No Bug Is Left Behind

Started a literally freezing cold day with the Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends. While many parents on Amazon.com complained about peril or it being to scary for toddlers, I found the show to be very sweet. The title episode involved "Heartwood Day," a variation on Valentine's Day in which bugs give something special to each other to remind each other of life and death and how much they care.

Another episode proved a bit of a surprise. In "Family Tree," Miss Spider's brood is doing research on their ancestry. Trouble is, three of her children were adopted and don't know much about their early lives. Shimmer the jewel beetle wants to find her "hatch tree" and have something to contribute to the project. Miss Spider agrees to help her. Shimmer's upset when the search proves futile. Miss Spider reminds her that just because you're adopted doesn't mean you're not a part of the family...or that you don't still have a chance to find another part of yourself.

I was impressed with how gently and elegantly this episode handled adoption and looking for one's birth parent. No wonder Miss Spider has three adopted kids; she herself was once an orphan. She was taken in by a kindly grasshopper named Betty who raised her. It's not a subject you often see in animation, and rarely is it handled as well as it was here.

I pretty much spent the rest of the day looking around for writing projects and adding more from Helium. It was too cold to do much else. The high here today was 22. Some parts of the Midwest saw temperatures in the teens...or even lower! Good thing it was also sunny and not nearly as windy as yesterday.

Continued the last DVD of the public domain set during a leftovers lunch. The Hoppity Hooper episodes were by far my favorite of this batch. Anyone who's seen Jay Ward's other productions knows that he loved spoofing early 60s culture...and in "The Traffic Zone," he takes on one of TV's most famous sci-fi programs, The Twilight Zone. The episode was almost as weird as it's inspiration. On the run from the cops, Filmore hides in "The Traffic Zone," where he's somehow turned into a turnip. Waldo and Hoppity first have to rescue their now-vegetable buddy from being planted by the shocked locals, then themselves when they end up in "The Traffic Zone" and are all turned into veggies.

I made sure to bundle up for my ride to work. Surprisingly, given the cold and the time of the week and month, we were steady throughout most of the night. A manager actually called me earlier in the week and asked me if I wanted to work tonight. No problem - I didn't have any plans for tonight besides avoiding the cold, and I badly need the extra hours.