The temperature continued to fall yesterday evening, so very chilly that it felt very natural when James went downstairs to work in his hobby room to put "Holly" on, and later the Christmas episode of All Creatures Great and Small while I was on chat—a long nice one lasting until almost 3 a.m.!

Well, one of the chat group went out stimulating the economy yesterday—we did it on a smaller scale today. We had to go by Kroger to pick up the few things I couldn't find at WallyWorld, and then we went to BJ's. At BJs I bought a new telephone/answering machine with two extensions (we jokingly call them "puppies"). We only needed one extension for James' room downstairs, but this one filled the bill. The phone we have now still works, but the main receiver's battery died and we are using the extension receiver upstairs instead. These phones are so old that they use special batteries made for the model; even if I could find one it would probably cost as much as a new set. Until we got a new one, I couldn't use the intercom to talk to James if he was working on his models. Worse, I use the phone for our weekly staff meeting since I am teleworking that day. If the meeting ran long enough to drain the battery, usually anything over 30 minutes, I could run downstairs and use the other receiver. But then the battery went dead in the main. I was embarrassed the last time we had a staff meeting and I had to warn them that if I got cut off it was because of the batteries in the phone. (There is also a phone in the bedroom, but you can't plug an earphone into it. I like to be able to take notes and look through my work for any problems I want to discuss with my supervisor during the meeting; hard to do one-handed.)

So the new phone has the answering machine feature and the intercom feature on the extensions. It's also wall-mountable, which the other wasn't and it runs on regular rechargeable Ni-CD triple-A batteries rather than expensive proprietary batteries. It doesn't have a headphone plug, but it does have a speakerphone, which means I can leave the headset in the holder during the meeting and no batteries will run down.

I also got the shower stall scrubbed out this morning, and then we replaced the vinyl strip at the bottom of the door, which keeps any possible water from leaking out of the shower. It has been torn and dangling for several months, but we just never got around to getting a tool to pry the end cap off and put the new strip on, and since water never leaked out from underneath we had no imperative to do the replacement.

The funny thing was that we could not buy this strip separately! It's something that is certain to wear out every couple of years or so, and you would think they would be a dime a dozen, but we had a hard time finding one. We finally had to get a generic "shower repair kit" at Lowes, which included not only the vinyl strip but screws and wall anchors to enable hanging of a new shower door.

These were our errands for the day, and we came home to refill the bird feeder, fixing the tension on the window shades in the bedroom, get ready for work tomorrow, read the Sunday paper, etc. We had potlucks for supper and, after the news, switched channels listlessly before settling on Airport. We figured the DVD would look better (it did), so we put that on instead.

I love Airport. It's not only an entertaining movie, but there are a lot of nice memories associated with it. It opened in 1970, at the Majestic Theatre in downtown Providence. The Majestic was one of the last of the grand old movie theatres left downtown—it started out life as a vaudeville house—and I especially liked it because almost all the Disney movies opened there. I had probably seen all my favorites there: Mary Poppins, Three Lives of Thomasina, The Moon Spinners, Big Red, Summer Magic, In Search of the Castaways... It had plush seats and a huge ladies' room that was downstairs and a big screen in front of which a big plush curtain still opened before the movie started (it still had a stage as well).

My dad had jury duty right about the time Airport opened. He worked as a polisher in Trifari, the jewelry manufacturer, so jury duty was a bit of a vacation for him. He was placed on the trial of a man who was accused of embezzling money from his company. One afternoon, the judge dismissed the jury early, so instead of coming directly home, he decided to go see Airport, since it had one of his favorite singers/actors in it, Dean Martin. He came home raving about it, and was especially tickled with the scene where the priest makes the sign of the cross and slaps the hysterical man who caused all the problems on the plane in the first place. (The bomb wouldn't have gone off had this man not interfered.) He said we had to go see it, and so Mom and I did, and we loved it, too (especially Helen Hayes!).

The Majestic closed soon after that—luckily it wasn't razed like the RKO Albee, but became the new playhouse for the Trinity Square Repertory Company; although they demolished the interior and the stage with its beautiful red curtain was gone forever, the beautiful exterior remained. Airport and all those Disney films always remind me of those fun days at the Majestic.

Labels: DVDs, electronics, movies, nostalgia, shopping

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