April Showers Bring Cold Weather

Started a cloudy morning with oatmeal for breakfast and cartoons to celebrate Earth Day yesterday. I did The Lorax, the Dr. Seuss tale of the little orange man who "speaks for the trees," yesterday. This morning, I ran two Tiny Toons Adventures episodes with environmental themes and a Sailor Moon episode from the early first season. The Toons deal with Elmyra carelessly littering Plucky's swamp, the destruction of the Acme Acres jungle, and Montana Max dumping his factory's sludge into GoGo's beloved Wackyland in "Pollution Solution." Babs and Buster Bunny (no relation) save a baby whale and his mother from poacher Grabbme Gotcha, with the inadvertent help of Elmyra, in "Whale's Tale." The Sailor Soliders band together to save a park from being destroyed by developers and stop the Negaverse from making nature go wild in "An Unnatural Phenomenon."

While the cartoons were on, I tried something I haven't done in years. I bought a sun catcher paint set at Dollar Tree last week. We used to buy them all the time when I was little. The kits usually consist of a circle of translucent plastic and four colors of a special paint. You paint the pattern in the plastic, then let it dry and hang it from a window. I painted a deep red rose with soft green leaves and yellow and blue octagons around the edges. I haven't found anything to hang it with yet; I'll figure that out later.

It was still just cloudy, windy, and cold when I rode to work. It sprinkled a tiny bit on the way, but nothing resembling yesterday's monsoon. I arrived perfectly dry this time. It was quiet when I got in, steady but not crazy when I finished as rush hour petered out. There were no major problems, and I was in and out quickly with no relief.

For once, I got off early enough to have a decent dinner at home. I made Chicken Parmesan with spinach salad, steamed broccoli, and multi-grain pasta, with bread pudding made from the last of last month's Irish Soda Bread and Cinnamon Swirl Bread for dessert. I did At Sword's Point, my second Warner Archive birthday DVD from Lauren, during dinner.

The aging queen of France (Gladys Cooper) fears her evil nephew (Robert Douglas) intends to try to usurp the throne on her death. She calls the original Four Musketeers to come to her rescue. Alas, the four gentlemen are now too old to fight, so they send their sons...and Athos' tough daughter Claire (Maureen O'Hara). Claire may be a woman, but she's the equal of any man in France, as D'Artangan Jr. (Cornel Wilde) discovers. Claire will need all of her wits and cunning if she and the other Musketeers are to save the Queen's daughter and young son from her nephew's plotting!

This one is notable for being one of the very few Golden Age of Hollywood action films with a female star. Athletic O'Hara is genuinely good at the fencing heroics, and is noticeably more at ease with the swashbuckling than Wilde is. The dialogue is a bit stilted at times, but if you like old-fashioned swashbucklers or the original Three Musketeers, it's all a great deal of fun.