's were old drinking buddies of Dax anyway.

Who just really makes me sick in the Star Trek universe?

I think for today I'll pick, Kevin O'Riley.

Let me refresh you're memory a bit. About forty years ago, on an episode called "The Naked Time" the Enterprise found a bunch of frozen dead people. Seems like they just all went crazy and killed each other. Maybe someone even turned off life-support, or maybe it just went off by itself after the crew died. Anyway, it was not a pretty picture.

A bit after the Enterprise crew found the dead crazy people, a few people on the Enterprise started acting weird. Someone killed himself. Sulu started chasing people with a sword.

Most of the crew was exposed to an illness that makes people appear drunk. They don't think clearly. They get very emotional. They make totally irrational decisions.

Kevin O'Riley locked himself in the engine room and started playing with the equipment. He decided to turn off the engines.

So why did I decide to pick poor Kevin O'Riley?

I have liked Star Trek my whole life. So has my brother. My dad was one of the people who watched Star Trek when it first aired, and decided he really liked it, even if it wasn't quite "serious" science fiction.

My mother decided we were all from a different planet. We shouldn't waste are time watched TV. We needed to do important stuff in the here and now, like clean up our rooms. Watching reruns of Star Trek was just a total waste of time, and it was all about dumb stuff anyway.

So after me and my brother had cleaned our rooms, we would watch reruns of Star Trek anyway. And once in a great while, my mother would sit with us, and try to point out that it was all a waste of time, and comment on what was going on. But usually she wouldn't try very hard. She didn't have any good arguments. And how can you not think that Zefram Cochrane and the Companion on the episode Metamorphosis aren't just the most romantic couple ever in the history of romantic stories? And how can you not watch Spock and his father argue again every time Journey to Babel comes on? How can you just not get any of it?

So she mostly left us alone for a while.

Enter Mr. O'Riley.

Apparently drunk Mr. O'Riley, who has locked himself in the engine room, turned off the engines, and has decided to sing..."I'll take you home again Kathleen...."

My mother decided to sing with him.

My mother decided to sing some more, any time that we were watching Star Trek. It didn't even have to be the same episode. It just had to be Star Trek.

I hate Kevin O'Riley.

The busiest travel day of the year

I'm sorry that more of you didn't like the story about the drunk Tom Cruise guy I posted over the weekend. Anyway, I'm going to be very busy today and I don't have time to come up with anything brilliant. So I'm going to transfer an old post from the other blog. I think from now on, I will just post the rest of those in chronological order, instead of trying to find something relevent to something someone else posted.

(the following was originally posted on another blog on November 23rd)

Yesterday was the busiest travel day of the year.

Well, that's what the day before Thanksgiving is supposed to be. But I hardly ever travel on that day, because most of my family lives here. In fact, when I was little, one set of grandparents lived an hour away, and the other set lived about two or three hours away, so that we did our traveling on the holiday itself and didn't have to deal with any traffic at all.

But after my husband got a job that involved a lot of travel (mostly in Texas), I did have to deal with the dreaded Wednesday before traffic a couple of times. And yesterday was one of those times. But yesterday's traffic wasn't bad at all, at least where we were.

So Monday we had to drive a few hours away, to the place I spent the first eleven years of my life. There's nothing to do there. It is quite boring. Next month, there will be Christmas lights to look at, but this week, nothing.

Still, I went anyway, to spend a little time with my husband. We drove by my old house. The people who live there now are really into the spirit of things and already have a lot of Christmas decorations up. The two front yard trees are gone now. I wanted to look in the back yard and see if the plum tree was still there and if the storm shelter was made good use of, but I didn't look. Nor did I look in the backyard of the house across the street to see if the Fort was still there. I think it was, maybe I just couldn't see it because it was painted a different color.

We had lunch at The Glass Kitchen, the world's only drive-thru where you can actually understand what is being said because you talk to a real person instead of a microphone. It has never made sense to me why everyone does not have this same design. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered from my last stop in town (I should have asked for a chili-cheeseburger, but those are so messy), and I'm always surprised how small it looks. When I was a kid it seemed like a really big square building, like a Walmart, but no, it's just a little hamburger stand.

After working only two days, we headed home, and stopped at a small town that we used to spend a lot of time at about ten years ago. The Walmart my husband did business from was closed, replaced by a Supercenter outside of town. A Taco Bell/KFC had been added, but it was closed for renovations. More of the little shops on Main street had closed down, and very few of those remaining where open yesterday. We stopped at the soda fountain, and were told that the two old antique dealers from next door finally moved to California, and they both died soon after.

Not much to do there either, so after I finished my ice cream we got going again. There was hardly any traffic until we were almost home. We got to I-35, and there was the traffic waiting for us. Only I couldn't tell that much of it was really from out-of-town travelers. At some point we thought, lets just go ahead and get off at this exit and do a little shopping. And there everyone was, going to the mall. We didn't actually go to the mall, but a shopping center nearby. We mostly just looked at a few things and stopped for lunch.

So it was not a bad day before Thanksgiving, but it wasn't a really fun day off either. Now I'm off to decide which movie to see after we eat, then plan out tomorrow's shopping.

Happy Thanksgiving

I miss haunted houses of the past

It seems to me that when I was younger, haunted houses were better than they are now. Not that I don't still like them, but I remember them being a lot different. There were people in them with really great makeup, and the house itself was really something to look at. The outside of the house might be a spooky graveyard with interesting tombstones for people to read while they waited in line.

Now it seems like they are all about people chasing you with chainsaws. Gone are the perfectly decorated rooms with mood lighting. The hallways that were once carefully painted to look like bricks or cracked walls are now mostly covered with that splatter type paint that is used to hide graffiti.

And why spend hours on someone's makeup and set decoration, if it is going to be too dark for anyone to see it? I used to be able to see such things by the lights of fake candelabras and lamps with colored lightbulbs, but now the rooms are just barely lit enough for you to see the exit, and many of the hallways have no light at all. I don't like literally stumbling around in the dark. Once or twice might be okay, but after that it really gets annoying.

Maybe it's all my imagination. Maybe the reason I remember the better lighting when I was younger was because we went to some special early show for kids when they turned on more lights. Maybe we went to a preview show, and the people were making more of an effort with their makeup and such, and later in the season they're just too tired to bother with it anymore.

But I don't remember running through the whole thing just trying to get out. I remember stoping to watch people. I remember going through rooms with black lights and laughing at people whose white bras and underwear became visible beneath their dark colored clothes.

Not that I dislike everything new. I like the bridge that goes through the vortex. Okay, it isn't as impressive now as the first couple of times that I saw one, but I still like it. And I like some of the animatronic things, but not all of them. (I especially do not care for the one that has spasms on the toilet. And why are we supposed to be scared of a guy playing with himself anyway?)

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like for the most part we're paying more and more money for less quality entertainment.

Darkness

When I was seven, I decided that Halloween was my favorite holiday. The really weird thing was that I decided this sometime in the spring, when a lot of kids would say that Easter is their favorite holiday. I mean, either you would say that Christmas is your favorite holiday, or you would say that they are all your favorite, and so the next one about to arrive or the one that has just past must be your favorite holiday.

But no, we were in school that day, and we were taking down these colored papers that we had taped to the windows. Most of these papers had fall leaves stuck in between the window and the paper, so that the color faded except where the leaves had been. And I was holding this piece of paper with the colored shape of the leaf, and I wished that it was fall again so that Halloween would come. And that's a strange thought to have in the spring, since most of the rest of the school year you wish for it to be spring so that school would end for summer vacation.

For most other kids at the time, the thing they liked most about Halloween was the candy. I like candy just as much as the next person, but that was never really it for me. I liked putting on a costume and going out with my friends to run around the neighborhood in the dark. I just knew that when I was a grown-up I wouldn't wait til Halloween, and I would walk around the neighborhood in the dark on a regular basis.

I still like dressing up in costumes, and I've found reasons besides Halloween to wear them.

But the walking around in the dark bit...well, my feelings on that one have changed over the years. At one point, darkness became a way to hide the fact that I was kissing someone. Later on, the sun going down was really no big deal.

But at some point it was something I was really afraid of.

Nothing really bad like that has ever happened to me, but it does make me uneasy at times. My brother lives a couple of blocks away, and because of the awful parking situation, it is pointless to drive to his house (unless it is raining or something) so we often walk to his place. We used to walk to his place every Friday night.

Sometimes I walk by myself now.

The gates are all locked, and I'm sure it's perfectly safe, but sometimes it just doesn't feel that way.

Sometimes I am so unnerved by it all that I can't seem to get to sleep alone in my own bed. Silly. But the only place I've really felt safe enough to sleep by myself was my old upstairs apartment. I suppose someone could have murdered me in my sleep there, just as they could here or at the house I lived in before the apartment. It just seemed to me that if someone wanted to murder me in my upstairs apartment, they'd have to want it enough to bring a ladder with them, and that would probably make noise and they would get caught.

I used to really love being outside in the darkness.

I guess that's one of the things that people miss when they talk about the good old days.

ARK II out on DVD

Or, at least, it will be next month, according to my friend.

If you weren't a kid at the same time that I was, or if you just don't remember, I'll tell you a bit of what I remember.

It is set sometime in the future after whatever we did to almost destroy the Earth (having an atomic war, inventing a plague, using hairspray, or maybe not recycling soda cans). Four or five people and a chimp travel around in a (solar powered?) RV, looking for other people to have adventures with. They run into some telepaths, Robbie the Robot, and some other people. Then they save the day, and drive off looking for someone else to have an adventure with next week.

Anyway, I just thought I'd mention that it will be available next month, just in case someone wants to buy me something for Christmas.