Been just slogging through orders for the past three days. I am desperate to get some done rather than just solving problems or asking for information. I had one order ready to go on Monday when I got some new information on it. What a good thing it had not been awarded online! I can just change the wording and send it.

In the meantime it has been cold, with an interruption yesterday for rain. It was not as much rain as they said there would be, and it was not raining during rush hour either end, which suited me fine, because after that nightmare ride home during the flooding in September, I'm not really eager to be commuting during a rainstorm anymore.

Last night after the rain cleared out, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped. The gusts of wind were so bad last night that I took down the banner and the flag from the front porch, because you could hear the banner flapping outside even through closed doors and if you watched it, the pole was rattling about. It's mounted to one of the columns and I don't want the column to be ruined if the pole mount works loose.

Today the wind squeezed the very last bits of moisture from the scattered clouds and throughout the morning there were snowflakes randomly floating here and there. I thought the first one was a feather, it was swirling about so leisurely in the wind.

I did something different tonight: watched a television episode instantly on Netflix. I had watched a movie previously (North Station, which is only available instantly), and decided to watch this to fulfill my curiosity.

As I've written before, I was a big fan of the 1975 series Ellery Queen with Jim Hutton and David Wayne. It was sad when it was canceled because it was actually due to be renewed, and then another series that NBC wanted became available and Queen was discarded for it. So several unproduced scripts existed. Some, according to elleryqueenshow.com, were used by the Eddie Capra Mysteries series, but one was actually produced as a period piece on Murder She Wrote, back when Angela Lansbury was feeling under the weather and only introduced many episodes, which were told as stories. The script story "The Adventure of the Grand Old Lady" became "The Grand Old Lady," still taking place in 1947. A murder takes place aboard the Queen Mary just before she docks. The Ellery character is changed to Christopher "Christy" McGinn, a young, rather nerdy composer of crossword puzzles who aspires to be a newspaper reporter, but who turns out to be a better amateur detective. His father is a police detective, and the story even included a Simon Brimmer clone, played by Robert Vaughn. Also aboard ship, and helping Christy is a famous British mystery writer who, I'm pretty sure, was supposed to be a thinly disguised Agatha Christie.

The story, involving repercussions from World War II, was pretty interesting, but the substitute characters for Ellery, Inspector Queen, and Brimmer were pretty colorless. Even veteran Vaughn couldn't recapture the wonderful irritating personality that John Hillerman had nailed perfectly. Also, when I was watching Queen, I felt like I could walk through the screen and into 1947, the set dressing was that good. I never got a forties feeling from this story, despite appropriate clothing and props. It was all rather blah...but what was most depressing was knowing how the original Ellery Queen team could have made this a winner. Think of Ellery teaming with "Dame Agatha"...it would have been great.

Labels: television, weather, work

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