Encouraged by a weather report that predicted a cloudy but dry day, we slept until nine and then went through the usual morning routine, although I had to cut the dog walk short for a call of nature. However, this gave me enough time to write out some Thanksgiving cards and address and stamp them. These came with us as we left for lunch a little early so that we could swing past the Austell Road Cobb County complex so I could renew the registration on my car and get this year's tag. Even with this detour, we arrived at this week's lunch venue in plenty of time and had a nice long meal and convo with Alice, Ken, Aubrey, Mel, and Phyllis. We were eating at Okinawa and discovered that Aubrey's good friend from her school years, Kayla, was working there and had just been promoted to head server. Alice was keeping warm by the window, as she had come home from Conjuration with a cold. Nothing worse than good ol' fashioned con crud. We talked about everything from the weather to the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.

Lunch broke up after two, and I had James swing by the Mableton post office to drop off the Thanksgiving cards. Instead of coming back up Floyd Road/Hurt Road to return to the East-West Connector, we did a slight variation on the directions being given to us by the GPS and drove a street called Fontaine Road. We're so used to being surrounded by suburbs that we are surprised when we find the small places in Cobb that are still country-like. The road leading to Fontaine was filled with small, older homes, but Fontaine itself paralleled an old railroad line and looked almost like the road we take up to Helen, GA, with widely-spaced homes, some with stables and acreage behind them, and many stands of trees, all in various stages of autumn color. The railroad tracks were out of sight in a little valley at the right side of the road. It was like a little five-minute vacation in the middle of our day.

We were headed for Barnes & Noble to get the cocoa we got cheated out of last weekend when the Acworth Books-a-Million showed up missing in action. The doors were wide open and they had been doing some rearranging inside, with big upright shelves of the newest and recommended books right up front. Before we had our cocoa we wandered around both floors, checking out the magazines (but I'm not buying any this weekend, as they usually have the magazines on discount on Black Friday), and then the books. I did find a book that was discounted, so picked that up (a humorous memoir about a woman who is an introvert attempting to act as an extrovert) and a paperback involving a paranormal mystery. After surveying the reading material and getting ideas for the few gifts we have left to purchase, we sat and had peppermint cocoa and shared a chocolate chunk cookie. No dessert for us tonight!

James wrapped up the power chair before we left the bookstore and a good thing, because we ran through a rainshower on the way home—say, what happened to that dry day we were supposed to have?—but luckily it was barely spitting when we pulled into the driveway. So we got the chair put up safely.

Spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening watching some things on Netflix. First up was a British special narrated by Stephen Fry about the elaborate courting behavior of several types of tropical birds, including birds of paradise and bowerbirds. The narrative was very tongue-in-cheek and the birds beautiful to look at, but with the most extraordinary courtship rituals: dancing, decorating elaborate nests, even a type of bird where the male has a male "wing man" to help him court his lady friend.

While James was cooking up some burritos for his breakfasts, I watched the documentary Harry and Snowman, the story of which is told in Elizabeth Letts' The Eighty Dollar Champion. Snowman, a former plow horse, was on his way to become dog food when a riding instructor named Harry DeLeyer bought him for eighty dollars. The horse turned out to be a natural jumper who won prestigious jumping contests in the late 1950s against younger, fitter horses. It wasn't the first time I had met Snowman. He appeared in a childhood book I still have, More Than Courage by Patrick Lawson, stories of real-life dogs and horses, where I also first read about "Sergeant" Stubby of WWI, Chips the war dog (whose real story was much better than the Disney telefilm), Roman war dogs, the famous Lipizzaners, police dogs, race horses, rescue dogs—and even a chapter on performing dogs and horses that talked about Lassie, Fury, and Rin Tin Tin.

Later we watched a series of short Disney films, including little shorts based on Rapunzel and Frozen, the enchanting nearly black-and-white "Paperman," the Prep and Landing "Secret Santa" short, etc. Totally delightful! The Mickey Mouse cartoon made of half vintage animation and half CGI was very inventive.

Labels: animals, books, Disney, friends, holidays, seasons, shopping, television, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:57:00 PM

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It's been a lackluster day. James awoke in pain, tried sleeping on the heating pad, then finally got up to sit in a straight-backed chair. I walked the dog. Did the grocery shopping, coming home feeling rather queasy and with a stomachache. Probably subconsciously dreading tomorrow and yet another damn debt. (It is no longer subconscious and I'm still queasy.)

Couldn't do much for James, so spent the afternoon watching two episodes of Wild Britain (the presenter has a soothing voice and I thought it might lull James, now in the recliner, to sleep). Instead, after the second one, he went back to the computer and I fell asleep. Woke up in time to watch two episodes of The Wild Wild West, one with Artemus Gordon as the main character for a change, and the second "The Night of the Returning Dead," one of my favorites, with Sammy Davis Jr (as Jeremiah, what today we might call an "animal whisperer") and Peter Lawford.

I'd brought home soup for lunch and we had a Hormel dinner (beef tips in gravy) over spaetzle for dinner, with a Hostess cupcake chaser. Watched some of the Olympic trials, then got bored and put on Waking Sleeping Beauty, a documentary about how the Disney Animation division found its legs again in the 1980s after The Black Cauldron failed (actually, I kinda like BC, although I was disappointed that Hayley Mills did not voice Eilonwy as was originally announced), through The Lion King. It was comprised not of interviews of "talking heads," as Leonard Maltin noted at the end, but of footage filmed at the time, which was fascinating: Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy Disney Jr, etc. Loved the animators' sketches of some of the events that happened.

Poor James has pretty much been sitting with a heating pad all day. He says he is going to work tomorrow with it.

If all this hasn't been "fun" enough and tomorrow going to be a nightmare, I found out at Kroger this morning that they no longer have levothroid on their generic 4/10 drug list. So I will have to go to Kaiser for refills from now on. Thanks heaps for nothing, Kroger.

(Yep, no longer just queasy; now dinner's coming up on me...ugh.)

Labels: Disney, food, health, sickness, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:25:00 PM

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We had a treat yesterday morning.

We usually just go to the Winter Market and come home, but we wanted to go to the Corner Shop, which doesn't open until eleven. So we wandered the marketplace, enjoying the scents of bacon and shea butter and other savory food. There is a vendor who sells nursery items, and today they had lilacs. The vendor told me these are southern lilacs, which will do well in this climate. Most lilacs have to have certain days of frost to grow properly, and our climate does not provide for it, but these have been bred specially for the South. I would like to have one of those some day. I remember the lilac bush at the back of our yard, growing insistently through the fence from Charley's yard, in May thick with fragrant pale violet blossoms. I would bury my nose in them (and pay, courtesy my stinky allergy, later) and drink in the sweet scent with delight.

Shillings has breakfast specials, so after picking up some homemade dog biscuits, we crossed the street. There in front was a big sign saying the Saturday breakfast began at 9 a.m., and the door was wide open; however, when we walked in there at a quarter to ten, a rather disheveled looking man told us they wouldn't be "open" for 20 more minutes. Fine. We walked past Glover Park and went to the Australian Bakery instead. It took a while to get served, but we just busied ourselves with an Australian food catalog and our Nooks, and had a delicious breakfast. James had something with egg, ham, and potatoes, and I had a bowl of yummy oatmeal and a bagel with cream cheese.

Just at eleven we strolled over to the Corner Shop and wandered among the British Easter candy. James got some sale orange and mint creams for desserts, picked up a couple of pasties for lunch and some bangers for us to have for supper, and I picked up a few of the heavenly Fry's orange cream bars. We split a bar once we got back to the truck; these are exquisite, with a very orange-tasting filling with plenty of zest so you have an aftertaste of dark chocolate and sharp orange in your mouth for some minutes afterwards.

We came home to put the bangers in the freezer and the rest up, then went to the mall to price eyeglasses. James had his eyes examined on Wednesday and found, though he has no damage to his eyes from diabetes, his prescription has changed radically again. He used to be very nearsighted, then a few years ago it developed that only one of his eyes was very nearsighted, and the other was near normal. That was four years ago. Now presbiopia has done its work. His very nearsighted eye is now only slightly nearsighted, and the formerly slightly nearsighted eye is now farsighted!

(James was a bit worried about a visual problem he had occasionally: a "sparkly" circle effect in one of his eyes which he explained in detail. The opthamologist asked him when this happened and was told it was chiefly at work; the doctor told him these were a visual migraines, probably caused by stress!)

First we went to Lenscrafters where we were helped very efficiently by a young woman. He found some frames on sale that would do, and got a quote for those. Then we went downstairs to VisionWorks. Well, they had a twofer deal, and frames that he just loved, and ended up ordering them. They didn't cost any more than the last two pair I bought, so I thought it was a good deal as well. I need to go have a checkup myself, but in looking at the same brand of glasses he had, the ones I liked best were pinky-purple. Yuck! I have so much trouble finding glass frames. I hate the little narrow metal "John Lennon" glasses or plastic "David Tennant" glasses everyone seems to be wearing now, and I especially don't want plastic. My complexion is still greasy enough that I'd have the same problem I had in school, my glasses always being slimy and sliding down my nose.

From there we decided to go to Micro Center. I'd had an idea to do something, but it wasn't going to work out. However, we did talk with one of techs and decided that we did need a new router, as the computers are having dropouts from the wireless connection. We found a Linksys on sale, which was at definite advantage to our budget.

Spent some time at the hobby shop; I mostly read The Grand Mirage while James shot the breeze with the guys. Then we drove home via Dragon to pick up some supper for ourselves.

Ah, but before that could be happily eaten, there was one more chore to get through. We had a very grubby dog, and, having found a surprise on the doorstep when we arrived home, it was time to do something about it. So first I stripped the old recliner cover off the recliner and happily threw it out. We've had the old one for years and it's a bit threadbare. The problem was remembering where we bought the first one, especially as it showed up for a year or so at the As Seen on TV Store, but was now gone again. I knew it was either at Lillian Vernon or Harriet Carter, and last week I was successful in finding it on an internet search and bought a new one, which arrived in Saturday's mail.

Next I vacuumed the recliner...and vacuumed...and vacuumed...well, all the dog hair never will come out, but I got the worst of it, and also collected any crumbs. Then I gave it a spray with Febreeze and some Lysol and left it to rest. James later used a towel to sit on it as we ate supper and the arm covers and headrest that went with the chair were washing and drying.

And then I drowned the dog.

Well, that's the way she sees it. I gave her a bath and she whined her way through it, but she came out looking fluffy and a shade lighter. Not soon afterward we were able to put the new recliner cover on. Later I got on chat and had fun talking with Jen, Emma, and Mike.

This morning we were awakened by barking, but it was only a few minutes before the alarm. Breakfast was accompanied by Rinty and Rusty: "The Legacy of Sean O'Hara" and "The Barber of Seville." Next was a trip to Kroger for the usual weekly items.

Once these goodies were put away, we gathered our two coupon books and headed out to BJs. We had some good coupons for fruit/vegetables/nuts/toothbrushes/soap, etc. which could be stored away.

On Wednesday I had, on the way home from work, begun listening to a Rick Steves program about Scotland and Wales. I was enjoying it so much that I never finished listening to it and instead played it as we drove up to Woodstock. Rick talked to a woman from Scotland and a man from Wales about tourist traps [cough...Loch Ness], natural beauty, the difference between Welsh Gaelic and Scots Gaelic, and all sorts of delightful subjects. The BJs trip was a nice stroll around the store; I even picked up a 16GB thumb drive on sale.

On the way home we stopped at a little bookstore in a strip shopping center less than a quarter of a mile down the road from BJs, the Book Browser, mostly used books and a few new ones. Found a lovely book called Our Mothers' War, about women during World War II and also picked up a "Dear America" about a frontier schoolteacher. And then I found something I'd wanted since I was a kid but my folks couldn't afford it, the Walt Disney's Story Land book. This is a book of stories based on Disney's animated features and shorts. The stories based on films are either just an excerpt from the movie (Alice in Wonderland is just the tea party, for instance, and So Dear to My Heart has just an animated sequence with Danny the lamb at the fair) or the whole story (Dumbo is the longest, telling the whole story in detail, but there are more abridged versions of Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians among others). It even has the full text of the Scamp Little Golden Book. The other stories are based on cartoon shorts, from Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to stories from the compilation films ("Once Upon a Wintertime" and "Johnny Appleseed") and even "Ben and Me."

We finished Rick Steves on the way home and then listened to the end of an A Way With Words that I wasn't able to finish because of telephone calls I needed to make on Thursday.

And then we had a nice late afternoon reading the paper. I got a few things off the DVR and James cooked some pork chops for dinner. There was enough left for me to have a pork sandwich and have leftovers for a lunch as well. Watched the new Frozen Planet and the season premiere of Mythbusters (Adam and Jamie surviving with only duct tape), with an intermission of going outside to see a stellar show: Venus, Jupiter, and a tiny gondola of a crescent moon hanging in the western sky. Even with the streetlight it was beautiful. I tried to snap a few photos, but they were totally inadequate to what was seen.

As a nice capper to the evening I found out the newest Bryant and May book is on its way to me; I've had it pre-ordered for a while. It was bad enough they published it last October in Great Britain and I've had to wait all this time for the American edition!

Labels: books, Disney, dogs, food, radio, shopping, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:19:00 PM

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Back when home movies were really "movies" (and silent ones at that): shot on film on an 8mm (and later Super8) camera and shown on a projector (that Dad would swear at when the film didn't uptake correctly!) with a fold-up screen, the manufacturers would often repackage cartoons or edited movies and sell them. We had a "Deputy Dawg" cartoon that I loved as a kid. These were also silent, with subtitles.

Here's a short film edited from Disney's "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh" in QuickTime format:

"Mysterious Dr. Syn"

Labels: Disney, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 6:02:00 PM

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Ultimatedisney.com is reporting that Leonard Maltin has stated that there will be no more Walt Disney Treasure sets coming out. Snellfrocky. Hangnails. Dirty socks.

Labels: Disney

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:11:00 AM

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