Saturday, July 19, 2014

Naughty Number Nine

I had to work earlier than usual, so I got up earlier than usual for the American Top 40 re-run. I would have been a little over a year old in the summer of 1980 when this episode was new; many of these songs were a big part of my childhood. Hits in mid-July of that year included "Love the World Away" by Kenny Rogers, "The Rose" by Bette Midler from the movie of that title, "In America" by the Charlie Daniels Band, "Emotional Rescue" by the Rolling Stones, "One Fine Day" by Carole King, "Little Jeanie" by Elton John, "More Love" by Kim Carnes, "Let's Get Serious" by Jermaine Jackson, "Tired of Toein' the Line" by Rocky Burnette, "Take Your Time" by the S.O.S Band, and two hits from the Xanadu soundtrack, "Magic" by Olivia Newton-John and "I'm Alive" by the Electric Light Orchestra.

(I left for work before I heard the #1 hit, but research online indicates that it was one of my favorite Billy Joel songs, "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me.")

I had 9AM work today. It was dead for a lot of the morning. I worked on a full cart of returns. It started picking up around 10:30, even before rush hour. By noon, it was busy. I had some fairly annoying customers. One woman fussed because she wanted the Cheerios she found on an end display for the price there. It was the wrong kind of Cheerios and was in the wrong place, but I gave it to her for that price anyway to keep her from complaining. Later on, another woman also threw a fit over an end display, this one for a cleaning products sale that gives you five dollars off your order if you buy the products listed in the flyer. She bought the products on the display...most of which were not a part of the sale. A manager and a stock person tried to explain it to her, but she got mad and left rather than listening.

I wasn't up for anything else after dealing with that. The moment my relief arrived, I hurried home. I watched another Bowery Boys movie to cheer myself up while I changed into regular clothes and had a snack. Jalopy is basically No Holds Barred with a car having the special powers instead of Sach. The Boys hope to enter their beloved, broken-down Model T Lucy in a car race, but she can barely get one lap in...before Sach and a professor friend of his develops a special fuel that makes her run like a champ! Now a group of gangsters who have money on the race would do anything to get that formula, including sending their moll after the Boys.

My original plan for today was going swimming at Dad's, but I ended up napping instead. For one thing, the weather wasn't really all that conductive to running around. It was on-and-off cloudy all day, cool and windy and kind of blahh. For another thing, I was dead tired after my early work day. I passed out at 4:30 and didn't get up until two hours later.

I had leftovers for dinner while starting the last disc of that public domain cartoon set Lauren gave me last month. Fraidy Cat was one of the few funny animal shows created by TV animation studio Filmation, which mostly specialized in action cartoons and adaptations of popular characters. Unfortunately, it's a good example of why Filmation generally stuck to action. Poor Fraidy is a cat whose first 8 lives were killed off quickly. He wants to live out his remaining one, but every time he says a single-digit number, the ghosts of his past lives appear and makes things worse. When he says 9, a cloud in the shape of a 9 appears and tries to zap him! Though a few of the ghosts are pretty funny, the show is more annoying than anything. It gets pretty bizarre at points, especially the episode that consists of that pesky 9 cloud chasing Fraidy and trying to get rid of him.

I'm working on ideas for things to do this week. It looks like the weather on Thursday is going to be nasty, so Monday will be the outing day by default. I'm tired of malls, and I don't have that much money. Maybe I'll just go for a long ride and have a nice lunch or a real picnic instead.

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