Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Thundering Into Earth Day

Started off my Earth Day by taking down the Easter decorations and running cartoons with environmental themes. The Lorax is the little orange creature who speaks for the trees. The greedy Once-ler disregards his pleas and keeps chopping down the forests to make "Thneeds"...until both discover the damage that unchecked progress can do. Sailor Moon and the Sailor Soldiers also run across trouble when they're attacked by a caretaker and the animals of a threatened park that are under the control of the Negaverse in "An Unnatural Phenomenon" from the first season.

Tiny Toon Adventures often had shorts or whole episodes with environmental themes in their early first season. I ran two of them as I got ready for work. "Pollution Solution" has Plucky teaching Elmyra how to recycle, Babs and Buster stopping a nasty millionare from destroying the rainforest to build his home, and GoGo the DoDo dealing with the backwash from Montana Max's factory being dumped into Wacky World. Buster, Babs, and Elmyra also help a baby whale rescue his mother from poacher Grabbme Gotcha, who wants to use their blubber to make cosmetics, in "A Whale's Tale."

Work was pretty much the same as yesterday - mostly dead. I spent a lot of the early afternoon helping the baggers and managers condense the four remaining shelves of Easter candy and items to one and a half. The baskets, stuffed animals, and large bags of candy were loaded into carts and put in the self-checkout area for people to sort through. The head manager really, really wants to get the summer items out as soon as possible.

Other than some grouchy people, there were really no major problems. It did pick up during the 4-6 rush hour, but it finally slowed down long enough for me to get off and grab some milk on the way out (I ran out yesterday).

Went back to specials as I made salmon and sauteed mushrooms and spinach for dinner. It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown has Sally and Linus learning about trees and the holiday that celebrates them. Sally takes what they've learned and plants a garden on her brother's baseball field. Chuck's not too happy with this...until it looks like it may help him win a game.

Moved to an episode of the 70s Wonder Woman as I finished dinner. There were some pretty strange stories in the show's third and final season, but none more than the tale of "Formicida." Three collapsed buildings are connected to a firm that's going to release a new pesticide that could be deadly. Wonder Woman follows the trail to a biologist who has discovered a formula that allows her to control and have the powers of ants. She tries to convince the woman and the pesticide company that two wrongs don't make a right...and that while it's good to protect the Earth, it's not good to hurt innocents while doing it.

Oh, an we did have a thunderstorm briefly earlier this evening. It really came down for a while, but it's long-gone now. Otherwise, today was sunny and actually quite nice.

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