Not Quite Fall

The weather remains incredible. It was a bit chilly in my apartment this morning when I got out of bed. I celebrated the fall-like day with mildly spooky episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Piglet is "A Knight to Remember" when he dreams that he's a real knight who must fight a fearsome dragon. Poor Piglet's also having weird dreams in "Rock-a-Bye Pooh Bear." When he has a nightmare about his friends disappearing, he refuses to sleep at all. The others prove to him that bad dreams don't necessarily come true. Piglet lets his imagination get the better of him when he and Tigger tell the story of "The Monster Frankenpooh." He also lets his imagination go wild in "Things That Go Piglet In the Night." Spooky noises send him running, so the others go after him. Pooh and Piglet think they go on an intergalactic trip in "Pooh Moon," but they're really just still in the woods. Meanwhile, the others try to capture the Grab-Me Gotcha that Tigger described.

Work was still very busy, despite the nice day. Lovely weather or no lovely weather, people still need to buy beginning-of-the-month groceries and food for kids going back to school. It didn't help that my register went down about an hour or so into my shift, and they never were able to fix it. I had to move to another one.

It also looks like we're starting a new promotion tomorrow. We're going to give people stickers to collect in order to buy or get Rachel Ray Dishware for free. On one hand, the last time we did this promotion with a huge pot set in 2010 was nothing but a pain. It took forever for people to collect enough stickers for the better pots, the stickers were tiny, easy to lose, and not fun to give out, and you had to count each one out, which held up the line.

The sticker board they have for this promotion already reveals some improvements. For one thing, if the board is an indication, the stickers are larger, and hopefully easier to keep track of. Since it's only a six-dish-set, there's less to collect. Also, I doubt a lot of people will need to keep collecting and collecting for the whole set unless they really need a ton of dishware or plan to give it away.

When I got home, I did things around the apartment. I swept the porch, which was a mess. There's still pepper nuts and nut bits all over. The first leaves of the fall are starting to come down, too. I vacuumed the living room and emptied the vacuum canister. I put the braid rug in my bedroom and the strawberry mat in the kitchen outside to air.

I put on Rockin' In the Rockies while baking a Rosemary-Lemon Cake and making chicken breasts in white wine-balsamic vinaigrette sauce with Chinese beans and Persian Cucumber Salad for dinner. This Columbia B-western is one of the few full-length films featuring the Three Stooges during their heyday. Moe is the foreman of a ranch owned by a young man just out of agricultural college (Jay Kirby). He convinces two vagrants (Larry and Curly) and a pair of showgirls (Gladys Bake and Mary Beth Hughes) to put money into his prospecting scheme. Meanwhile, the ranch's cowhands would rather be playing music than chasing cattle. They accidentally mistake the mining surveyor (Forrest Taylor) for a rustler. When the group hears about a big Broadway producer vacationing in town, they do their best to get him to hear them and several other local groups...and get around Rusty's objections to turning his ranch into a music showcase.

Much to my surprise, this was very cute, and actually better than some of the features Moe and Larry made with Curly Joe in the 60s. All of the actors do fairly well with the silly but effective plot, especially Bake as the slightly dim-witted brunette singer who falls for Moe. I will warn you that this is also very much a musical  - all plot comes to a halt whenever anyone starts singing and dancing. Anyone who can't handle that, or prefer the Stooges as more of a unit (Curly and Larry spend a lot of time on their own), may want to skip this. If you're a fan of B-westerns, 40s Big Band music with a western touch, or the Stooges, look this one up on Amazon.com as part of the made-to-order Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Choice Collection.